1. Concentrated gathering of industry experts. The panelists are hand-picked very knowledgable.
2. Nuggets of gold in the Q/A time after each session
3. Sometimes search engine reps have a slip of the tongue and reveal too much!

I would encourage all of you small business owners to take a few minutes and read one or two of the sessions at seroundtable.com from this week’s show. Have some questions? Leave a comment, or email me and I’ll be happy to answer. I love working in the SEO / SEM industry, but maybe even more, I enjoy educated and training people to understand and utilize search engine marketing to benefit their business.

In the end, even if click fraud subtracts 5% of your total clicks, the overall ROI of your program should be relatively high. While it’s always hard to swallow a loss, the net gain of PPC advertising should more than make up for it.

One question I always get when training people with Web Analytics is “What is a good bounce rate?”. That’s kinda like asking “What is a good IQ score?”. Higher, obviously! Well, in the case of a bounce rate, the lower the better (you know, like golf). And while a 0-5% bounce rate is almost impossible, it’s not uncommon for well marketed sites to have bounce rates below 25%.

When evaluating bounce rate, it’s important to evaluate each segment of traffic differently. For instance, you want your bounce rate from PPC traffic to be lower than SEO, because you are paying for every PPC visitor. While a 45% bounce rate from organic traffic might be acceptable, the same percentage from PPC traffic could indicate a need for some negative keywords or ad refinement.

Finally, bounce rate can be used to discover e-commerce roadblocks. For instance, if you find that your bounce rate is very low, but your conversion rate is still poor, that might be an indication of price shopping. Consider lowering your prices, or hooking visitors in with a free shipping coupon or discount.

Bounce rate is a great metric that can be used to easily evaluate visitor quality. Almost every respectable analytics software has bounce rate metrics, including the free Google Analytics package. I would recommend you add it to your analytics dashboards and see how it can help improve your online business.

There comes a point where there just isn’t much more traffic to be had – either with SEO or PPC. Yes, a site can max out. The question becomes, how do I get more people searching for my brand or product? Where as before we simply had to reach the traffic that was already available, in this new stage, more web traffic must be created in order to continue to show increases. This is the traffic creation stage.

It really isn’t an easy thing moving from traffic gathering to traffic creation – the later stage is much more difficult and gets to the heart of how a business operates and markets itself. I’ll admit, for a while I was strictly a traffic gatherer myself. It was fun to work for large businesses and perform traffic gathering services like search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising and see their satisfaction when website traffic increased 300%. But I’m learning that I can’t be satisfied as an online marketing if I simply grab the low-hanging fruit.  Traffic creation involves techniques that are creative, out-of-the-ordinary, socially cool (that’s hard for me!) and cutting edge.

As I gain more experience with all kinds of customers, I’m learning that online marketing is less about magic code and symbols and more about defining a strategy and executing. Sometimes my strategy doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but that’s OK. The great thing about the new web is you can be adventurous and try new things quickly and with minimal risk.

What I am concerned with today is Universal Search’s affect on PPC listings click-thru rate (CTR). I am particularly concerned about PPC listings in the top spots which are displayed above Google local results. Here’s a screenshot from a search for Dallas gas grills.

Now, after looking at that screenshot, why in the world would you want to be in the top PPC position? The large map image immediately grabs your eye’s attention, completely skipping over the yellow PPC listings. Furthermore, the map points A, B and C serve as eye arrows, leading you even further down the page towards the organic listings. The first time I saw a result set like this, I didn’t even notice the top PPC listing.

As we know, CTR is an important factor in the Quality Score algorithm, which in turn determines the minimum bid price and ad ranking. Will we see a drastic drop in CTR for advertisers who hang out at position #1? In the past I’ve used position preference to avoid the top spots in order to get less traffic (but arguably more qualified). Now I may be using position preference to stay out of the top spots to get more traffic.