This chapter is the first of three chapters that involve putting positioning strategy to work (delivery). In this chapter we will discuss both aspects of search engine marketing (SEM), paid and organic search, as well as the search marketing process and how it relates to positioning strategy and branding. At the end of this section you should have a better idea about how search relates to digital strategy.
The Search Process and Strategy
Since we have decided that the basic tenets of corporate strategy apply in the world of digital marketing, we can then apply these tenets in the world of search. There is an old adage that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. The same idea can be applied in SEM. If you don’t know who you are and who you are trying to target, then you won’t be able to figure out how you need to present yourself on the web.
I like to say that search really is strategy. The reason I say this is that search is how people find your product. Most purchases today start with an online search, making an online search presence critically important. As stated previously, it is estimated that 93 percent of purchase decisions begin with search, so if a company doesn’t know who it is or what keywords are important to customers, it can’t be found online.1
Critical to search marketing is the concept of the keyword. In this context, a keyword is a word or phrase that users employ to search on the Internet, hoping to get to the information they need. Sometimes users type in actual questions as keywords. The term keywords can be used loosely because keywords are increasingly phrases. As users have become more sophisticated in search, they want to target exactly what they are seeking. Google understands this trend and has changed its search engine to accommodate these longer searches. The key to finding the right keyword is to know your customers and prospects well and what their intention is when they search.2 The role of customer intent in developing a search strategy is critical. Increasingly, consumers are using voice search and longer phrases to find exactly what they want. So keywords might be strings such as “cheap movie tickets near me” rather than “movie tickets.” In addition to talking to our customers and using Google Trends, tools like the keywordtool.io, the Moz Keyword Explorer, and the Keyword Planner in Google Ads help us to see common search trends and understand the customer’s search intention. The technology has also improved to the point where visual search is now more commonplace and must be part of a search marketing strategy.
The process of search marketing is called SEM. Essentially there are two different types of search with which marketers are concerned with (see Figure 4.1). These types of search are paid search, often called pay per click (PPC), and unpaid search. The process of paying for search involves paying for advertisements that show up on the top or the side (and sometimes the bottom) of the search engine results page (SERP). The SERP is what is shown when we type an inquiry into a search engine. It typically displays both paid and unpaid search results. This type of search marketing that uses advertising is called paid search because the advertiser pays the website hosting the advertising (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.) every time someone clicks on an advertisement.
Figure 4.1 Types of search engine marketing
Paid Search
Paid search must be considered in terms of strategy as well. Paid search means advertisements that show up at the top and side (sometimes the bottom) of SERP. For Google search results, people tend to look vertically, which means that the sponsored ads on the right side of the page were being viewed less. While 36 percent of clicks are on the fourth position or higher, even being in the first position in paid search is not important if no one clicks on the ad or if you don’t get the desired results. When setting up a paid search campaign through Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or any other vendor, keywords are critically important. Again, the appropriate keywords must match how a product or service is perceived by the customer, their search intention, and how they search for the category. Google Ads is the best known and used form of paid search, but paid search advertising can also be employed in other search engines, blogs, and increasingly on social media platforms such as Facebook.
In Google Ads, for example, we can set up how we want to be displayed based on match type, as noted in Figure 4.2. Users can search using the modifiers and punctuation below to increase their chances of a relevant search result. The type of match selected depends on the product and the campaign results. In general, a broad match will give us the most advertising display but not necessarily the most relevant results, so a modifier can help.
Figure 4.2 Match types for selection in Google Ads
Phrase match is often the best choice because it will display our ad as a variation of a phrase that may be relevant to our campaign objectives. It is always good to include negative (sometimes called excluded) matches such as things for which we don’t want to be found. For example, if we sell hats but not baseball hats, we can include baseball and baseball hats as negative matches.
An important aspect of paid search is the cost of the campaign. When someone clicks on an ad, the company placing the ad pays the vendor the cost, known as a “click.” Paid search can be expensive, with the average cost per click (CPC) being at least between one and two dollars. Therefore, from a strategic point of view, managers are sometimes unwilling to be involved in paid search programs. The fear is that the program is a “black box” and that money will be thrown into the search marketing program and not recovered on a timely or cost-efficient basis.
