Search Engine Marketing – Getting Your Brand Found

Danny Meadows-Klue

Chief Executive
Digital Strategy Consulting

As UK online ad spend crosses 15% of total media spend and leaps 38% year-on-year, Danny Meadows-Klue reflects on why half this investment goes to search engines, and explores some of the critical elements that brands should take to get themselves effectively listed.

The UK web advertising sector will overtake television by the end of 2009, and with 58% of today’s online adspend going into the pay-per-click formats of search engines, their power as customer acquisition tools is unassailable. Yet most brands fail to unlock the audiences they deserve because of chronic under-investment in the search engine optimisation techniques.

These can boost their position in the editorial or ‘natural’ listings inside search engines, immediately increasing traffic and lowering the cost of acquiring each customer. Easy to start and often exceptionally low cost to implement, search engine optimisation can transform the bottom line of a firm.

Go to Google, type in the phrase of what you’re looking for, and in an instant, results appear. That speed can mask the complexity of what goes on in the engine room, but behind the scenes your phrase is being compared to all of the language lodged in the search engine’s index – its interpretation of the content of the web – and the sites with the best matches, the highest density of matching language, and the greatest popularity on the web, are pushed to the top of the list.

There are dozens of factors involved, but broadly they can be broken down into those that are within the web page that is trying to get listed (on-page factors) and those external to the page (off-page factors). Without systematically tackling each, the discoverability of a site will be down to chance, and that’s not a risk worth taking in what has become the most powerful of direct marketing channels.

Yet modest investments of time and energy can have a disproportionate impact; search engine marketing is about unlocking more value from all the investments a firm has already made in the web: the site, the business process and the lead generation mechanics. Having spent the last three years running search engine marketing training across Europe, there are consistent weaknesses we have seen in brands attending the Search Marketing Academy, but many can be quickly addressed to get their marketing back on track.

Search engine marketing best practice tips

· Use your customers’ language, not your own
· Try building a page for every product
· Remove the barriers; let the spiders in
· Then help spiders find what they want
· Build your link equity
· Switching on pay-per-click ads switches on customers
· And getting help from search experts
· Blend paid-for with ‘natural’ search to boost results
· Get the right business process in place

Use your customers’ language, not your own

Getting the language on your web pages right is tough. No two people search in exactly the same way, but unless the language you use in the fabric of your web page reflects the exact words or phrases typed into search engines, your pages stand little chance of ever being listed. It’s a brutal reality, with heavyweight implications not just for the copywriting within your site, but for the ownership and business processes around this.

By listening to the way customers describe your product, brands can unlock groups of words or phrases that match what is really being searched. This type of keyphrase research should begin before any web pages are written and be used to guide the whole structure of the site.

Try building a page for every product

With so many pages each competing for a listing, search engines have to take into account the frequency and density of those keywords and keyphrases: too low and your site might not feel relevant, too high and not only will the copy be unreadable, but the engines are likely to think the page is trying to trick them – welcome to the world of search engine ‘spam.’

Building at least one page for every product or sales proposition, or creating microsites of thematic content, can prove useful models to help get firms thinking in the right way.

Remove the barriers; let the spiders in

Many sites with great language on their pages fail to get a single entry listed in Google, because the way their site has been constructed prevents search engines from being able to read and index the content. There are numerous barriers that can inadvertently block the spidering programs search engines use to explore websites from being able to access the content.

Some of the most common are hiding that carefully crafted language inside graphics, videos or animation that search engines simply can’t read, while others hinge on the way the databases that typically house web content are structured.

Then help spiders find what they want

Building sitemaps the way search engines like them is only part of aiding discoverability. The smart use of headlines and tagging around the content can dramatically boost search rankings because they give a strong signal from you to the search engine about what matters and why. It’s ironic that while massive budgets may be poured into advertising, most firms can instantly amplify the effectiveness of their sites by these processes that often cost nothing more than the time for re-writing and restructuring existing editorial.

