SEO Demystified (Part 1)

Dave Eckstein

Discussions of "SEO" are almost as prevalent today as discussions of the weather. If you're not quite versed on what SEO is or know enough about its vital significance to your clients, you'd better read on. As an industry, we absolutely need to know much more about this topic.

Apologies to those "in the know" ... but let's take a minute to get everyone on the same page here. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Wikipedia has a great definition for SEO:

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and volume of traffic to a website from search engines (and here's the important part) via "natural" or"organic" search results for targeted keywords.

SEO is not to be confused with SEM (Search Engine Marketing), which is essentially a fancy term for pay-per-click. Oh, and let's please stop any associations between SEO and SEM right here, because SEO actually works, while SEM has quite a few flaws for local businesses. SEO done right will lower the cost-per-lead for advertisers, just like broadcast television has done for years. SEO focuses on the organic search results (i.e. the stuff on the left side of your Google search), while SEM focuses on the paid search results (i.e. the stuff on the right side of your Google search ... the "shaded and jaded" links).

Okay, so why are we having this discussion, and what does it have to do with selling advertising to local retailers and destination businesses? More importantly, how can we make this work for our clients -- and profit from this information?

SEO has everything to do with our job and our clients' success. And we must lead the charge here, because a lot of money is being wasted down the wrong avenues by local advertisers.

All local businesses desire to be at the top of organic search listings -- they need to be there. It's another reinforcement of TOMA (top of mind awareness) that can lead to preference and retail gains. The reasons are simple and obvious. Most important among those reasons: a lot of online "retail" traffic funnels through major search engines, and consumers do most of their clicking on the highest ranking organic search results. In fact, they're clicking much more frequently on the organic listings than they are on those costly paid positions off to the right.

No surprises there. The real question is, how do I help my client to an improved "PageRank" on the major search engines?

Should I tell them to spend thousands of dollars with a vendor who can analyze and restructure their "sitemap" and links? Should we recommend some keyword strategies that'll steal clicks away from the competition? Maybe advise them to bid on specific words on Google's AdWords service? And what do we make of all this talk about HTML and meta-tags?

Enough to make your head spin. The real answer is so much closer to home -- and simpler -- it's breathing on our necks.

The solution for many local advertisers, both from a cost and performance perspective, is to advertise on station websites. From a cost perspective, station website advertising is extremely cost-efficient when compared against other "narrow-band" local media and national media (on a cost-per-thousand impressions basis).

More importantly, it answers the call in driving page rank.


If you took a look at Google's own published Webmaster Guidelines, you'd see they've given us a simple hint. You really don't have to read between the lines to hear what it says: Companies are wasting lots of money going about their SEO the wrong way, and there's a direct solution for driving a local retailer's page rank. We'll save you the trouble ... here's the most important sentence:

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.

Simply put, the BEST way to increase a website's search engine position is to have high quality inbound links to that site. Links from other sites that are relevant and highly trafficked. Hmm, any bells ringing yet?

Station websites provide both the volume and quantity of traffic that can both drive visitors to a local business's site, and improve page rank. In other words, when advertisers buy station websites, they're also getting SEO as a delicious side dish. For free.

Two important side notes to this discussion.

First, be sure your website's design supports your ability to use the "alt" attibute in your advertising. For example, when placing a display ad on your station's website for XYZ Furniture, the alt attribute will allow your webmaster to add another layer of relevancy to help Google when it crawls your site and ranks your client's site. Simple descriptive text should do the trick ("XYZ Furniture Atlanta has discounted heirloom furnishings, 40% sale this weekend"). If you're not sure about this, ask your local webmaster or contact the vendor.

Second, be sure whatever advertising you're placing is getting enough traffic. Page rank will not increase if your client's advertisements are buried in some lightly trafficked micro-site. This is why internet projects have had unpredictable results. In general, Home, News and Weather pages tend to draw the most impressions needed for local business. That's where we need to be.


Last but not least, make all of this simple for your client. Let them know that your website is receiving hundreds of thousands of uniques each month (most stations average about 250K uniques), and that search engine "spiders" are drawn to that traffic when determining page rank. This simple fact will help their own page rank increase. That's it.

Our clients need to realize local broadcast stations are the most capable and affordable means to draw store traffic and web traffic.

Now, all we need to do is to set appropriate expectations, measure performance, and demonstrate the worth of this investment. We'll tackle each one of these goals in Part 2 of this article.

