Developing a search engine strategy
Search engines - for many, a missed opportunity
Most companies employ various forms of marketing, such as direct mail or press advertising. They may well spend thousands - or tens of thousands - on different forms of lead generation. They also structure and plan their marketing, allocate budgets, resources and time - generally working to a 12-month rolling plan.
If you were to propose to these companies that they place a single advertisement in a directory somewhere, never repeat it, don't measure how effective it was and don't even opt to have the advertisement highlighted in some way, they'd think you were barking mad.
That's effectively what many companies do with search engines. Most companies do little in the form of search engine marketing - beyond an initial free registration with just a handful of search engines. Yet they're surprised when they're not top of every search engine's results - and for free!
Make your commitment commensurate with your desired outcome
You won't get millions of hits from little effort. The more you want to get out, the more you have to put it. But don't feel compelled to. If you're site does not directly generate income, or you won't want to reach a global market, then you might not need to apply much effort at all. But such Web sites are - usually, the very act of having a Web site implies that business is being sought. Whatever your status, you should apply an appropriate effort.
The first step
If you're serious about getting good results from search engines you have to be prepared to invest some time and money. So, the first step is simple: add 'search engines' as a line in your marketing plan/budget. It's a little step, but a surprisingly important one. (The second step is to see that the financial amount allocated each month doesn't equal zero!)
Define your goals
If you were to ask most people what their goal of a search engine strategy would be, they'd typically answer: "to be top of the search results". This is similar to saying that your goal for a direct mail campaign is to "mail 50,000 leaflets". It sounds reasonable enough, but it's not focused on a meaningful outcome.
Our ultimate goal is not search engine hits, nor is it enough to know that people have clicked from the search engine to your site. Our goal is to convert search engine hits into activities - be that sales or enquiries.
A search engine strategy should be linked into your sales, marketing and Web strategies. Getting clicks isn't enough, we have to be sure that any visitors pulled from search engines will be met by a Web site that communicates well and engenders a response. It's not the purpose of this briefing to solve all of these issues, but it's important to realise that a search engine strategy should not be self-serving and should link into your other business-development strategies.
Also, when you're only measuring search engine success by where you are in the rankings, you're not measuring the business effectiveness of what you do. If you place an advertisement, you'll measure response and sales, not what position on the page the advertisement got printed.
Your goals should be realistic. There's nothing wrong with them being modest either, but you should compare your expectations with off-line media. If you spent £1000 or $1000 on an advertisement or mailer, what would your expectation be? Don't expect better results from search engines!
So, it would be okay to have higher ranking as part of your search engine strategy (because higher rankings will result in greater pull-though) but also include clicks through to your site and a percentage response from those clicks - and if you're site is an e-commerce site, a percentage of sales from those clicks.
The legacy of search engines being free
If something's free, it's true that we don't tend to value it. Search engines were free for a long time. Now, they expect you to pay. It's quite a problem. We're used to not paying. Because search engines were free, we didn't value getting listed. Now we have to think differently. If you were offered a free ad, your expectation would be low and it wouldn't matter if you placed it or not. Once you start paying, it becomes important to get it right: it's the same with search engines. You're going to have to work selectively.
Budget
And that brings us on to budget. Companies have expected that getting results from search engines just takes a little time. Now, things are changing.
Paying to get on a search engine is the surest way of:
- getting higher in the search results
- getting to the top of the search results.
- getting a listing which stands out from the rest.
- getting a listing which is on every search results page for a specific keyword.
- getting a listing for controlled, multiple keywords.
In fact, it's not only the surest way - it's the only way.
If you want good results from search engines, part of your strategy has to be to pay. How much is up to you - and what you can afford. But it's a good rule to make it comparable to a single typical direct mail campaign or perhaps your directory listings budget.
The good news is that you can start modest and scale it as required - search engines generally off a 'pay per click' service where you only pay when people have clicked your link, the equivalent of paying for a referral. You can generally cap your spending too, putting you in control.
Of courses, there's the nagging doubt that, instead of paying you can get great search engine results for free - just by using a free secret tricks. I invite you to try and to compare the results! The fact is, using a paid listing is the only fast and guaranteed way to get to great search engine results. The effects of any 'tricks' take weeks or months to filter through - paying can bring results immediately.
