Dr. StrangeSearch or How You Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Google (and Yahoo and MSN, etc)

Direct Marketing News

Now that Search Engines have been launched as part of the fabric of daily existence there’s no way to call them back and make things like they were. Remember how there always used to be a “place” for the phone book? In the middle drawer in the kitchen desk; top of hallway cupboard, middle shelf in the mud room, etc. I have to confess that I don’t know where we keep our phone book, either at home or at the office. Like most people I know, if I want to find something I first go to Google, Yahoo or MSN.

If that description sounds familiar to you and you are responsible for marketing a product or service then you have what may be a red alert. If your web site does not appear on the first page of Google or Yahoo, then it’s likely that you are not being found and prospects are instead finding your competitors.

A quick review - after you search for a word or phrase on Google, you see listings based on either “organic” results or “paid” results. Organic results are those web sites that naturally rise to the top of search queries for keywords. Paid results are ads that appear under a heading labeled “sponsored ads” or something similar.

So what do you do if you depend on generating leads through your web site? First, you can level the playing field by running pay per click campaigns. Second, you can take steps to make your web site “search engine friendly”.

Pay per Click Campaigns

The really savvy marketers (Sellers!) want to be first in both organic and paid advertising. However, it’s a much longer process to optimize web sites for organic results so it’s important to get your pay per click campaigns running with your most crucial keywords. What does that mean? Think about the product or service that you market. If you wanted to buy what you sell, what are the likely words you would enter on Google to search for a company that sells what you do? These are your crucial keywords. However, you don’t have to guess. Professional search marketing companies (like Cornerstone and several others) have expertise in determining which words are more likely to be entered and can bid for these words accordingly.

Of course being successful at pay per click advertising is not quite as easy as it sounds. If your objective is to sell something, then you’ll know where you stand pretty quickly with this very measurable media. This heavy lifting process requires full time expertise consistently analyzing many different factors including bid costs, ad position, relevance of landing pages and much more. Like all great direct marketing media, it provides the ability to test and re-test variables with the objective of course to beat the “control” and pull good response.

The most important thing is that pay per click can get you on those very important first pages of Google or Yahoo if you know what you’re doing. That, as already mentioned will allow you level the playing field while you work on the second part of the equation – working on your organic results.

Optimize Your Web Site

It’s unfortunate, but one of the last things companies do when designing web sites is look at how well it is optimized for search.

What does that mean exactly? Well, there are lots of different theories on what should be done to get noticed. Generally, once we have established the objectives of a website we work with a 5 step process (not including analyzing and reporting on progress) when providing search engine optimization (SEO) services. They are:

1. Technical Analysis to Determine Search Engine Friendliness

Search engines are better able to find and rank web sites if they have been technically designed to be ‘search engine friendly”. Although not always practical, there are best practices that achieve this. The more obvious include avoiding frames and flash when possible. However there are many more principles including naming conventions, the use of java script, or even making sure that PDF files are created such that they can be readable by search engines. The list goes on.

2. Keyword Research

There are a series of techniques and tools that will identify the keywords that are most often searched for on the Internet with an affinity to a website’s product or service. A good rule of thumb when creating keywords for a web site is to split them into top keywords and next best keywords. Then, use them to help create a theme for each section of your web site or even in some cases a theme for every page.

Determining top keywords is an art form that requires that you be both creative and realistic. In some areas, the competition over certain keywords is so fierce that if you try to hang your hat on the most popular you will make little progress. Instead, you need to review combinations and variations of words that ultimately will be rewarded. An important part of this process is looking closely on how your competitors are performing with popular keywords. However you need to bear in mind that your online competitors might not be the same as your “offline” competitors. Your true competition is those sites that have optimized for words that best describe your product or service. You might be selling magazines, mortgages, haiKu, Bricks, or whatever. The important thing is to make sure to focus on a just few keywords and optimize them as much as possible.

The next best keywords should also be considered when writing, adding or changing copy. They help to create your theme and to make your copy flow more naturally with less repetition. These keywords can have a lower density than the top ones.

3. SEO Copywriting

Arguably proper web copywriting is amongst the most challenging. It can be the best written web site in the world but if no one can find it; who cares. Good copywriting looks at such factors as e stablishing and following a theme, setting the optimum number and density of keywords per page that should be used, proper use of titles, headlines and sub-headlines and most importantly the use of natural language. You can’t just please the search engines, your readers have to understand what you’re trying to convey!

4 . Organic Link building

One of the least understood and most complex part of optimizing your web site is link building. Google has a ranking system known as PageRank. Although no one knows for sure how it’s built, we do know that it uses link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In other words, internal links and who links into your site is considered an important component of what you are about. For example, if we look at which sites link into www.dmn.ca, we’ll find links from such affinity organizations as the Canadian Marketing Association and Jupiter Events. Google keeps tracks of these links each time it updates its index.

So the result of this is that disciplines of search optimization have arisen that specialize solely in building these links. However, it can be tricky because engines like Google don’t like to be fooled. If it finds that you are establishing links with sites that are creating just for that purpose (so called Link Farms) then you can be penalized.

5. Public Relations

Search engines like change on a web site. Techniques to both improve the number of times a search engine reviews your site and how to ensure higher rankings because of it can be based on some fundamental public relations strategies such as keeping your press releases up to date and optimized, introducing RSS feeds, having industry news, etc.

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One of the cool results of search engine optimization work is getting some pretty good insight into your competitors. Almost all aspects of the optimization process involve analyzing who is doing things the right way and the wrong way and you end up with some detailed statistics that can give you an edge.

Do yourself a big favour and go on to www.Google.ca right now and type in a few of the words that best describe your product or service. Don’t cheat by adding your company name. If you are on the first page (preferably) or two; congratulations. Make sure you stay there by reviewing some of the optimization techniques. If you’re not there, and it matters that your prospects find you; then think about embracing some pay per click campaigns and hiring an SEO specialist.

Better hurry up before the Pickens become too Slim.

Don Lange is the SVP of Cornerstone and the head of its new search engine marketing business unit which provides a complete end-to-end pay per click service for Canadian marketers and US marketers who sell products or services in Canada.