Search Engines - Bringing The Best Customers To Your Door

During my time working with a search-engine marketing company, I become aware of a new marketing crime - the crime of “the invisible website”.   
The invisible websites are the websites no-one can easily find on the web because they don’t have a solid search engine strategy behind them – and they are a widespread phenomena despite the many, many site managers who have said to me over the last year or so “I can’t get too hung up on subtle visitor statistics when I really have to concentrate on getting high quality traffic to the site”. Bums on seats, so to speak. In order to increase such traffic, many managers have remained within the advertising mindset – adding urls to packaging and advertising, developing affiliate programmes, running online advertising campaigns or email marketing programmes, for example.  But no search engine strategy.
 
So what is Search Engine Marketing Strategy?  Search engine marketing strategy is all about maintaining top positions in the search engines. It’s worthwhile because over 80% of internet users regularly use search engines, and 97% make their selection from the first 30 search results. It’s like an iceberg. If you’re not at the top, you’re invisible. Obtaining and maintaining these rankings for relevant search phrases is no easy task, and requires research, planning, attention to detail and dedicated management and measurement.

And it’s worth it – because search engines are fundamental to the way people use the Internet and are the most popular method used by web surfers to find websites.  Traffic from search engines is valuable because the searcher has taken action to search for a product or service either in response to traditional marketing messages or out of need. This means that they are more likely to buy or take the desired action of the site than visitors from any other source.  It’s the difference between someone who has intentionally driven across town to buy a widget from your shop and someone who has casually  wandered in because you had “sale” plastered over the windows.

One other key point to understand is that search engines form the gateway between the offline and online worlds. People turn to search engines in response to real life problems or in response to offline advertising messages. Just look at the tragic events in the US last month – for a while, “World Trade Centre” became the most popular search phrase on the web, displacing the long-standing incumbent “sex” along with phrases and words such as “Osama bin Laden” and “American flag pictures”. So it’s not just about tapping into online traffic but also about supporting your marketing message, brand and market position through an integrated marketing strategy.

The bottom line is that search engine marketing strategy is the most cost effective mechanism for directing targeted traffic to a site – there’s not much in the world of marketing which has quite the same qualities.  Over the next few columns I intend to share a number of key tips for marketing managers wishing to implement search engine strategies. 

For starters, remember that this is essentially another marketing exercise.  Begin with the business objectives: Identifying your target audience and the desired action you would like them to take when they find your site is the first step in formulating a strategy to attract qualified traffic to your site. By understanding your audiences’ motivations and objectives you can produce a list of relevant search phrases they will actually be using to look for your site – and they will, by definition, be the people most likely to take the desired action of the site.

But that’s not all – the key is to select phrases that are popular with your target audience, but are not commonly used by your competitors.  To achieve this, a good early place to start is to use a search engine to search for the products, services or information your site offers and make a note of the phrases you used. Use this list to query the many search engines that now provide a list of related search phrases people use - this can give you a good indication of the most popular phrases used for a particular topic or industry. Once you have your list of possible phrases, use a search engine again, this time to search for each phrase to note how many results are returned. The less results returned, the less competition there is for that phrase, and the better your chances of achieving a top ranking.  Like all marketing, “cut-through” is key.

Jonathan Dodd