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Search marketing rejoins the mainstream?

Posted on 1st February 2008 at 2:20 am by Manley

I had to give a presentation to a non-technical marketing team on the loose subject of 'Search Algorithms'. There seems to be a reluctance amongst many traditional marketeers to embrace search, but old-school marketing is still one of the most powerful elements of search PR.

Search marketing is not the dark art that it is often perceived to be. The technical side of ethical SEO mostly involves avoiding mistakes, rather than clever tricks using smoke and mirrors and, as long as you have a good technical team who listen to your search consultant and do not fall foul of the many pitfalls of duplicate and obfuscated content, it is the marketing department who will make the difference between a good campaign and a great one.

To give you an idea of my audience, I used a PowerPoint presentation and included a 'Top 10 on-page tips' section. This was not difficult to write, but it forced me to think about ideas which I would normally take for granted. Search is changing, search engines are better at recognising and compensating for the mistakes and nuances of a CMS, recognising canonical pages and perceiving context. Attitudes to search are changing as well; on-line marketing is no longer lumped in with the classifieds in the budget as the ROI is too great to ignore.

There was a time when I would find myself giving advice to people who would nod and go away to the comfort of their existing systems, with a couple of new ideas which were soon to be swamped by the incoming tide of wistful thoughts regarding tea and biscuits, for the dunking of.

Thankfully that time has passed and the senior executives know about duplicate content, ask intelligent questions about reciprocal linking and social bookmarking and make sure that the changes suggested are implemented. The tea grows cold and the biscuits break off and float around disturbingly, whilst the poor techies are whipped into action.

The next step has to be recognising that search PR is still PR. Every major search engine bases the majority of its algorithmic bias on link analysis. Getting your message out and, perhaps more importantly, choosing the right message to put out, is absolutely necessary. The most spider-friendly site in the world is never going to rank if it has no value-adding content, if nobody has heard of it or if nobody wants to link to it.

The divide between the on-line and off-line world has become blurred for marketeers - I have had clients who refused to put their URL on print media as they did not want to detract from the impact of the print. This is, in the tone of Gerard Butler, madness. The majority of searches are performed by users who know what they are looking for. The top 10 industry-wide search terms for October 2007, as reported by Hitwise can demonstrate this far better than I:

myspace
ebay
myspace.com
craigslist
youtube
www.myspace.com
mapquest
yahoo
facebook
yahoo.com

Now, there are many reasons for this, including the laziness of users, but whatever the cause, the fact remains that these searches are performed by someone who already knows precisely what results they want returned. This is not about SEO, this is old-school marketing. Do a search for [badger] and the first result is for Jonti Picking's superb Badger Badger Badger cartoon. Search for [kitten] and up comes Fraser Lewry's kitten war. Neither of these sites has much in the way of content, but they have thousands of inbound links and huge volumes of traffic. These are not huge corporations, they are young men from publishing backgrounds who are making things that they love and marketing the results throughout the internet.

The moral? Make sure that your site follows best practice, research and target the right keywords and then go back to basics. Building links the ethical, organic, lasting way is about getting people to want to link to you and that is not done by computer wizardry, it is a matter of good, old fashioned PR.

File under: search marketing