It’s a proud day today at Apogee Search.

We officially announced that Google has recognized Apogee Search as a Google Website Optimizer™ Authorized Consultant (WOAC). We are one of a select group of companies worldwide (currently only 16 total) that have been awarded this recognition by Google.

“This prestigious certification from Google Website Optimizer reflects our willingness to invest our time and resources ahead of the curve to ensure our clients become better consumers of Google offerings. We’re honored to have acquired significant expertise and knowledge with Google Website Optimizer, and we expect that this new practice will be a very popular service offering in 2009, as it can dramatically improve the ROI of online marketing campaigns across the board,” said Apogee Search CEO Bill Leake.

Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a testing tool that performs A/B and Multivariate testing on websites, landing pages and other web properties to help online advertisers increase their conversion rates. The results from these tests can determine the most effective combination of content and landing page design.

To be considered for this accreditation, WOAC applicants must have a verifiable track record of success using Google Website Optimizer, be a recognized industry participant in online marketing services, and be committed to improving online marketing techniques.

“We have already had proven client results using Google’s optimization technology, and this deeper collaboration with Google demonstrates our commitment not only to provide results, but also to generate empirical data for our clients on what is working for them and what is not, to ensure long term success,” said Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting.

Jason Kapler, Marketing Programs Manager at Asure Software said, “Apogee Search was a tremendous partner in helping us implement Google Website Optimizer. They educated us on the value of the tool and then helped us implement a program that improved our conversion rates by 216%! Needless to say, now all of our campaigns use GWO when applicable.”

As an authorized consultant, Apogee Search offers highly skilled Google Website Optimizer set-up, support, training, and consultation services.

If you’d like to learn more about Google Website Optimizer, check out this video interview from our resident website effectiveness expert Alissa Ruehl as she discusses some helpful tips and tricks in working with GWO.

Here are some great things our clients have been saying about Apogee lately:

“Rimini Street has enjoyed working with Apogee Search for years, and our long relationship is due to the consistent, high-quality results on both paid search and natural search. Technology is a competitive industry, but we have seen great results from the campaigns, including holding top 5 results for several key terms. We trust Apogee to continue guiding us through changes in the dynamic search engine space.”

David Rowe
VP, Global Marketing and Alliances
Rimini Street, Inc

“I have enjoyed working with Apogee since the launch of our website, PowerOverYourPain.com. They have been a good partner in our patient campaigns and initiative for our website.

We have seen wonderful SEO and paid search advertising results with their expertise in the last year. Our site has just recently received top 10 rankings in several of our key terms. We have also seen great traffic generation from our search advertising. Thank you Apogee!”

Meredith Nguyen
Senior Marketing Manager Patient/Web Initiatives
ANS, St. Jude Medical

We love to hear that our clients are happy and that their campaigns are doing so well!

Apogee Search’s Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting, has joined the Search Engine Marketing Journal as Editor of Paid Marketing and Pay-Per-Click.

Ruehl will participate in the peer editing process of scholarly papers written on paid search. She has been a champion for integrating paid search data into multi-level, online and offline tracking systems, and therefore approaches paid search and website effectiveness not only in terms of boosting conversion to raw lead form or sale, but for improving the long term profitability of the website. Ruehl has spoken at search industry events such as Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, and Innotech, as well as online webcasts.

About the Search Engine Marketing Journal

SEMJ.org is the first printed journal dedicated to the advancement of search marketing through peer-reviewed articles. The goal of the journal is to help professionals in the industry share and demonstrate their expertise. The journal is different from a magazine in that it encourages the submission of articles and research papers by experts in the industry. Similar to a scientific journal, a team of experts reviews articles submitted by industry professionals and editors decide if the article will be published in the journal.

On Wednesday, August 20, Inc. 500 ranked Apogee Search as no. 368 on its 27th annual Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S.

Apogee experienced an impressive three-year sales growth of 809.5%, and ranks no. 9 in the top 50 Austin/Round Rock, TX based businesses. Apogee also ranks no. 29 out of the top 100 marketing and advertising businesses who were also ranked in the Inc. 500.

