Search Engine Marketing: Savvy Search Marketing Strategies

“As consumers become savvier searchers, online merchants must become savvier marketers,” said Diane Rinaldo, director of strategic alliances for Yahoo Search Marketing, at the session “Search Engine Marketing Strategies for Retailers: What Are Your Choices, and How Can You Use Them Effectively?” at the Search Marketing Forum held last month in New York.

Rinaldo offered the following two strategies for merchants looking to get the most out of search engine marketing:

1. Since 38 percent of sales occur four weeks after a consumer’s initial search, you need to track consumer behavior for a longer period of time, Rinaldo pointed out. “Look beyond your current cookie duration. Thirty days probably isn’t enough time to track all of your customers’ behavior,” she said.

2. “Multivariant landing page testing is the next big thing in paid search,” noted Rinaldo. This testing involves dividing each landing page into its constituent pieces and figuring out which parts are the most compelling, she said.

Scott Delea, senior vice president and general manager of e-marketing services for search marketer DigitalGrit, agrees. “Take a landing page, divide it into its most important elements, then build a router that dynamically generates different combinations of those pages,” he explained. The router should send searchers to different iterations of the page and measure the clickthrough rate for each configuration, said Delea.