Why Search Engine Marketing Works

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Marketing separates success from failure for many o­nline ventures. Search engines and directories are perennial favorites. The explanation of their value often revolves around targeting, but it's also about legitimacy: it's not seen as advertising, even though it is. You can create your own authoritative image with a bit of extra attention to search engine promotion. </MM_REPEATEDREGION><MM_REPEATEDREGION NAME="Repeat1" SOURCE="rs"><?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = MM /><MM:DECORATION OUTLINE="Repeat" OUTLINEID="1"></MM:DECORATION> 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 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 grâce, 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. Please Click if you like this on google plus.