The Process
The best way to manage this process is to make sure that you are using a search firm that understands the search process and to have a clear plan, or if you are doing this yourself also to have a clear plan in place. You will need to plan and make adjustments along the way based on the immediate feedback the Internet provides. A planning process can apply to both paid and organic search. A suggested process is shown in Figure 4.3. The process begins with researching appropriate keywords and their costs, building the campaign, launching and then analyzing, and reporting. Typically for paid search campaigns on Google there will be analytics such as average ad position, quality score, and CPC. The quality score is essentially the relevance of terminology on the advertiser’s web page to the keywords which they are using. More specifically, quality score consists of expected click-through rate, the landing page relevance, and ad relevance, or how well the ad matches what the user is searching for at that time. For organic search programs it will be necessary to use Google analytics and/or another analytical tool to understand where your search traffic is coming from and which keywords are most effective in the campaigns.
Figure 4.3 Four main phases of search engine marketing planning
The process alone suggests that the search campaign be broken into manageable and measurable sections so as to clearly measure the results. In Google Ads these segments or sections are called ad groups. By setting up groups for different products or offers, you can measure the results of campaigns. You can also do online testing of particular campaigns and ads versus what has worked previously (known as A/B testing as discussed in Chapter 3) and conversion tracking. A conversion is anything that you want to happen as the result of your marketing efforts, or a desired action on the part of the customer. In the case of a paid search campaign, we often send those who click to a specific landing page, again for tracking purposes. These landing pages then can have a “conversion” action on them, like clicking through to another website or purchasing a product or downloading a white paper.
Figure 4.4 shows how an account can be set up in any paid search environment. This structure can apply, for example, to ads in both Facebook and Google or any other paid search format. From a managerial perspective, it is the researching and organizing of the account sublevels that is most critical. Without these levels, it is impossible to determine results and to allocate budget. There might be different campaigns for selling products like mobile access devices such as tablets versus the newer smartphone models. One campaign can be for the East Coast and another for the West Coast and have a different focus; campaigns can be set up as branded or nonbranded. Once you have established campaign themes, then you can set up different groupings known as ad groups with different keywords and ads associated with them for measurement purposes—selling Apple versus Android products, for example.
Figure 4.4 Organizing a paid search campaign
Advertisers in Ads also have the option to display on the search network or the display network, which allows them to show the ads on websites that are most relevant to those buying your product. The search network is the general network that we see when searching Google. The display network allows ads to be targeted on relevant sites such as The Wall Street Journal for financial products or a sports site for a weight loss product. For Facebook advertising, it is possibly to target specific demographics. I heard of someone bidding on such a specific demographic in terms of age, sex, and location that he was able to deliver a highly targeted anniversary wish to his wife on Facebook! Google has even more targeted demographic capabilities, in acknowledgment of the importance of audience targeting. Advertisers can also target audiences that are searching for similar products.
Whatever the target market and the goal, it is most important to have a process in place for both paid and organic search, to know who the target market is and to understand the importance of each element of the campaign. For paid search, a budget is important. Search, once the alternative for those marketers who were cost-conscious, has now become big business and expensive, so keywords must be carefully chosen and budgets managed effectively.
In fact, paid search marketing is so big that the industry is predicted to reach $45 billion by 2020, and is still growing at a double-digit percent rate.3 Google dominates the search market with an almost 70 percent share globally,4 taking most of its growth recently from declining market shares at Yahoo!. Google’s historic dominance has come from it being considered a trusted organic search source that returns the best results.
In paid search, as mentioned above, advertisers create ads and bid on the keywords, paying when a searcher clicks on the ad. The paid search process is somewhat akin to an auction, but the top-ranked ad does not always go to the highest bidder. Other factors such as quality score (expected click-through rate, landing page experience, and ad relevance) can determine how well placed the ad is on the search page and if it gets served at all. The order of the ad is referred to as the ad position, with the top ad having position 1, the next position 2, and so on. Advertisers typically try to be somewhere between positions 2 and 3 to avoid paying too much for their ad placement. Most clicks occur in the first few positions. Usually, on a desktop or larger tablet, users look at the top ads and do not scroll down to position 10.
A trend is the variety of choices that are now available for paid advertisement. In addition to the standard text ad, users have a chance to create ads that are targeted to shopping or are video-based. These ads can also be targeted specifically to mobile devices. An increasing number of searches are being conducted on mobile devices, so much so that Google changed its format to expand the text available to accommodate the needs of mobile users. There is more text available so that the user has more information before clicking on the ad, which is especially important in mobile advertising.
This move to mobile means that ads must be targeted, and bidding strategies must be optimized to obtain not just the first three positions, but the first one or two positions. Google now provides an Optimization Score as well as paid search recommendations to help advertisers in this competitive environment. Both of these tools can be used to make sure the campaign is performing at its best.
