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Why Search Engine Marketing Works
By Andrew Goodman, Oct. 18, 2000
From the buzz in news releases, in email correspondence,
and on popular discussion sites, we've learned that one topic seems
to inordinately fascinate many people somehow connected to the "Internet
industry": marketing. Take, for example, many of the sites that
are often thought of as "webmaster resources," such as Search
Engine Forums. This site is in fact almost entirely devoted
to search engine placement or "search engine optimization" (SEO)
and is aimed at smaller webmasters wanting to get noticed as well
as consultants who help companies get their sites ranked well in
search engines. In other words, the whole thing is about marketing.
Marketing (and its high-flown cousin, branding)
separates success from failure. People love to talk about what doesn't
work: Super Bowl ads and other expensive campaigns which raise awareness
but don't attract customers; annoying forms of "interruption" marketing;
and so on. Inevitably, one clever marketer has even launched a review
of bad online marketing strategies called fuckedmarketing.com.
But let's focus on what works.
Search Engine Placement: Marketing that Doesn't
Look Like Advertising
It's no accident that search engines are still
seen to be a great marketing tool. Not only is much of the traffic
free, but it's targeted, so the response rates are higher. Think
about it: you have pre-qualified customers looking for solutions
- even looking to buy something. They'll be much more predisposed
to your message, since in a sense they initiated the transaction
themselves. This and other forms of marketing which are unique to
the Internet are still poorly understood by many. Just as you shouldn't
believe the hype about everyone in the technology industry getting
rich, you also shouldn't listen to all the doom and gloom that says
nothing works.
MSN Works the Soft Sell
Everyone's selling something on the net (or, some
say, if they aren't then they need to be). I just leafed through
some featured "top" news stories at MSN - they were, curiously enough,
all about dating and relationships. These things lead right into
the more targeted (and highly emotion-charged) content directed
at women. Some of this stuff is very successful, and why shouldn't
it be? Print women's magazines make a bundle on advertising, in
part because the subject matter leads into sales for products
relating to personal care, which is linked to emotion and wants as
opposed to rational assessment's of one's so-called "needs."
Although it hasn't been totally figured out, content can sell products
on the Internet just as it does in print. You wouldn't believe
that if you'd been reading the newspapers lately. (Part of the problem,
of course, is that some of the more lavish online content sites
were launched as if a whole editorial organization could be supported
by banner ads. Nope.)
But content can also sell content. If print magazines
are profitable, then maybe their online incarnations need to (a)
reach more relevant readers and (b) make sure there's a compelling
reason for a lot of them to subscribe to the print version!
Thus let's never overgeneralize when it comes to the media business.
There are many reasons for trying a number of strategies, and the
"business end" may be lurking at several removes. Hard-nosed students
of business models may miss the subtleties of how growing awareness
can be turned into profit.
Why Shameless Self-Promoters Love the 'Net
It's also becoming apparent that individuals with
something to promote (even if it's just themselves) can
make great use of online strategies. Let's take a glimpse at something
like this in action. MSN's featured
links about the perils of dating lull the voyeuristic reader
to glide from one article to another, and suddenly there I am reading
a Miss Manners column. Because of its subject matter (it's gossipy
voyeurism), it's fairly riveting. The first thing to realize about
it is that in reading her column, we just "bought" a bit of Miss
Manners - again. What I mean by that is that Judith Martin just
got another bump in the mind share department. For that alone, it
was worth it for her to give away her column.
The coup de grāce, though - and what she couldn't
get so directly from a column in the newspaper - was a plug for
her latest book. If you liked the way she put readers' problems
into perspective - a unique perspective that is far from psychoanalysis
but more like "sensible advice for not making mountains out of molehills,"
you might be very interested to read her latest book, Miss Manners'
Guide to Domestic Tranquility. With a column featured on a major
portal like MSN, even a miniscule response rate would sell a lot
of copies of the book. Amazingly though, MSN doesn't make it easy
to buy (no link and no affiliation with Amazon or Barnes and Noble
online book sales).
