Search - I still haven't found what I'm looking for

Marketing

26/03/2008

Marketing Digital Report

To get the maximum benefits from search marketing, companies must understand how consumers use search engines and pre-empt any problems.

Sometimes, search simply does not work. Rivals may have purchased keywords to be ranked higher than another brand, or the company itself may have forgotten to include keywords pertaining to branded microsites leaving consumers frustrated.

To help brands address these problems, we asked the experts about the common mistakes brands make, how they can solve search dilemmas and help consumers find what they are looking for.

Problem

A company makes no checks on what follows when a consumer types the brand name or related terms into a search engine.

Solution

Emily Knee, senior digital account manager at the NSPCC, believes marketers fail to check often enough what listings are coming up in response to their brand name. 'It's crucial that you think not just about obvious keywords associated with your brand but also about related topics,' she says. 'You must think like your customer and imagine what information they might go after when they are in pursuit of information relevant to your product.'

For example, Knee once typed 'non-biological washing powder' into Google. The first result returned in the search listing was entitled 'The Chemical House'. When she clicked through to it, she quickly discovered that several leading household brands of washing powder contained harmful pollutants. Yet nowhere was there a site from one of the cited brands explaining its products' chemical content to ease her conscience.

Another aspect to consider is the different territories a brand can own online and different topics related to its subject. Experts advise brands to work with a search agency to understand how people are going about looking for the product, and optimise its site accordingly. There might be a whole area that has not been thought of. 'Brands don't do enough to work out how they're perceived by customers and to make sure they appear with information where they are most needed,' adds Knee.

Problem

The search-engine marketing for a brand is promoting products or services that are running out of stock or are unavailable.

Solution

According to Warren Cowan, chief executive of search agency Greenlight, this situation occurs frequently and is a waste of time and money, not to mention fruitless for the enquirer. He cites the generic example of a hotel chain with five big sites in New York, running at 98% capacity. That means the chain must be extremely careful about continuing to bid on the key phrase 'New York hotels'. The demand for such a precise phrase is high, which means the cost is too.

'Advertisers can quickly accumulate costly clicks without being able to convert them into sales, because stock is depleted,' says Cowan. 'They have to remember that search is different from every other marketing medium; things happen very quickly and, as soon as you're no longer able to sell, you need to stop marketing or you're just wasting money paying for empty clicks.'

Greenlight avoided this situation when it was working on behalf of HMV to promote the coveted Nintendo Wii games console. This product had created a wealth of media hype and the pay-per-click (PPC) campaign was converting very well, to the extent that stock quickly ran out. Greenlight monitored stock levels and alerted the agency as soon as the campaign needed to be shut down. 'If we hadn't pulled the ad quickly from the listings, it could have been sitting there for a week, paying for clicks that no one could buy,' adds Cowan.

Problem

Search engines struggle to pick up and index a brand in their rankings because of its website design.

Solution

This situation tends to arise because clients are often tempted by design agencies to commission sexy, complicated websites that search engines struggle to read. There are programming languages that engines such as Google find harder to read, for instance, Flash and JavaScript - the ones that make websites look slick.

Problem

The brand's domain name is attracting the wrong kind of customer.

Solution

The site name can make a difference to the effectiveness of a brand's search strategy, according to Simon Hetherington, internet marketing director at web design agency Prodo. He says he has seen some classic examples, such as a site for programmers needing expert advice that was unwisely called 'www.expertsexchange.com'; a pen company made a similar faux pas in choosing 'www.penisland.com'. 'These mistakes not only attract the wrong type of customer, but are also highly embarrassing for a brand,' he says.

Hetherington adds that there is a move away from creating 'dynamic URLs', which are longer domain names generated in response to specific search queries that the consumer taps into the search engine. While they can take users more quickly where they want to go, the problem is that search engines don't respond to them as well as 'static URLs', as they find them harder to rank in their listings.

Problem

The brand falls foul of search engines' regulations and suffers poor ratings or is banned.

Solution

One of the hardest aspects of search-engine marketing is trying to second-guess what the engines - particularly the all-powerful Google - are thinking. Their views on best practice and how to best rank advertisers change frequently and, unless the brand or its agency is up to speed on these changes, it will not remain at the top of the rankings. At worst, the brand could find its name splashed all over the national headlines for contravening search-engine regulations, as happened to BMW (see case study).

The best starting point is to remember that search engines have consumer usability at the top of their priority list. If they fail to provide users with a relevant, useful search facility, the users will soon shift loyalties to a competitor. Consequently, search engines will not hesitate in dropping a brand to zero in the rankings if they feel it is trying to manipulate their indexing system in an underhand way.

Nevertheless, it is still possible to deceive the search engines temporarily and make a fast buck, and there are plenty of questionable organisations who will pledge to shoot a brand to the top of Google's list instantly.

According to Prodo's Hetherington, many of these companies claim to boost rankings by creating links to a brand's site, which is one way that search engines rank websites in the organic listings. These unscrupulous players are referred to as 'link farms'. The problem is that a search engine such as Google will soon find it suspicious that a brand has suddenly gone from having two quality links to its site to 350. 'They will conclude that the brand is trying to fool them and it will plummet down the rankings again,' says Hetherington.

Case Study: BMW

Most brands have made mistakes along the way with search marketing, but few will admit to them. However, BMW had no choice but to hold its hands up and apologise in February 2006, following one of the biggest search bungles to date. The debacle resulted in the brand being removed from the listings by Google.

The car marque was penalised by Google on account of its underhand optimisation techniques, which contravened the search engine's code of conduct for advertisers. BMW.de had been using a technique known as 'cloaking' to boost the brand in the rankings. This works by creating 'doorway pages', full of keywords and phrases intended to be picked up by the search engine's spiders.

The spiders' job is to deliver consumers the most relevant pages in response to their search terms. However, these doorway pages serve no purpose apart from to attract the attention of the spiders. Consumers never see them and were immediately redirected to BMW's official site, which contained far fewer of those all-important keywords.

Google prides itself on designing its results for users - not advertisers - which is why it enforced the immediate penalty of dropping BMW's Page-Rank to zero.

The message from Google was clear: do not deceive users or present different content to search engines from that displayed to users.

'The intention at the time was simply to facilitate finding the BMW pages for interested users and not manipulating the search results,' says a spokesman at BMW's German head office. 'BMW was not the only company using such instruments. A few days after the incident, BMW was listed again at the top of the Google PageRanks.'

Lucy Allen, managing director of search engine optimisation agency Netrank, believes that the whole industry should have learned from this incident. 'It shows clearly that there aren't any tricks to get to the top. The only way is through strong content, lots of content and a good user experience with good natural links to the site,' she says.

'Getting found out, as BMW was, is highly embarrassing for big brands and does not say much about the brand's commitment to the user experience.'