Dave Eckstein is not the shortstop for the Toronto Bluejays. He is a partner in the retail consulting firm ESA & Company, based in Red Bank, New Jersey.

The Perfect Retail Storm

Why Developing a New Concept is More Important Today

Mac McDonald

More stores appear the same to shoppers today.

Since the early 90’s most major retailers have gone for years without developing a new concept. The result was a perceived “sameness” in store offerings, according to consumers. The major chains bought smaller, regional chains, and eventually all their stores began to look the same. Even when a large chain bought an extremely well-positioned smaller chain, the smaller chain would become indistinguishable from the parent-chain to the customer.

For the past 25 years, many major retailers have shied away from significant store innovation. Now, an opportunity is on the horizon. According to shoppers, WalMart is showing signs of weakening. For the first time since their inception, WalMart has shown signs of a decline in their brand strength among shoppers. They are no longer quite the deterrent they use to be.

Is the changing shopper getting bored? It seems that consumers no longer flock to Ho Hum retailers. An increasing number of consumers are becoming less drawn to the Big Box stores, which have dominated the landscape for the past 20 years, and seem to have become less attractive and exciting over the past 6 years. Younger customers expect to be entertained. Older customers don’t need as much “stuff” and don’t see shopping a 200,000 square-foot store as easy, convenient or enjoyable.

The rewards of higher multiples and greater growth potential has proven to exist via new concepts, rather than the “organic” growth of traditional ones. Since even a majority of “successful” new concepts take 3 years to develop to acceptable profit levels, a great number of premature evaluations are being made, and “strong concepts” are being killed before operational excellence can be achieved. It also should be noted that increasing competition, and decreased product consumption, among key demographic groups results in a more competitors fighting for relatively fewer dollars.

Today’s mistakes and rewards are bigger. It took several of today’s large, iconic chains over 75 years to open 1,000+ stores. Today, successful new concepts can be rolled out at the rate of over 100 per year. The costs associated with:

- rolling out an ill conceived concept
- not rolling out a strong concept, at the right time
to the right target in the right location
- over-reacting to a bad competitive concept
- ignoring a breakthrough concept

… have grown dramatically in terms of both real and opportunity costs.

The worst mistake a merchant can make is to NOT spend resources creating a New Concept Store – BEFORE HE HAS TO. Remember the prophetic quote from Walter Wriston: “Failure isn’t a crime. Failure to learn from failure is a crime.” Following the New Concept development steps of “the best” merchants is expensive, and may even hurt the short term stock price or profitability … but so will going out of business. On the other hand, running a business for the short-term interests of your stockholders, rather than consumers, is what can get you into trouble in the first place.

Over the past two decades, the best new concepts have been developed by merchants who didn’t HAVE TO develop them as a means of survival. They just wanted to exploit the opportunity by moving away from “sameness”. (i.e. Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Central Market). But many of the traditional merchants today “WANT TO” because they “HAVE TO”, and that is extremely difficult! They now realize they have been painted into a no-win corner and their time as a future empire is tenuous.

The problems of developing a successful new concept when you HAVE TO are endemic to cultural difficulties in changing course, the short term financial pressures of the times causing a lack of innovation, objectivity, patience and persistence on traditional food retailers – and throw in Levitt’s Marketing Myopia Effect for good measure.

As noted earlier, for the past 25 years, most major retailers have shied away from significant store innovation. However, for the past 3 years, a flurry of “new concept” activity has taken place. However, for “new concept” activity to be considered “innovation” it has to be successful. The idea of In-Store Beauty salons was not exactly a true food store innovation. The only constant we will continue to see is that the largest chains will disappear and new powers will emerge. Not much different from when King Kullen replaced the General Store; A&P replaced King Kullen; Kroger replaced A & P and WalMart replaced Kroger as the dominant player and way of shopping for food. Only today, it will happen sooner rather than later.

The consumer market and competitive conditions that exist today make the chances of success in the development of new store concepts the highest they have been for more than 30 years. It’s the Perfect Storm condition for New Retail Concept Development.

William "Mac" McDonald has worked as a Senior Retail Marketing Specialist for over 40 years, focusing on consumer actions that affect retail tactics and strategies. An advisor to the National Retail Federation (NRF), Mac can be reached at Mac@ESACompany.com.