Step Wise SEO

Studies by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) have confirmed what a lot of search marketers believed:

The power of search engine marketing, and the advertising medium of search, in driving branding and awareness; and The IAB reported in a survey an increase of 27 per cent in brand awareness from search’.

Further research performed by Comscore suggests that, for some retail sectors, some 92 per cent of purchasers willing to buy researched the purchase online and subsequently bought offline.

This indicates that search marketing is one of the largest influencing mediums for researching products and services that are researched online.

With this information available the construct of a search-marketing plan around the objective of driving brand and corporate awareness is of high importance.

This article will revise the components necessary in the construction of a search-marketing plan around this topic.

Submission type
This strategy requires prominent placement on terms that are commonly used. When constructing a portfolio the focus will be on generic words and phrases as well as the branded terms specific to the company and website in question. For this reason the following mix is recommended.

Paid For Placement = Yes
Paid For Inclusion = No (Optional)
Organic Search = Yes

Paid For Placement (PFP) has been selected due to its ability to rank terms at the highest and most prominent placement within the search landscape.

This includes both generic terms that have the highest search volume and also the branded terms related to the firm or organization.

Organic Search has been selected as it has one of the best opportunities for branded search.

Additionally, if the site is well optimized it can be used for generic phrases, but above all else the ability for an organic listing to appear in the most prominent placement in the organic listings can account for up to two thirds of all click throughs from search engine.

Paid For Inclusion (PFI) has not been selected as it lends itself well to an ROI or commerce related strategy and not one of branding.

The specific nature of the searcher’s requests suggests a progression past an awareness stage and more towards one of interest/decision.

It has been left in as optional as arguably the more listings that a company has related to a product or service the higher the likelihood of awareness being generated. The decision to use this medium must come from a cost vs. benefit analysis.

Search engine selection
It is important to select the correct search engines to achieve this objective (see Table 1). The criteria necessary are good coverage across a large number of the search engine and portals the audience uses and to capture interest by allowing for prominent placement of listings within these engines.

In other words if a branding or awareness campaign is to be run, getting the search listings at the top of Yahoo!, MSN, Google, Ask Jeeves and AOL is critical to success.

PFP First tier - these are the engines/search providers that are going to get the strongest coverage for the marketer.

These engines alone cover 90 per cent plus of the search network and, as a result, will give maximum coverage for branding and awareness.

The Second tier PFP engines listed here are some of the stronger contenders for this type of strategy among many available.

Each of these listed here has a particular share of the market space and or demographic. MIVA, for example, has strong coverage across Europe. Kanoodle has strong coverage of many news or entertainment portals.

Organic listings are critical to a good branding exercise for many reasons. The first, and probably the most important, is that these listings will attract the largest percentage of clicks.

Two thirds of searchers click on the organic listings and trust them more than paid listings for providing the most accurate answer.

The second is that this listing should show in the highest placement against the brand name of a company.

As a result ensuring that this listing has the correct title and description (creative) is essential as many factors can contribute to poor performance. This can be measured, not by ranking position, but by CTR from listing to site.

Keywords: branding campaign, awareness campaign, search marketing, generic words, generic phrases, branded terms, Paid For Placement, Paid For Inclusion, Organic Search, search engines,