There is simply not enough “real estate” available on the mobile device so advertisers need to try to make sure their campaigns are the most effective. Paid search advertising has also become more competitive in general. There are other outlets for paid search, such as Instagram and other social media formats that are competing for advertising dollars. In addition, it is estimated that 50 percent or more of product searches now begin on Amazon.com.5
Another trend that is making search more competitive is the move to automation. Automated bidding strategies such as those employed at Google make use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to suggest the best strategy. Although some writers warn against a “set it and forget it” strategy as the best way to spend a lot of money on Google and not necessarily get a return on investment, automated strategies are a trend for the future. The Performance Planner tool is a way to try using forecasting and simulation to see how effective campaigns might be before investing a lot of money in them.
This careful process of planning and measurement relates to organic search as well. The unpaid type of search is known as organic or natural search and the process of getting ranked “naturally” is known as search engine optimization (SEO). This SEO process involves an understanding of what is known as a search algorithm. An algorithm helps the search engine decide which pages come closest to which queries on the Internet. The natural or organic search results show up below and to the left side of the advertisements on the SERP. Google makes changes to the search algorithm periodically. These changes are usually given a colorful name such as Penguin or Panda. One major algorithm change was called Hummingbird, which was designed to be fast and accurate. One of the latest developments is that Hummingbird has made it more difficult for smaller companies to show up in search results because of an increased emphasis on corporate branding. Increasingly you might see results from larger companies because they have a stronger brand.6 Another change is the emphasis on “semantic” or “conversational” search. However, the basic principles of SEO remain intact.
The BERT update (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) incorporates a greater understanding of natural language. This capability allows Google to identify nuances in search to provide the best results. The best way to work with BERT is to write better content and continue to focus on intent and the audience experience. This preference of search engines to rank sites with great content has been a trend in natural search for a long time.
In fact, there is a challenge today in that it is getting harder to get ranked highly in organic search results, especially for smaller companies that cannot put a lot of resources into writing engaging content. Another factor in search rankings that has increased in recent years is that of EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness). These factors also tend to favor larger companies, or at least those with strong brands. That factor is one reason why this book begins with strategy and branding and continues to emphasize understanding who your customer is and how your company is positioned in the mind of the consumer.
While there are many factors that result in a high ranking in natural search and while the basic principles remain fairly constant, it is important to stay abreast of algorithm changes across all platforms. The basic idea behind organic search for a company is still what has been emphasized in the chapter. You must have a good idea of who the company is to choose the right keywords for web landing pages and therefore to be found by search engines when users are looking for your type of product or service. Increasingly, especially if you are logged into your Gmail account while searching, you will see results in search that are specific to you; no longer will everyone see the same results, but you will see results dependent upon your most recent searches. The content on the site is emphasized more and more frequently and it is less important to have lots of inbound links and more important to have relevant ones.
Brands are important in natural search because the search engine is trying to identify the most credible information. How organic search works is that web “crawlers,” “robots,” or “spiders” search the web and index content on an index server to be retrieved when a user makes a query. The results are called the SERP. Most readers are probably familiar with these pages, which look slightly different depending on the browsers. As noted above, the organic search results are usually listed above, below or to the left of the results from paid search, giving the user a complete picture of the products and services available on the web.
For organic search, a number of other factors are important in terms of rankings. Studies show that people typically do not go beyond that first page for search results so it is important to rank highly. As stated above, this high ranking is even more important on mobile sites where there is less space and fewer positions available. In addition to keywords mentioned above, other important factors are the content on the site and the authority on the site. Authority is established through inbound and outbound links to the site, suggesting that the information is relevant to a number of users. Authority is also established by the type of site. Those sites that are associated with educational institutions (.edu) often rank highly in organic search because of their domain authority. Recently, with the updates to the Google algorithm, content has increased in relevance. Since relevant content will also improve your company’s rankings on search engines, it is even more important to figure out the brand story and how to convey that story best not only through keywords but relevant content.
Content can be blog posts, white papers, news articles, social media posting, or any media that is getting the message across. But the type of content shared should not be advertising in nature. For example, if I were marketing a university, I would have information for users on how to select a university, navigate financial aid, and so on and not just talk about how great the university is. A descriptive URL with a meaningful title tag is also helpful in organic search. The title tag is an opportunity to explain your company in terms of keywords and branding and, depending on the browser, appears in the blue bar when you search and/or in the search results themselves. So the URL for the university might describe the university name, but the title tag would also include something relating to its point of difference.
