inter:digital strategies

mesothelioma

A tumor affecting the lining of the chest or abdomen. The risk of malignant (cancerous) mesothelioma is increased by exposure to air-borne asbestos particles.

Mesothelioma is a famously expensive term to purchase in Google’s Adwords program. The actual most expensive terms in Adwords fluctuate pretty regularly - but certain types of terms and search phrases are consistently extremely expensive.

Sample high spend terms from Google’s Adwords Tool today:

• mesothelioma lawyers - $27.32
• mesothelioma treatmenst - $21.86
• chicago personal injury lawyers - $39.62
• chicago personal injury attorneys - $37.74
• consolidate student loans - $41.19
• consolidate school loans - $41.36
• mortgage refinance rates - $33.41
• refinance my mortgage - $32.06
• search engine optimization firm - $20.89

Pricing for Adwords is on a bid structure - in order to achieve high placement, you need to be willing to pay more than the next person in line. Therefore, certain very desirable terms inevitably climb to the highest point somebody is willing to pay. When you are working with Adwords you need to be extremely careful in bidding - it is very easy to take your spending past the point where it is actually profitable for you.

How do terms like these remain profitable? Well, for the most part, these are terms in the legal or financial industries - hugely expensive industries where a single new client may be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. Consolidating a single student’s loan package can easily reach $100,000 dollars - and the profit on that loan, in investment value and interest payments can be enormous. Is it worth $41.19 per click? Possibly, at least as long as your conversion rate is high enough. (Without knowing the actual profit margins on these transactions, I can’t really guess the needed conversion rate, of course.)

So, presumably, the bidders on a major high-spend keyword like mesothelioma are legal associations looking to represent what could be major industry lawsuits or medical associations looking to provide information on the disease and access to insurance or medical aid.

Well, one would think, at any rate.

However, in this spam-filled world, the top 10 ad placements on Google as of my search for "what is mesothelioma" at 10:50 AM CEDT are largely dominated by spam. The URL’s displayed by these ads are, in order from top to bottom:

• MesotheliomaAsbestosLungCancer.com
• www.lungusa.org
• Mesothelioma1.net
• www.breastcancer.org/dictionary
• www.info.com/Mesothelioma
• www.quizlaw.com
• asbestos.free-resource-guide.com
• Mesothelioma.getfast.info
• tips2info.com

I visited all of these URL’s (without clicking their ads) to check them out, on the off hand chance they were actually legit. As expected, the American Lung Association (lungusa.org) is legit. breastcancer.org is also legit. www.quizlaw.com is MOSTLY a legitimate site, but they do have this interesting page. Is this the landing page for their ad? I don’t really know…but one suspects.

The remaining six results were unequivocably made-for-advertising sites of no meaningful value. How can these sites profit on this advertising? Presumably, the average visitor, having cost them $40 by clicking on their ad, will only click on ONE outgoing ad, or perhaps two? Given the percentages granted to advertisers, it’s hard to imagine this can be profitable. But these sites are so incredibly cheap to create that it is no trouble to maintain a thousand of them - and the offhand traffic or incidental searches are what keep them profitable. Nevertheless, it’s hard to perceive the value of adwords expense for this.

Regardless of the profitability of spam websites, they are a frustrating phenomenon. Six out of nine results were worthless non-resources - one of the other three was probably driving traffic to a nearly worthless page, even though the site itself seems to be somewhat valuable. The two remaining organizations are both non-profits - spending a huge amount of money hoping to educate people.

A search for "mesothelioma lawyers" is little different - the ad results include many of the same results now including such highly relevant addresses as www.wakeboarder.com/Mesothelioma and www.Bargainrama.com.

What’s the lesson? I feel that if you are in a legitimate business which is working in an area which requires these kind of high-spend terms you are far better off ignoring pay-per-click advertising altogether. The density of garbage in the ads will quickly drive attention from your ads and the expense may be very difficult to justify.

Verifying qualifications is a subject that comes up from time to time in every field of internet activity. Web development, applications programming, internet marketing, you name it. Various companies offer some kind of certification - Zend offers certification
in PHP programming, Google offers their own Google Advertising Professionals program, SEOtoolset offers a certification program for their tool set. All of these programs have a similar goal - provide professionals with a way of demonstrating to potential employers that they are accomplished and competent.

None of these programs are all that widely recognized or necessarily meaningful. Unlike certification in law practice (being admitted to the bar), certification in psychological therapy practices, or any of the many mainstream certification programs, there is no web certification program that requires continuing education in order to maintain their certification status.

Certification for SEO comes up from time to time in conversations, and earlier this year two separate companies began offering certification programs. The two programs are offered by the Society for Internet Professionals and by SEO Pros. Both of these programs are fairly rigorous, requiring study, courses, and examinations to achieve accreditation. Only one of them, from the SIP, requires any kind of continuing education for accreditation. I feel that this element is absolutely critical in order to give any certification validity.

Specifically, the SIP requires that you renew your certification once every three years. This is, I think, respectable. It is unrealistic to expect a renewal as frequently as the "game" actually changes, but every three years should be sufficient to maintain a valid connection with best practices.

It is my feeling that every area of web development could stand to have such a certification - something where you can achieve some kind of validation of your skills which would require first that you meet a particular standard but second, and most importantly, would require that you continue to further your understanding of the discipline in order to maintain your standing.

It is easy for somebody to accomplish a certification; it is a different matter to keep up with the rapid changes in a technological discipline. It is also a different matter to consistently apply those best practices in your work.

There is a secondary issue surrounding the significance of the accrediting body. An organization needs to have a strong degree of national or international acknowledgement in order to provide a strong certificate - and, I’m afraid, there simply aren’t many web organizations which have that kind of a reputation. Most professional associations in the web world have only minimal representation, or have significant politics surrounding their organizations. Even something as significant in name as the HTML Writer’s Guild is in fact merely a decorative label.

It would be nice, perhaps, if an organization as well respected as the W3C would offer certification programs - this would be one of the few organizations with a high enough name recognition to offer a
truly meaningful accreditation. Of course, then one might find oneself obligated to attempt to meet the requirements of WCAG 2.0.

Other than demonstrated accomplishments (the best recommendation of all), what would
you consider to be a valid indicator of web competence?

The single most common piece of advice for search engine marketing is to build inbound links. And that’s exactly what it is - a piece of advice. There can be no question that building inbound links (also known as "inlinks") is a crucial part of developing your website marketing strategy. But this advice is very much incomplete.

Today, Aaron Wall posted a great blog entry discussing the evolution of SEO. The meat of the entry is from a post on Webmaster World which describes the development of real and synthetic authority in the form of a parable.

One fundamental point is that a link building strategy is inevitably long-term. It takes time to build industry trust and to demonstrate that your site deserves appropriate links.

After reading this article, and along with several articles by Jim Boykin, Rand Fishkin, and others, I’ve been prompted to write an article discussing link building, posted in the articles section of this site.