The point is, this is a very old game. The Letterman
interview provides legitimacy for the sales pitch for
the latest Tom Cruise flick. Emeril Lagasse appears on nationwide
TV for a cooking segment on Jay Leno, and it boosts his ratings
for the annual Super Bowl edition of Emeril Live. The Oprah interview
gives that John Gray book a publicity boost, and again, the sales
pitch aspect is almost invisible to many viewers. Why would online
media not seek to create similar marketing opportunities?
Online marketers therefore need to think
a bit about what kind of journey the customer is travelling
before she lands on a site. What paths set up the site as
a legitimate authority or vendor? This is why there's so much
to love about search engines and portals from the marketer's perspective.
Case Study: Say You're Promoting a Motorcycle
Magazine...
Think about this for 30 seconds or so. A consumer
who just happens to use Hotmail frequently does many searches at
MSN (since Microsoft has done a clever job of getting a lot of people,
not least Hotmail users, to use MSN). They go looking for print
magazines relating to their hobby - motorcycles. Now here's the
important thing: MSN uses the LookSmart directory structure and
LookSmart directory listings to power its web search. That's a lot
of queries, as MSN is a top three portal in nearly every country
in the world. This means that a magazine which is in the category
"Lifestyle > Auto > Motorcycles > Publications > Complete
Coverage" in the LookSmart directory is one of a select few which
are getting found by consumers searching on MSN. If Texas
Moto has a prominent listing here, they're getting a steady
stream of paying subscribers. And if your magazine isn't here, you're
losing a steady stream of paying customers to Texas Moto. And note
the sales-friendly description the LookSmart editors have written
under the entry: "Publication contains useful resources for motorcycle
enthusiasts such as a dealer, ride and club locator. Learn how to
subscribe."
If you've got a business, then your issues are
no different. You need to take some quick shortcuts to ensuring
maximum search engine visibility. Instead of sitting around and
getting jealous of the Texas Moto's of the world, do what they did:
get into the Looksmart Directory right away. You can do this by
paying for the LookSmart
Express Submit service, which gets your submission reviewed
by an editor in 48 hours. Not only does a listing in this directory
get you into MSN results, but also into search results for dozens
of other wide-reach portals: iWon, Excite, and the list goes on
and on.
How To Get an "Unfair" Advantage
LookSmart listings (and other paid listings, like
GoTo, Sprinks and Realnames) can also give a site a higher
ranking at metasearch engines like Metacrawler, which gives sites
an aggregate score based on rankings in various search engines
and directories, or Ixquick, which gives a site a "star" for
each time it appears in the Top 10 on a major search engine or directory.
As it happens, a search for motorcycle magazine using those two
keywords on Ixquick gives Texas Moto two stars - one of them thanks
to Looksmart, the other from Alltheweb, putting it on the first
page. More hits for the Texas Moto site, and more to the point,
perhaps, a certain legitmacy. Ixquick is a bit of scientific magic,
so if you're ranked high here, the user might assume, you've got
to be doing something right.
A check of Metacrawler shows Texas Moto
a #3 ranking overall there using the keywords motorcycle magazine -
another nice result, this time owing to good (but not Top
10) placements in Google and AltaVista. It looks like
Texas Moto's really got some horseshoes. But to some extent, they
made their own search engine "luck."
Make no mistake about it: search engine and directory
listings are not just good because they're targeted, it's because
they are seen as legitimate, even scientific. Consumers
click on search results because they are NOT advertising, NOT a
sales pitch. They're seen as objective - at least about 100X
more objective than a banner ad.
"But," you say, "I can't eat legitimacy!" Think
again.
See also: Why
Search Engines Must Continue to be Referees
Andrew Goodman
is Editor of Traffick.com. Need advice on marketing your web site to search engines?
Andrew's consulting firm, Page Zero Media,
can help.
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