Build your link equity

Beyond the boundaries of your own website, its popularity on the web sends a powerful signal to search engines when they have to decide the relative importance of one page versus another. Google founder Larry Page gave his name to the ‘Page Rank’ algorithm that is at the heart of evaluating the quality of inbound links.

Links from a well respected high-traffic site count for much more than links from a barely read blog, and building out the volume and quality of inbound links will help boost a site’s position – as well as creating more opportunities for discoverability within what is likely to be a targeted environment.

Switching on pay-per-click ads switches on customers

The runaway success of the search engine industry has been down to the exceptionally efficient formula of pay-per-click advertising. The profitability of the business model allowed search engines to inject massive investment into their own product development and created a self-sustaining cycle of better search tools that both users and advertisers would want to use more of, more often.

Being able to set a price for the maximum cost-per-lead brings a much sought after accountability to marketing, and being able to switch on customer acquisition like a tap has a dramatic effect on the role of search throughout the business. Whether it’s to clear last minute distressed inventory, boost uptake of a seasonal promotion, or increase orders during a quiet period, the pay-per-click model puts marketers in absolute control.

But pay-per-click does not have to be expensive to work. With the market setting the price of clicks through a bidding engine, there will naturally be some firms who choose to bid more than others. While the top bids generally attract a higher placement (and also more traffic), cheaper bids may prove more effective for the revenue strategy of the firm.

As with all acquisition marketing, the starting point should still be in calculating the profitability of a customer and their lifetime value to the business, but the ease of booking and testing out different approaches has created a much welcomed culture of testing, evaluation and re-tuning within the digital marketing industry.

Much of Google’s success has grown from the ease of this process, making the process of getting started effortless, and the path to improving efficiency easy to discover for the smallest of micro-businesses.

And getting help from search experts

Smart online marketers will go on to create wide ranges of keyphrase terms, and unique listings to match each one. They will draft in specialist support to manage the complexity of the process and the constantly adjusting rules for how the engines work, because only dedicated search agencies can truly keep on top of the pace of these changes, and with search forming the starting point for customers researching big ticket purchases in most sectors, it’s too critical a task not to entrust to the hands of the experts.

Blend paid-for with ‘natural’ search to boost results

Blending together the two formats of natural and paid listings can push acquisition costs down because when faced with the choice, many search engine users will click on the natural links rather than the paid-for placements, yet the very existence of the paid listings boosts the kudos of the natural link.

Get the right business process in place

Getting serious about search means putting in place the right business processes to manage the growth of customer acquisition marketing. When we began training search agencies and their clients in best practice search engine marketing, we developed a ten-step model for getting search engine advertising to truly deliver. While getting started in search may be simple, getting maximum value from search campaigns is a tough challenge because there is a series of sequential steps marketers need to have in place. Many of these are outside of the search engine itself, but too often a well written search advertising campaign will fail to deliver customers because the website landing pages, conversion mechanics or business process simply wasn’t in place.

Digital’s 10 steps for effective search engine advertising

1. Ownership
Get the ownership of search right in the firm; it demands senior sponsorship and strong project management

2. Objectives
Set clear effective marketing objectives

3. Engines
Select the right search engines

4. Keyphrases
Research and build the right list of keywords and keyphrases

5. Bidding
Create an astute bid price strategy

6. Copywriting
Write listings – both advertising and editorial – that gets clicked

7. Conversion
Build landing pages that truly sell and convert audiences

8. Measure   
Get the right metrics and measurement in place to learn about campaign performance

9. ROI
Calculate the return on investment throughout

10. Review
Review, reflect, revise and rebuild your campaign

Collectively, these techniques boost not only the volume of clicks and customers heading into your site, but also the quality of those leads and their likelihood of conversion. Whether the site is a brand-building proposition, a purchase research site or a fully enabled e-commerce platform, the same approaches apply.

Danny Meadows-Klue is chief executive of www.DigitalStrategyConsulting.com and the www.DigitalTrainingAcademy.com. He was one of Europe’s first online publishers and the co-founder and first CEO of the UK and European Internet Advertising Bureau trade associations. He is the author of The Search Marketing Academy and coaches marketers and agencies.