After a couple more classes and a Thanksgiving break, I’m back with renewed energy to write more about search engine marketing and orchestras. This time, I’m covering paid search. As I wrote before, if natural search is public relations, then paid search is advertising. Paid search is instantaneous, direct and controllable, extremely measurable, and when done right, very cost effective.

To keep things simple, I will only be looking at Google, as it represents by far the biggest share of the pie, but other search engines will work in roughly the same manner. I will go into the basics of how an ad shows up, what a typical account structure looks like, tips and information about key words, creative, landing pages and targeting, and, of course, performance measurement. I’ll be taking the Los Angeles Philharmonic as an example this time. They currently do some paid search, but as I have no knowledge about its structure or strategy, I will ignore their current efforts and create a theoretical case.

What is paid search?

Paid search, or pay-per-click, is an Internet advertising model. This model is used by networks such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter.

Advertisers pay these companies only when their ad is clicked. In these bid-based models, the advertisers pay the companies only when their ad is clicked. The advertiser competes against other advertisers in a blind auction.

How does your ad show up?

Although the exact algorithm is a secret, we know that your ad position is determined by two factors: quality score (relevance) x maximum cost-per-click (the highest amount an advertiser is willing to pay for one click).

Your quality score is determined by different kinds of relevance: the click-through-rate on Google.com (clicks divided by impressions), which shows how relevant consumers think your ad is to their query; the key word and ad text relevance to the query, and landing page quality and relevance to the query.

Here follows a simple, fictitious calculation to demonstrate that the New York Philharmonic would be positioned above the Los Angeles Philharmonic, despite a lesser willingness to pay.

Quality Score x Max CPC = Ad Rank
New York Philharmonic: 2.0 x $0.40 = 0.80
Los Angeles Philharmonic: 1.4 x $0.52 = 0.73

Keep in mind, the guy positioned below you sets the price; your cost is $0.01 more than the spot below you. So what does the New York Philharmonic pay per click? Remember that the actual cost-per-click is the same or lower than the maximum cost-per-click. In this case, the New York Philharmonic pays 0.73 (LA Phil Ad Rank) / 2.0 (NY Phil Quality Score) + $0.01 = $0.375 per click.

The bids are blind; organizations cannot see a competitor’s click-through-rate, max/actual CPC bid, or quality score. So you’ll need to tweak you own bid in order to gain prominence. But remember, as you can see, improving quality score is an effective way to raise ad position, while controlling costs.

Paid search account structure

Your paid search strategy is not just simply bidding on your own brand. In fact, your brand is probably a very small portion of the whole effort. You have to know, and test, what your patrons are looking for and use their language.

A typical account structure begins with the account itself; in this case the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The account has different campaigns. When I looked at the LA Phil’s Web site, I saw an almost natural ordering of the campaigns right on the front page: classical concerts, jazz concerts, world music concerts, and pop, family & others (and we can go on and create campaigns for brand, recordings, Dudamel, the Hollywood Bowl etc.).

Those different campaigns will be divided into several ad groups. For example, when hovering over the classical tab, concerts include Los Angeles Philharmonic, visiting orchestras, baroque variations, celebrity recitals, casual Friday, and chamber music.

Each of these ad groups will have scores of key words and certain key words can be grouped together with the same creative (ad copy) and landing page. But stay tuned for more about that in the next part.

Here below is an illustration of a part of the fictitious Los Angeles Philharmonic account structure.

Search Account Chart

I am aware that, unlike retailers such as Target or Home Depot, inventory for tickets at orchestras has a time limit and is ever evolving. Perhaps you could further divide Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts by weekly program and create key word themes for each of the weekly programs, ranging from repertoire to guest artists. You will have to make those decisions based on how you want to categorize your campaigns.

It will all make a bit more sense in the next part, when I delve deeper into key words, ad creative and landing pages. Stay tuned.

The third class went a little deeper into natural search. I think it’s important to first reiterate some important matters. Search engine optimization (SEO) is not an overnight process; it might take 6 months for your efforts to show any results. The goal of SEO is to be the Web page with the most relevant content, all else follows.

There’s a difference between paid and natural search and I like to compare it with the difference between advertising and public relations. In very broad and general terms: advertising is paid, you control the message, but it is not as credible; public relations is “free,” you can’t control the message, but it is more credible.

Without further delay, here are some key lessons. This time, I used the Nashville Symphony Orchestra as guinea pig where needed.

• You can’t optimize for an unlimited amount of terms. If you optimize your site, you want to optimize your home page for high volume words (remembering the 80/20 rule). Pages below the home page can be optimized for more specific terms.

• Check to see what you’re up against. Your real-world competitors might not necessarily be your search engine competitors. Searching for the term “Nashville classical music” does not lead to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. In fact, it does not lead to any classical music ensemble or opera company whatsoever. The search competitors are a radio station, a review site, an event listing site and a record label. In other words, not necessarily organizations you would see as competitors for tickets.

