E-commerce Insights: Nine Popular Myths About Natural Search Marketing

Search marketing is hot: Analysts predict the industry will reach almost $15 billion in marketing spend in 2005, up more than 30 percent compared to 2004.

There are two primary flavors of search marketing: paid search, dominated by Google’s and Yahoo!’s pay-per-click networks; and natural search, also known as organic search, unpaid search, or search engine optimization. Since cost-per-click fees have risen during the last few quarters, marketers have increased their focus on natural search efforts.

To help improve online sales, this article examines nine common misconceptions about natural search marketing and how you can avoid these pitfalls.

It’s simply too complex. Some natural search experts would have you believe the entire field is shrouded in mystery and insanely complex. It isn’t.

Yes, gaining top rankings on highly competitive terms takes a combination of specialized expertise and some luck. For example, you face nearly impossible mountains to climb if you want to rank highly on “mortgage,” “women’s clothing” or “New York hotel.”

However, many e-tailers can gain large improvements in natural traffic from only modest improvements to their sites.

Tip: Get educated. For an introduction, read “Search Engine Optimization for Dummies” by Peter Kent (Wiley Publishing, 2004). If you later decide to hire a consultant or an agency, you’ll have a much better understanding of what expertise and services you’re buying.

Natural search is free. While site owners don’t pay per-click fees for natural search traffic, smart marketers find it worthwhile to make some investment in improving their natural search rankings.

Can you spend money on natural search? Most commonly, e-merchants hire a consultant or an agency, give training to in-house staff, buy content or upgrade their sites’ technology.

Tip: Establish a plan, revenue goals and budget for natural search.

Natural search is expensive. Search marketing is a young field. Prices have yet to stabilize. You can pay consultants or agencies small fortunes for their services. Sometimes it’s money well-spent; other times, it’s not.

How do you know if you’re paying a fair price? Know exactly what services you’re buying. Compute a rough hourly cost for the work. Compare the rate to what it would cost to do the work in-house. Compare it to what you pay other professional service providers, such as outsourced designers, programmers or accountants.

Paying hefty fees to outsource large amounts of work can make good business sense. Paying large fees for “secret” information does not (see No. 1). Be sure the contracts have friendly “out” clauses if you don’t see good efforts and results within a reasonable time frame.

Tip: Know exactly what you’re buying and what you’re paying per hour.

If you sell widgets, you must rank No. 1 for “widget.” Many retailers believe that winning at organic search means gaining the top position on Google for their “hero phrase” — that single word or two (e.g., women’s clothing) that best describes what they sell.

This limited view is wrong for two reasons. First, you likely face incredible competition for that top spot. For myriad reasons, your site may not be able to get (or even deserve to get) the top position for your hero phrase.

Second, this view misses the importance of optimizing the entire site in order to score high on more specific searches. While individually these more specific searches command far less traffic than your hero phrase, collectively they can equal or surpass the hero phrase in traffic.

Tip: Look beyond optimizing for a few hero phrases. Make every page on your site more search engine effective.

All that matters is getting the HTML tags right. Yes, it’s important to use smart HTML for the search engines. Pay particular attention to your title tags, headlines and link text.

However, other factors are equally important, including inbound links from relevant sites, well-written content, site architecture, page size, load speed, URL structure and site availability.

Tip: Develop a holistic approach to optimizing your site, focusing on inbound links, content and markup.

Sales from natural search will equal sales from paid search. Many retailers desperately seek to learn the “correct” ratio between natural and paid search revenues. Sadly, there’s no one correct ratio for all retailers.

The ratio of natural-search revenues to paid-search revenues could be low for several reasons: You’re doing a poor job with natural search, or it could be you’re doing a great job with paid search. Or the problem could be your site or merchandise category. Conversely, the ratio could be high for just as many reasons.

As a general rule of thumb: Retailers with both strong natural and pay-per-click programs report a ratio of natural search revenues to paid search revenues from 0.8 to 1.2. When computing this ratio, remember to exclude revenues tied to your brand name, on both the natural and paid figures.

Tip: As a manager, don’t focus on the relative size of the two efforts. Instead, charge your marketing team to grow each program by appropriate percentages this year.

You need natural search optimization “applied” to your site. Would any cataloger ever say anything like the following? “We’ve finished building all the pages for our upcoming catalog; before they go to our printer, we’ll send the pages to our photography-and-copy-optimization agency to rebuild them.”

Just as optimizing copy, photography and layout occurs at every point in the print catalog design process, so should decisions regarding natural search optimization occur at every point in your Web design process. You may have an existing site that performs poorly for natural search, and so needs improvements. And making those improvements will require some work from your in-house staff or agency (see No. 2).

If you’re like most catalogers, however, your site constantly is evolving. Going forward, make sure all new pages are designed to score well for the engines. It’s more efficient to build decent pages in the first place than to suffer ongoing retrofitting.

The key here is training. Your Web merchants, writers, designers and developers can and should understand the rudiments of natural search. They needn’t be experts, but teaching them the basics will pay off handsomely.

Tip: Going forward, train your staff to build search engine friendly pages.

If you correctly prepare for natural search, you can turn off paid programs. Maybe — but probably not.

The relationship between natural and paid search resembles the relationship between public relations and paid advertising. Both have a role in the smart marketer’s portfolio. Few companies rely solely on one to the exclusion of the other. In the long term, I believe it will become increasingly important for catalogers to have strong paid-search programs.

Tip: If your paid-search programs are generating true incremental revenue and earnings, keep them running (make sure you understand the role your brand name plays in your campaigns).

Paid search is dead; long live natural search. Search engines are not public utilities. They’re for-profit companies, and they’re very smart. Most (if not all) of the major engines want to wring as much ad revenue as they can from their traffic.

A rush to embrace natural search by merchants, if taken to the extreme, would represent a threat to the engines’ business model. If enough consumers opt to block paid search ads, or if enough retailers opt out of advertising (both of which are highly unlikely), the engines might respond by blurring the church-state separation between natural and paid search. I predict we’ll see this blurring regardless during the next two years.

The rise of digital video recorder TiVo and other television ad-zappers have forced television networks to generate ad revenue from paid-product placement, blurring the line between advertising and content on TV. Analogously, I predict some of the major engines to monetize their natural search traffic through paid-inclusion-style programs.

Tip: Keep a close eye on developments in paid inclusion.

Conclusion

Search marketing presents a great opportunity for catalogers. Now is the time to get both your paid and natural search marketing programs in shape, as there’s still time to influence this fall’s critical holiday season. May all your pages rank highly, and may all your visitors buy.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Ph.D., leads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, a firm providing search marketing services to leading catalog clients of all sizes since 2003. He can be reached via his Web site at www.rimmkaufman.com.