This is a book excerpt from our friends at Pearson Education. Each excerpt will be taken from one of Pearson’s excellent Marketing titles. This is our second excerpt from Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site, 2nd Edition by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt from Que Publishing.
Search Marketing Is Big Business
You can tell a new marketing technique is taking off by noticing the number of consultants who
hang out their shingles to help you do it! Several kinds of firms are involved in search marketing:
• Search consultants. A brand new kind of consultancy has sprung up in the past several
years, variously known as SEO consultants or SEM consultants. These new firms, led by
iProspect, OneupWeb, and Global Strategies International, handle search marketing and
nothing else.
• Traditional advertising agencies. At the other end of the spectrum are the old-line adver-
tising agencies that have been around for years. Just as firms such as Young & Rubicam
and Ogilvy & Mather handle TV, radio, and print advertising, in recent years they have
taken on Web advertising. Starting with banner ads, they have now moved into search
marketing, too. Some ad agencies handle paid search only, whereas others offer SEO
consulting for organic search, too.
• Interactive advertising agencies. In between the two extremes, interactive agencies
handle anything online, ranging from search marketing to banner ads to e-mail cam-
paigns. Sometimes these agencies are subsidiaries of the traditional ad agencies, such
as OgilvyInteractive, whereas others, such as Avenue A | Razorfish, are smaller, inde-
pendent firms.
All of these firms are competing for your growing interactive marketing budget—projected
to be 9 percent of all advertising spending by 2011. Your organization might already work with
one of these companies, or might be looking for a search marketing partner. What is most impor-
tant at this point is your interest in allocating part of your marketing budget to search, because
you will soon see that achieving success is rather challenging.
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The Challenge of Search Success
Now that you know the basics of Web search, and you know how big a marketing opportunity it
is, it must be time for a reality check: Search marketing is not easy to do.
And, unlike most marketing efforts, the bigger you are, the harder it is. We know that in
marketing, size has inherent advantages. The bigger the budget, the more advertising you can
buy, the more free media coverage you can coax, the better a public relations person you can hire,
and on and on. But search marketing is different.
Companies with well-known brand names assume it is easy for their Web site to rank
highly in search results, but John Tawadros (of search marketing firm iProspect) explains that
“the field is more equal. Just because you’re a big name doesn’t mean much to the search
engines.” In fact, well-known brands have lots of competition for search rankings, both from their
competitors and from their allies—many resellers rank highly for well-known brands. Amazon
may rank well when a searcher searches for “sony dvd player”—possibly even higher than
Sony’s Web site.
It is actually easier in some ways for small Web sites to succeed in search marketing than
large ones. For instance, fewer people need to know what to do, and the whole Web site is man-
aged one way by one team. As soon as your site is large enough that you hear some telltale con-
versations about separating your team or even your site into multiple parts, then search marketing
has just gotten tougher:
• We need multiple teams of specialists. “The copy writers and the HTML coders really
should be in different departments. . . .”
• We need multiple product sites. “Each product line should really run its own separate
Web site. . . .”
• We need multiple audiences. “We should really have different user experiences for con-
sumers than for our business customers. . . .”
• We need multiple countries. “It is really easier for everyone if the Canada and the U.S.
sites are separate. . . .”
• We need multiple technologies. “We decided to keep using the Apache server for the mar-
keting information, but we are putting all of the commerce functions into WebSphere®. . . .”
“Green Buzz Agency staff and their finished product was of the highest professional quality. Our project requests were not only respected and delivered but also met with other, more expansive, suggestions and ideas. Their experience and dedication to their work was highly evident in our final project, which exceeded our original concept.”
Lisa Nichols, Director, International Programs: American Seed Trade Association
This is the first in a series of books excerpts featured on the Green Buzz Agency Blog from our friends at Pearson Education. Each excerpt will be taken from one of Pearson’s excellent titles in the fields of Marketing or Social Media. Today we feature Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site, 2nd Edition by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt.
The Green Buzz Agency Blog provides insight for Marketing Decision Makers and other fun people
“From concept to completion, the team at Green Buzz Agency has been a pleasure to work with. We’ve used them for several video projects, and would definitely recommend them to anyone looking for quality video production. They work within budget, and deliver a final product with high production values.”
Steve Franco, Marketing Manager: Software & Information Industry Association