Images can’t be read by spiders, so it is important to tag images as well use what are known as “alt tags” or “alt text” and to have a descriptive title tag for the web page. In fact, different types of media can be quite useful in improving organic search rankings. I tried for years at a prior university to get my interactive marketing certificate program listed on the first page in organic search for certain terms, to no avail. However, once we incorporated student videos into the site from a class project, we got our desired page one ranking in a matter of weeks. Search engines, and Google in particular, reward rich media.7
Another factor in search engine rankings is your firm’s social media usage in general. Be sure to claim your Google Business Profile and complete the profile. Other tips include Facebook page listing and making sure your online yellow and white page listings are identical. Combining rich media with social media is another way to increase your organic search rankings under the current algorithm. These organic search factors are summarized in Figure 4.5.
Figure 4.5 Factors for ranking in organic search
Choosing the Right Keywords
So to summarize, before you seek to implement a SEO program you need to first undertake a positioning strategy as stated in prior chapters. You need to figure out who your target customers are and how they think about your product. A common method of developing a positioning strategy is to develop the positioning statement as noted in Chapter 2. The positioning statement is used online to explain within the company the characteristics of the ideal customer or the super heavy user (SHU). This is the person to whom most mass advertising is targeted and also those who will be targeted by direct and other methods.
As stated above, keywords are important because this is how users find you online. It is a good exercise to observe those in your target market and how they search for products. A common mistake is to bid on your product name and not the need it is trying to serve. One example is the product “Monster Spray,” a fanciful product to help parents allay the fears of children who are afraid of the dark. Parents can use the spray and thus calm their children’s fears of monsters under the bed or in the closet.8
Parents searching for this type of help don’t search for a particular product. So bidding on “Monster Spray” might not be that effective. Instead, parents use terms such as “child afraid of the dark.” Increasingly, users are searching for the answers to questions such as “What can I do if my child is afraid of the dark?” and the search engines, such as the recent Google algorithm updates, are seeking to answer these questions. This development in terms of trying to answer natural language queries and take into account the context of the search is called “semantic search.”
So how can a company best align strategy/branding and search? I have previously talked in Chapter 2 about the positioning statement format. Let’s assume we are marketing an Internet site for Monster Spray. The positioning exercise might look like this:
Target customer: The target may be thought of as a segment, that is, adults with small children.
Category: Product category—how you would like to be thought of by the customer, that is, tool for children afraid of the dark.
Point of difference: Your point of difference, again, in the mind of the consumer. For our site, it might be that the imaginary spray idea works effectively and gently.
Finally, a positioning statement might be: To adults with small children, Monster Spray is the parental tool for children afraid of the dark that works effectively and gently.
So how does all this relate to search? In both paid and organic search, it is important that the keywords on your web and mobile site’s home page relate to the search terms that are on that page. Develop the positioning statement and then the website or landing page next. In organic search we use the term keyword density. Usually we want a keyword density on a page of 1 to 2 percent so the spiders know that the page is relevant to the topic but not disproportionally so as to indicate we are trying to “game” the search engine. The more you know and develop your brand and select relevant keywords, the more likely you will be able to be found by search engines (Figure 4.6).
Figure 4.6 How branding aids organic search
We want relevant keywords or phrases, such as “afraid of the dark” to be displayed on that page. The way natural search works is the spiders or automated programs “crawl” the web looking for keywords most relevant to the query using search algorithms. There are many elements to search algorithms and SEO experts are always trying to guess the algorithms. One thing we do know is that it is important for both SEO and PPC to have relevant keywords on the exact web page you want to come up in search results, often called a “landing page” or “microsite.” Therefore, the first step in SEM is deciding who you are and what is relevant to your product or service, who your customers are, and basic company strategy. Only then can you know why they search, how they search, and what terms they use are critical to doing well in the search process. Using the process above, research keywords, put them on your website and in your paid search campaigns, measure and monitor the results, and then make changes accordingly.
Synergies between Paid and Organic Search
There is evidence that paid and organic search work together. In general, the more “real estate” you have on the page, the more people looking for your type of product will pay attention. Having both a paid and organic search campaign means that your message will be reinforced. Typically, overall interest in a company increases when they start running paid advertisements. In working with students and their clients for the Google Online Marketing challenge, we have noted that phone and other inquiries increase after a few weeks and might stop or slow down when the paid search campaign ends. I have also seen information to this effect presented at practitioner conferences. While I have not seen a good study that is able to measure the offline impact of search, there is also some academic evidence that paid and display advertising work together.
