With so much ink spilt over search marketing one might assume that anyone who takes an interest would have acquired a complete and infallible knowledge. But the media has been selective in which parts of search it’s covered. While the nationals have favoured stories surrounding the big search engines – well, one in particular – the trade press has done a sterling job analysing and forecasting new methods from pay-per-call to white-label techniques.
The latter is fantastic for keeping practitioners abreast of developments, but it assumes a level of knowledge. It expects a universally sound understanding of how search works when this is not always the reality.
In an effort to fill in the gaps this feature aims to address some simple – not necessarily easy – questions. What is search? How does natural search work? How does sponsored search work? And, finally, why bother?
What is search?
The verb to ‘search’ means to look thoroughly in order to find something. Online its meaning differs: the searcher is not expected to look ‘thoroughly’ – they should find what they’re looking for immediately.
This is why search engines are so rigorous about which websites they list and in what order. Their prerogative is to list the most relevant links in the fastest times – half a second is too long – fail on either count and the user will simply use another search engine.
There are two ways of getting listed and like most things today there’s a natural and an artificial route. Natural search (also known as organic, algorithmic and search engine optimisation – SEO) is the sit-ups approach: it will get you a flat stomach but will take a lot longer. Sponsored search (also known as pay-per-click, pay-per-performance and keyword advertising) is the tummy tuck version. It’s immediate but is it sustainable – financially and time wise?
Warren Cohan, CEO of search agency Greenlight, says that such commitments are too often overlooked with sponsored search. “You can’t just set it up and leave. We have people who manage campaigns on a daily basis and there’s software in place that tracks everything on an hourly basis.”
Most practitioners recommend doing a mixture of natural and sponsored. Steve Dagleish, head of operations at Ambergreen, makes a simple argument for doing both: “If you’re lucky enough to be in the top one or two of a natural search, and you’ve got the top places on the sponsored side, then you’ve got a huge amount of real estate, which means less space for the competition.” It’s no different to the selling of goods on the high street – why just have one shop window when you can have two?
The shop windows are clearly distinguished: natural is situated on the left, sponsored on the right. It’s always better to be listed on the left, but the right isn’t as bad as some imagine. In a survey examining the relative importance that search engine users attach to organic and paid listings the ratio was 40:60 to natural (source: Search Engine Metrics Guide 2004).
Further research found that there is a 51 per cent increase in click-throughs for companies appearing in both in sponsored search and natural (source: Nielsen Reel Research 2003, conducted on behalf of Overture).
Russ Cohn, director of business vertical markets at Google, comments, “People will click on a combination of natural and paid-for. The key is to be relevant – the user will click on something that is relevant to their search term.”
Au natural
Hopefully talking about search in terms of sit-ups and shop windows has helped to demystify the general concept. Unfortunately the so-called ‘black art’ of SEO cannot be explained away in such a rudimentary fashion. Though there are some basic rules and having a good website is number one on the list. Good in search terms means accessible, relevant and credible – it does not mean loaded with fantastic graphics.
An inaccessible site is fundamentally flawed because not only will the customer have difficulty using it but the search engines may not index it. Cohn of Google, “the key to natural search is that the business designs the website in a user-friendly way with a clear menu, text and information that allows the spider to find its way around and identify the site’s main offerings.”
Spiders
Search engines work a little like the human brain but instead of sending out nerves impulses, they send out ‘spiders’ – basically computer programs – that constantly ‘crawl’ through the Internet taking copies of webpages. All of these pages are stored (and subsequently searched) on the search engine’s copy of the Internet. If Yahoo, Google, et al were to use the real Internet it would crash under the strain – Google alone makes over 100 million searches every day.
The spider’s objective is to ‘read’ sites, identify keywords and link through to the next page as fast as possible. Ultimately they want to label the page under a certain set of words – ‘keywords’ – so when the user searches it can bring up the most relevant links. They do this by making an index of every word on a web page, where it stands in relation to other words, whether or not a word is listed in a title, whether it is listed in a special typeface, how frequently it is listed etc.
Many agonise over what words to use and at what frequency but Dagleish, of Ambergreen, says this shouldn’t be the case. “They should be absolutely obvious. Simply list 20 words that describe what you do and then write honest copy using them.” (See the box-out on page 59 for more tips on optimising the website.)
Link popularity
Designing a ‘spiderable’ site is only half the battle with natural search, the other half is making the site popular, and this is achieved through linking.
Larry Page, co-founder of Google, first wrote a program called BackRub to find out who was linking to any given page. BackRub then became PageRank which is an algorithm that measures the importance of a webpage by counting how often other webpages linked to it.
Cohan of Greenlight explains how it works: “The search engines want to see other sites linking to you – this gives them more confidence to rate it highly. Effectively it makes it a ‘worthy’ site.” Also the more links there are to the site, the more times the spiders will visit and take fresh copies of your pages.
This system is fantastic for online powerhouse such as BBC.co.uk, Guardian Unlimited, Amazon and Ebay where linking happens naturally but for most this is not the case. Cohan of Greenlight advises, “Link popularity needs to be cultivated. It needs to be encouraged and propagated. Raise awareness of the link proposition through viral marketing and press releases for example. You could even make direct requests to have it featured on certain sites.” (See the box-out above for tips on linkage.)
Pay-per-click
Sponsored search came after natural search. The concept is simple: the business buys relevant keywords and every time a user searches for those words and clicks on the link it pays an agreed sum for that click-through. The pricing works on an auction model – high demand equals higher price. The minimum cost per click on Google is £0.01 and the maximum is £100.
Richard Ferminger, sales director at Yahoo Search Marketing, elaborates, “Search engines don’t control the price – we’re the Christies of the online world. Price depends on demand and on category. This morning there were 100 advertisers bidding for ‘loan’ but only two bidding for ‘ballpoint pen’. The margins for certain words can be high therefore they cost more, for instance ‘mortgage’ is more expensive than ‘CD’ simply because the margins are higher.”
In the early noughties, all of the search engines used the auction method where the highest bidder achieved the highest place, but some are moving away from this and applying the natural formulas to the sponsored side. Google initiated this in August 2005 with its Quality Score Model which takes into account the websites click-through rate (just in sponsored results) as well as the bid price.
Cohn of Google says, “Essentially businesses get rewarded for good copy and quality sites.” Yahoo still operates with the traditional auction method. Ferminger extols its simple virtues, “With Yahoo you can control the position by price, ie. ‘I want to pay for the top position’ or ‘I want to pay 50p per click – where will that put me?'”
With sponsored search, most of the advice focuses on choosing the best keywords but perfecting the 30 words of ad copy – just below the link – matters as much.
Cohan of Greenlight speaks from experience, “One of my clients was paying £15 per click to be number one and I convinced him to bring it down to third place which cost around £7 per click. Initially the click-throughs dropped but when we tweaked the copy – made it more compelling, with price points and offerings – the click-through rates went up higher than before.” (See box out for optimising pay-per-click.)
The popularity of search marketing mostly comes down to its relative cost-effectiveness and its extreme measurability. It can also work at different stages of the sales cycle ie. for raising awareness, selling, providing post-sales support and even CRM.
But in basic terms it’s simply another medium for your business. Your customers are there, the competition is more than likely there and you would be a fool not to be.
How to optimise your website
Ensure the site is navigable – site maps and clear links to other pages will help achieve this.
- Think about the words the user would type to find your pages and weave them into the copy.
- Make the content relevant, honest and information-rich.
- Structure the content as best as you can with headers, sub-headers and highlighted keywords.
- Use text instead of images to display important names, content or links – spiders don’t recognise images.
- Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site as Lynx would.
