Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Companys Web Site [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Assess Your Current Situation

No two search marketing situations are the same, which is why you need to assess your situation on its own merits. No matter how little search marketing you have done up to this point, you are probably drawing some amount of organic search traffic. But regardless of how much or how little traffic you are drawing, you cannot tell how well you are doing unless you take a more systematic approach. The first step in your new system is to decide exactly which pages on your site you want the search engines to show when searchers enter a query.

Identify Your Search Landing Pages

It's not enough to choose the keywords that relate to your campaign. You need to identify pages on your site that you want those queries to lead to. When a searcher enters one of those keywords, which page from your site do you want shown in the search results?

Harkening back to the question of whether the digital camera area of Snap's Web site is a simple enough choice for our first campaign, it appears to be. Some of the critical pages are indexed already, and we have identified other pages that we might get indexed. If we fail to get them indexed, we could create a few new pages to compensate. Overall, it seems to be a simple proposition, so finalize the choice for Snap's first marketing campaignit is the SnapShot digital camera.

Check the Search Rankings for Your Landing Pages

Now that you know which pages are in and out of which search indexes, it is time to see whether those that are included are ranking in the top ten, and if not, where they are.Chapter 15, we take a look at several fee-based rank checkers, but here we introduce the best free tool, shown in Figure 7-3, Keyword Tracker from Digital Point Solutions (www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords). Keyword Tracker checks rankings only in Google, Yahoo! Search, and MSN Search, whereas fee-based checkers handle many different search engines, but it can still save you some time.

Whether you do it by hand or use a rank-checking tool, the basics are the same. You record the organic search rank (paid does not count) of your site's page for the targeted search query. You start counting from the #1 organic result on the first pagethat is the top result on page one (which may be underneath paid results in some search engines. For search engines that show ten results on a page, the last result on page one is obviously #10, with the first one on the second page #11, and so on from there.

Of course, the higher the rank, the better, but you might not realize just how critical it is to rank in the top ten. Consider, however, that 87 percent of all searchers click a result on the first page. Not many searchers are getting to result #11. Of those searchers who do click the first page, 60 percent of them are clicking organic results, so appearing in the top ten of organic results is clearly the place to be. Of course, searchers do not split their clicks evenly among the top ten, so the higher up in the list you are, the more visitors you will get. Table 7-6 shows the results that Snap Electronics found for its targeted keywords.

^[*] Page found from snapelectronics.com site, but not the targeted landing page.

One interesting thing to note in this table is that AOL Search and Google have the same rankings, because AOL uses Google's technology. Looking further into the rankings, we see that although the landing page for "digital camera review" was indexed in all the search engines, it was not found in the Top 100 in Google (or in its clone, AOL Search). Conversely, the target pages for other queries were not indexed, but pages from the Snap Electronics site were returned for the queryjust not the pages that were targeted.

For "snap digital camera" and "snapshot digital camera," the Snap home page was returned. It is not the page that was targeted, but it is better than being missing completely. Similarly, the page that was returned by Ask Jeeves, MSN Search, and Yahoo! for "best digital camera" is a interesting one. Titled "The SnapShot Difference," it explains why SnapShot cameras are better than all otherswhat technology is included and why SnapShots are so easy to use. This page seems better to target than the most-expensive camera's product detail page.

The bad news, however, is the dismal rankings of most of these pages. Unless searchers explicitly specify Snap's company's name or product's name, they are not going to find snapelectronics.com with these keywords. We do not yet know why Snap's pages are ranking so poorly, but we explore those reasons in later chapters of this book.

Check Your Competitors' Search Rankings

If Snap is not getting the top spot, who is? It's easy to take a look and see. Figure 7-4 shows the results for "digital cameras" in Google. You can see that the first page lists retailers and review sites rather than camera manufacturers such as Snap.

One look at the Google results for "digital cameras" tells you that this will be a difficult keyword to get high rankings fornone of Snap's competitors are on the first page, either. But where are Snap's competitors? Studying the Google results for a few of the targeted queries can result in a competitor-ranking matrix, as shown in Table 7-7. You can see where each competitor's Web site ranks for each query. For example, the first page from snapelectronics.com returned by Google for the "digital camera" keyword is result #45, whereas Kodak has a page from its site ranked #12.

It is instructive to examine the results for the "digital camera" keyword. None of the manufacturers have even a top ten ranking, as we saw earlier. But is this the most important query for Snap to target if they want to attract potential camera buyers? Maybe not. Some searchers for "digital cameras" need help using cameras and are not looking to buy them. That means that searchers for "digital cameras" are not as highly qualified as those using some of the other keywords in the list.

Looking beyond the "digital camera" query, we find that the other keywords are more hospitable to manufacturers and suggest more qualified buyers. Focusing first on the searchers for Snap's own SnapShot brand ("snapshot digital camera"), we can conclude that they already desire the brand and are far more likely to buy from Snap. We also see that Snap already has a #3 ranking, so perhaps part of Snap's campaign should focus on moving up to #1.

When we look at the remaining keywords, we notice that, although only Sony has a top ten ranking, the rankings for the manufacturers look healthy. Despite this, Snap is missing in action for all but its own SnapShot brand name. Clearly, this competitor matrix is pointing the way to a search strategy of emphasizing those keywords favored by more qualified searchers.

The matrix has another value, too. When it is time to persuade other people in your organization to invest in or work on search marketing, showing your competitors' rankings usually gets the competitive juices flowing. When you appeal to people's competitiveness, they will want to win. Remember, too, every page that you get into the top ten pushes your competition down furtheryou are helping yourself while denying them exposure at the same time.

See What Traffic You Are Getting

All the rankings in the world don't mean much if searchers don't click through to your site. So although we know there is a strong correlation between high search rankings and high search traffic, we need to track that traffic to accurately measure the business impact of search marketingtracking rankings is not enough.Chapter 6, "Measure Your Web Site's Success," Web metrics software can track page views, visits, and visitors, but they can also count which of those visitors came to your site from search engines. Metrics facilities determine where each visitor comes from by examining the referrer for each page view. The referrer is the actual URL of the Web page that the visitor viewed before coming to your page.search referralsreferrals that come from a URL known to be a search engine (such as www.yahoo.com). Your metrics software comes with a list of the popular search engine URLs, and you can add any that are missing. This list is used to generate a report showing how many page views were referred from search engines.Chapter 14, "Optimize Your Paid Search Program."

Assessing your site is a critical step, but knowing where you stand is just the beginning. Let's see where you can go from here.