• Are you speaking the language of our audience? In other words, do your key words match up with the search terms of our audience? Don’t use jargon, give people what they want. Sometimes, this might be counter intuitive, especially when you have to consider your branding efforts. For example, although you might want to brand yourself as “assisted living,” you will get searched as a “nursing home” (which has double the results). You will have to balance your branding and SEO efforts.

• If your Web site has an internal search function, collect the data. This will offer great insight on what your audience wants and what terms they are using. If you’re interested in general trends and in what kind of searches are related to high volume terms, you should use Google Insight for Search.

• What’s the deal with NOFOLLOW links? Links from Twitter, Facebook, Google Ads and most advertising banners tell spiders not to follow the link. Does this mean that they are useless for SEO? No. Mihaela Lica writes: “People don’t care about “nofollow” attributes. If they see a link and they think the content it leads to is interesting, they follow.” SEO is not just about getting links, it’s about creating and promoting valuable, relevant content.

Now for some specific coding and technical advice:

• Spiders can’t crawl images, JavaScript and Flash. Don’t go overboard and balance your design and SEO efforts. Nick La has an excellent blog post “SEO Guide for Designers.”

• Use the “title” tag wisely. Use a different title for each page, otherwise Google might think you’re offering the same content on multiple pages. Keep the title short; around a 90-character limit.

• Always use “alt” tags for images. Not only is this user-friendly for people who are blind or visually impaired, it enhances your SEO efforts.

• Always use a descriptive anchor text (don’t use “click here” or “read more”). Links can even have a “description” tag.

• Use the meta “description” tag if you don’t want the search engine to describe the site for you. Nashville’s Web site is described by Google as: “The Nashville Symphony is joined by the U.S. Army’s premiere singing ambassadors, the Soldiers’ Chorus of the U.S. Army Field Band, this Thursday through…” As you can see, this is momentary copy that does not accurately describe the whole of the organization, and it gets cut off! Compare this to the tailored copy of engine manufacturer Briggs and Stratton: “Find out why Briggs & Stratton are the leading makers of small engines, lawn mower engines, portable generators, and home generators.” Keep the description below 170 characters (about the size of a tweet!).

• Many sites work with dynamic content. Make sure the URLs that are generated are optimized. Session IDs, especially if they grow really long, don’t tell much about the content. For example: http://www.nashvillesymphony.org/main.taf?p=9 could be transformed into http://www.nashvillesymphony.org/parking_and_directions (this is advice I should heed for my own blog!)

Once again, these are only some of the lessons. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

This week, I started my second class in the Integrated Marketing certificate program at the University of Chicago’s Graham School. This one’s on search engine marketing, taught by David Gould of Resolution Media. Last night’s class delved a little into natural search and search engine optimization and there were some interesting points that I wanted to share while trying to put them into a cultural environment. Where needed, I’ll mostly take the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as an example, for old time’s sake.

• Search is someone telling you what they’re looking for. And for a marketer, that’s pretty powerful stuff.

• Check your organization’s Web site without images and JavaScript enabled. This is roughly the view that the search engine spiders see. What do you see? Here is a Wordle of the Chicago Symphony’s page:

CSO Keyword Wordle

• The Long Tail of Search and the 80/20 rule. About 80% of the search volume comes from 20% of the keywords. The other 80% of the keywords are very specific keywords. But the specific keywords usually are much more likely to be associated with an action and are much more likely to end up as a sale. For example, a major keyword could be “classical music,” whereas a specific keyword sounds more like “Chicago Symphony Orchestra tickets.” In other terms, the major 20% that drive 80% of the volume create awareness; the specific 80% that drive 20% create actions and sales.

• A quick word about paid search. You can clearly see the difference in paid search: the New York Philharmonic has bought certain keywords, whereas the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has not. In fact, searching for the CSO results in sponsored links to the Lyric Opera and the Goodman Theater! Those organizations must assume that if people search for the CSO, they must also be interested in other forms of cultural entertainment. In terms of natural search, both orchestras see heavy competition with third-party sellers. Looks like they need some optimization!

• Another important lesson is that natural search is more than just optimizing your own site. It’s optimizing your content, including content on social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook and even Yelp. Both the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony’s social media efforts are appearing below the fold and in some cases not even until the second page. Organizations need to optimize so that their social media efforts appear above the third-party sellers, at the very least!

• Search engine marketing does not work as a silo. Look at it as part of your integrated marketing efforts. Online, including banner ads, and offline, including radio spots, television spots and print ads. Integrated efforts are proven to be much more effective.

• Perhaps most importantly, keep in mind that 80% of Web browsing starts with search and those searches are spurred by offline stimuli, including your offline marketing efforts. Be sure to streamline the two.

There were more lessons and more takeaways and the class has just barely started. Future classes will lead to future posts, but let this conclude part 1 of search engine marketing and orchestras.