It's doubtful that you can afford to pay to get to the top of every search engine - although the more, the better. Thankfully, most people only use the top search engines, so if you focus your investment on a few search engines - or even just one - than that should be sufficient.
You can find out more about whether to pay or not for your search engine listing in the associated briefing: search engines - fee or free?
Applying effort
As with most things in life, good results won't come automatically. It's necessary to apply some effort to get the best results.
You might say: "but you've convinced me to pay to get to the top - what other effort do I need to put in?" Well, it's unlikely that you will use a pay service on every search engine - so it's a good idea to make sure that your site works with all the others as well as it possibly can.
In practice, that means that you need to optimise your Web pages to work more effectively with search engines, remove elements from your Web site that impede search engines, apply repeated keywords well - and keep changes your pages to force site reindexing.
We don't have to cover these topics again here, as they are examined in depth in the associated briefings:
Time
After money, the next thing that you'll need to allocate is time. Again, how much you allocate is up to you - there's no rule of thumb. You should allocate time in proportion to the importance of getting good results. Larger organisations might want to utilise a lot of a person's time (or even dedicate a person) and smaller organisations might allocate just a few hours per month. This time is not just spent reregistering the site with search engines, but in assessing likely search phrases, checking current rankings, reoptimising pages, changing which keywords are used in pay services - and so on.
Keywords
A key part of your search engine strategy involves your target keywords. These change often (just as what you do, how you communicate it and what terms the market uses to understand similar concepts changes) and so a keyword strategy needs to be 'alive' and not fixed for the whole year. The keyword strategy is one of the most vital parts of your search engine effort. You can read about this in more detail in the associated briefing: optimising your Web pages for search engines.
Measurement
Like any core marketing activity, we need to measure our success (or not) rate. With search engines, we can measure:
- where a Web site ranks on specific searches.
- Web site hits, and where they came from.
- the percentage of call-to-actions taken by visitors.
- sales from those visitors.
Measuring where your site ranks in specific searches is easy. You just go to the search engine and type in a typical search. If you're listed for free, then you'll want to keep tuning your pages to get better results - by adding in the target keywords. If you're paying and want better results (perhaps someone else is paying for the same keywords, and they rank higher) then you know that you need to pay a little more.
It's surprising how few people undertake this (somewhat sobering) exercise. It's worth doing regularly, because it gives you a clear idea of how visible/invisible you are, and the scale of the problem of doing better.
You should keep methodical records, measuring your status and comparing it to recent changes on your Web pages. If you keep records of the changes, you'll see new text appear in search results, allowing you to see how long it take your changes to appear and what effect they had on your rankings.
You need to limit the number of search engines you're keeping tags on to a sensible amount - probably the same ones that you are targeting in terms of improving your search results. If you work with the top half a dozen, you'll be doing fine.
Measuring your Web site hits, and where they came from, isn't too complex either. Your ISP may well provide hit statistics as part of your hosting package. If you operate your own server, you can access the log files or use a professional package, installed on your server, to provide a much clearer view (as log files tend to require expert interpretation). If you use a content-managed site, or have had a dynamic site developed, then tracking can be built into the page code itself. If none of these options is available, you can add in a third party hit tracker, like Site Meter.
You'll need to work out which pages you want to track - as tracking every page is not only time-consuming, but of little value. It's usually easy to identify which pages are of more value than others. For example, you'll want to track product pages, news stories and so on - but tracking your legal notices or general positioning pages is likely to be of little value.
You should be able to see where a visitor came from, if your tracking method also tracks the 'referrer' (this is the URL/domain where the visitor clicked on a link to take them to you). This information is invaluable, as it shows you where your money and effort is most effectively spent.
Measuring how clicks translate into actions is harder, but it's usually only a question of asking a caller or adding 'how did you find us?' as an option on your enquiry form. You'll then want to add this information into your customer database or CRM system, so that you can query it - again to work out where your money is most effectively spent.
The final measurement, sales is dependent on the previous step. In larger organisations, the CRM system needs to be able to link how a customer was initially acquired with the resulting spend. In smaller organisations, you may not link the two via a system, but it's still worth keeping a record.
Conclusion
Getting results from search engines is little different from other marketing activities. For best results, you need to:
- define your goals.
- develop a plan/strategy.
- allocate a budget, time and resources.
- implement ongoing activity.
- measure results.
- adjust your activities to improve your results.
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