What rising competition among search engines means for retail marketers

Bing’s strengthening position as the No. 2 search engine means that online retailers who felt safe by focusing their optimization and paid search efforts on market leader Google must think more broadly, says Eric Papczun, vice president of search engine optimization and feeds at online marketing agency Performics.
Papczun will speak at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2011 in a session entitled “How Bing changes everything: What search engine marketers need to know.”
In his session, Papczun will survey the search engine landscape and discuss how marketers must adjust their programs to account for recent changes, notably Bing taking over as the search engine for Yahoo sites.  Joining him will be a retailer who has made that transition, Jake Fenske, director of new media at Redbox.
“To drive success on top search engines, retailers should balance art and science and leverage data-driven decision marketing,” Papczun says.  “This means understanding the correlation between SEO
tactics and ranking as well as the market share, audience and demand related to various audiences.”
Those are the fundamentals that must drive strategy for retailers when integrating the management of paid and natural search, Papczun adds. In the session, he’ll address the algorithmic variables that drive results at both Bing and Google, the differences between the top engines, and how retailers can leverage their own data and data from other sources to best allocate search spending. The speakers will share how to determine what changes to make to search marketing programs and the results those changes deliver on Google and Bing.

Internet Retailer’s editors asked Papczun to speak because of his long experience in search engine marketing. Currently the lead on Performics’ optimization services group, he previously led several Performics account teams in strategy, project management and analysis of clients' performance marketing as vice president of client services. He was the architect of Performics' current SEO practice. Earlier in his career, he served as vice president and chief financial officer of Golf Links to the Past Inc., and was a management consultant and corporate trainer.

 Source http://www.internetretailer.com/