Paid and Display Ads Can Influence Each Other
An academic study by Pavel Kireyev, Koen Pauwels, and Sunil Gupta indicates that the paid search and display ad budgets can work together to create results.9 These academics found some interesting results using data from a U.S. bank that used display advertising to obtain new checking account customers.
The display advertising generated more search volume, clicks, and conversions but the effect took about 2 weeks. The authors were also able to make some attributions regarding budgeting decision. According to these calculations, a dollar invested in display ads returns $1.24 and a dollar invested in search ads returns $1.74, which would suggest a far larger investment (36 percent increase) in search advertising in this context.
As the authors note, standard measurements such as CTR and cost per acquisition are static measures that don’t take into account what may happen over time. This study suggests that managers need to step up their game in terms of metrics in order to capture these search effects accurately. The metrics are beyond those normally used in practice. Search and social media can also work together, as we will discuss in a future chapter.10
Branding and Search Rankings
Finally, one of the most important aspects of SEM is branding. Branding can be simply put as a “promise” or how the company is perceived by its customers. Google wishes to be the world’s information conduit, Facebook is a communications conduit, and Amazon.com is a commerce conduit. Each of these firms has a clear idea of what and who it is and relates that information to the outside world. Branding is important because brand equity is the value of our firm to the outside world.
For non-Internet-only monoliths, the challenge becomes integrating the brand promise not only with the firm’s offline communications but online as well. In fact, it is my personal belief that branding is more important now that we are so reliant on the Internet to achieve our marketing objectives. There are many ways to reinforce our brands online: search, social media, mobile communications, e-mail, and so on. Each of these forms of communication must reinforce who we are and how we wish people to perceive our brand.
That is why in this part of the book I focus on search as strategy. Understanding who we are and how people search for us is the most critical aspect of our digital marketing management process. Search engines such as Google give acknowledgment to branding efforts. You may have noticed that when you type in a product you are searching for, the name of a large retailer like Amazon and Walmart comes up first, with specialty firms sometimes not showing up until the second page of the search results. The reason is that Google’s algorithms give special attention to strong brands because they are trying to “cut through the clutter” on the Internet and provide searchers something of value.
Branding as a concept can be elusive to those who seek to quantify their digital marketing efforts but we can see the results on SERPs. As noted above, Google’s algorithms give special attention to strong brands for a variety of reasons. Small companies need to work even harder than large companies to build their brand. Starting with a clear story, telling that story through related content through online channels will increase the chances of having a strong brand. A strong brand will in turn rank highly in search results.11
What to Do Next after Chapter 4
- Using Google Trends, keywordtool.io, and tools such as the Google Ads Keyword Planner, develop a list of keywords that might relate to your company and/or your brand. Be as specific as possible.
- Group the keywords into categories that might relate to a specific advertising campaign for either Facebook or Google search.
- Put it all together: Develop ad groups for your campaigns and develop a sample ad for one of your ad groups (if using an ad platform other than Google, still organize your ads into groupings). Make sure the keywords you choose are reflected on your website to also optimize organic search.
Discussion Questions
Discussion 4.1: Relate the discussion on SEM to your product or company. Using one or two specific product lines, do some research for a hypothetical paid search campaign using Google Trends, the Keyword Planner, or another tool. List the company, new product, at least five keywords, and how/why you selected them.
Discussion 4.2: What are the most impactful elements of a website in terms of optimizing a site for organic search? What about paid search?
Glossary
Algorithm: A fancy term for how search engines decide which pages to display for a given search.
CPC: Cost per click, the total amount paid from the ad auction divided by the number of clicks on the ad.
Conversion: A desired action on the part of the customer as a result of your marketing efforts.
Index server: Stores information previously categorized in a search query.
Natural search: What shows up in a search on a search engine, non-paid advertising.
Organic search: Another term for natural search.
PPC: Pay per click, a pricing method for online advertising where we are charged an amount every time a user clicks on our ad.
Query: User-initiated search term.
SEM: Search engine marketing, including both PPC and SEO.
SEO: Search engine optimization, also known as natural or organic search.
SERP: Search engine results page. The SERP is what is shown when we type an inquiry into a search engine. It typically displays both paid and unpaid search results.
Spiders: Also known as “robots”; programs that “crawl” the web and follow every link or piece of data they see and bring them back to the index server.
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