“Apogee Search’s commitment is to drive profitable revenue growth for our clients,” CEO William Leake says. “We are honored that we have served more Inc. 500 companies than any other firm in our industry. Becoming part of the Inc. 500 elite ourselves validates our core belief that if you help enough companies find success, success will come full circle back to you. ”

Businesses are ranked by the percentage of net sales growth from 2004-2007. Inc. started the list in 1982 and has since expanded to include the top 5000 private companies in recent years.

11 other Austin based companies were also named in the 2008 Inc. 500 list.

Apogee Search launched their new Website Effectiveness Consulting portfolio of services on Tuesday, August 19th and national media outlets have taken notice. Reuters, TMCnet.com, and International Business Times are among several news and news related sites to report on Apogee’s new offerings.

The official Apogee Website Effectiveness press release was released on MarketWire.com. The press release outlines specific offerings of the new practice including Conversion Rate Improvement, Metrics and Analytics, and Testing and Measurement. It also explains Apogee’s new promotion, a free key page review, which is a detailed recommendation of changes to a site’s headings, copy, site navigation, and layout for the purpose of increasing conversion rates.

On April 24, 2008 a sizable army of Apogeeans – the Apogee Army of Altruism –set off for the southern most tip of Austin to volunteer at the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas (CAFB).

The eighteen or so of us arrived at CAFB and made our way to the holding area to sign in and place name tags on our chests. With that difficult part of the volunteering experience out of the way our guide and host Xavier gave an overview of CAFB’s operations. Brief overview: the Food Bank is, in essence, a distribution center. Food is not handed out on-site, but rather local charities and non-profit groups place food orders, drive to CAFB in trucks, cars and trailers, pick up their orders and then provide the direct service of feeding Central Texans from their charity or non-profit organization.

It’s time to head to the Product Recovery Room. We walk through two sets of doors and into a 60,000 square foot warehouse. The ceilings live way up in the sky. It holds approximately 1.5 million pounds of food – the CAFB ships around 2.5 million pounds per month. Finally, we reach two massive swinging doors that lead to the chilly Product Recovery. We’re ushered to the back corner of the recovery room. Look up. There’s a large instruction guide hanging from the wall. It contains all of the dos and don’ts – clean all cans and pass them down the conveyor belt, check adult and baby formula for specific date guidelines, et cetera – feel free to sing along with the radio blaring in the other corner.

After a bit of a rocky start, everyone got the hang of it and we soon started cleaning, categorizing, caching the food into boxes and stacking for delivery at The Flash speed. By the time Xavier told us students to put our pencil down, we had managed to process 10,276 pounds of food that equals 8,220 meals. Hopefully, we’ll surpass that benchmark on our next trip to the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas!

After more and more evidence that an economic downturn is coming, marketing departments and firms everywhere are bracing for a hit. Marketing has historically been on the receiving end of lay offs once a recession kicks in, but will this ring true for those in search engine marketing? Withstanding the dot com bust, SEM has yet to be a part of a major, all-encompassing economic recession. We think SEM is well positioned to vis a vis any inclement economic weather, and here are 5 reasons why SEM may avoid the traditional marketing guillotine.

5. Before anything gets cut it gets analyzed
Traditional marketing, in terms of advertising, is heavily influenced by reach, which is not as scalable as some of today’s search engine tactics. When measuring marketing’s effectiveness during a recession, decisions are prudently based on ROI. With traditional advertising’s reach being affected by newer technology such as Tivo, and even cell phones, advertisers are now forced to look for new and economically viable ways of distributing their message. With its on-demand results and completely measurable analytics, paid search certainly falls into an area of marketing where ROI can easily be distinguished.

4. A Plethora of poisons
Paid and natural search are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEM today. Right now the trend seems to be dipping your feet into social media before diving into PPC or SEO. Finding a way to implement accounts on any social media site (Digg, Facebook, Myspace, You Tube, etc) that can get your name out there in a controlled, viral environment is a great way to reach large audiences with a small budget. Granted this is all hearsay, social media’s genuine and versatile messages, could be a very effective and low-cost recession-time marketing tool for any company. However waiting until the recession to implement a campaign could be costly. Now is the time to get started, recessions don’t take kindly to stragglers.

3. Timeliness
Implementing traditional marketing is a timely and costly process. Companies know this from the start which is why it is easy to immediately write off marketing. However implementing a paid search campaign typically takes only days or at most weeks, and is an investment that will glean a significant amount of keyword conversion data that will help properly target and focus a natural search campaign even during a recession.

2. Innovation
Recessions usually turn industries into being reactive instead of proactive, but SEM is built around exploiting and utilizing the web’s endless venues. While I doubt we’ll see major ventures like new search engines or pets.com 2.0, sites like howcast.com and hulu.com have the possibility to become major portals for SEM business.

1. Cost
Any way you look at it traditional advertising is more expensive than SEM. However that raises the question– will the recession raise the cost of SEM and finally make it a part of traditional advertising? If so this entire post could be bunk, it could also be bunk as of right now. No one knows how a recession could affect SEM because SEM has never been affected by a recession, but if you look at the overwhelming evidence of both its increase in use and effectiveness, it’s easy to see why it could be one of marketing’s best allies when trying to stave off the R word.

In the history of monolithic number two companies there have been a variety of innovations that have shifted the market place’s attention from the leader. Pepsi made clear cola, Reebok put a .002-psi pump in a shoe, Burger King concocted some sort of Chicken French Fry, and now Yahoo is creating a social networking site.

With ideas like this Yahoo deserves their perpetual silver medal, or in some cases: purple participatory ribbon.

Yahoo Mash is the number two search engine’s attempt to enter the already crowded social networking arena; and although it hasn’t been formally released, one can only guess that Mash is the byproduct of Yahoo’s highly publicized $1.6 billion Facebook acquisition fall-out. Either that or their R&D time travelers just returned from the year 2003.

The Yahoo Mash blog boasts new social networking innovations such as the ability to change your friends profile settings (I guess I shouldn’t have pluralized “innovation”). However, if you keep in mind the design and functions of Yahoo’s current social networking site, Yahoo 360, the ability to do more than update a blog is absolutely mind-blowing. All ribbing aside– I want Yahoo to prove me wrong. I want this site to make Mark Zuckerburg think twice before he orders his third Critsal and Sprite. I want this to be the application Google kicks itself for not thinking of. I want the tables to be turned for at least one fiscal quarter! However I don’t think any of this can be done until Yahoo stops its reactive development.

Second place is undoubtedly the first loser, but no movie was ever made about the winning bobsled team of the ‘88 Winter Olympics. There has to be a point where Yahoo steps up and outside of the box, and is recognized for being the innovator of something. It doesn’t have to stick, but it has to be memorable, and in order for this to happen Yahoo needs to stop playing catch up and start creating a bobsled team!

If so, you most likely still missed the WSJ Online article about our pay-per-post marketing efforts. The article highlights the growing interest in sponsored reviews, and also draws attention to some of the issues businesses can come across when paying for honest, 3rd party reviews of their services.

Below is a quick blurb from the article which you can read entirely by clicking here.

… When sponsored reviews first came on the scene a few years ago, they seemed like a good idea to the executives of Apogee, a division of Leads Customers Growth LLC, Austin. But the appearance of impropriety troubled them. In their early days, blogger-advertiser matchmakers didn’t require bloggers to disclose payments, so readers may not have known when they were reading a paid post.

“Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, they would write about you,” says William Leake, Apogee’s co-founder and chief executive. “It felt a little unseemly.”

But Apogee remained interested, not only for itself but to test it as a possible tool for its clients, so it monitored the practice’s development. …

Fixin’ Supper has a nice write up on Bill Leake’s talk yesterday at SXSW.