Meeting Customers on Their Own Terms...Their Search Terms (Part 1) by John Rasco
"Top-down" marketing was dying a slow, unattractive death, even before the
Web took over the world. The advertising dollars, creativity, number of
repetitions needed for retention, and everything else needed to launch,
maintain, and build a brand were increasing every year, along with the odds
against success.
Enter the Web, where everybody could find everything and
talk about it to everybody else for no marginal cost. The idea of "bottom-up,"
word of mouth marketing, generally not much more than a gleam in some marketing
professors' eyes, became a reality. In business-to-business, it has become more
than that—it has become THE decision-making environment. For a major purchase,
98% of the people involved in making that decision will have accessed Google
before the decision is made (Enquiro B2B Survey, 2007).
For most B2B
purchases, particularly first-time purchases and technology products, the Web is
the only source for information. Studies show that, in the B2B market, over 75
percent of purchasers searching for a new solution begin their search on the
Web. Since 92 percent of all U.S. search traffic occurs on Google, Yahoo and
MSN, we really need to gain an understanding of performance on these three
search engines. (comScore data, 6/2007) The issue is how to measure search, to
provide our clients with an objective measure of their performance on the major
search engines huanghaiyan251.
Rankings, Visibility and Readership: How
Many People Are You Reaching? When someone uses a search engine to find a
solution, typically he opens up a search engine, usually Google (over 77 % of
B2B searches), inputs a search phrase of two to five words, and gets a whole
bunch of search results back—often millions of listings assembled ten at a time
on separate pages. The searcher then clicks on listings—or, as is increasingly
the case (especially with young men), refines the search and then clicks,
refines and clicks—until he finds his topic. To the searcher, the efficiency of
a search engine is probably measured by how few listings he needs to explore to
find what he is looking for.
There has been considerable research on the
"readership" of each page of search results. In the B2B arena, we believe 100%
of searchers see the first three listings, up to 90% review listings 4 through
10, and about 50% go on to the second page. After that, readership declines
rapidly—a small fraction of searchers reach the third page.
So how do we
measure this process? It is important to know that the number of incidences of
search phrases is carefully measured. We developed the Total Available Search
Market™ metric, or TASM™, to evaluate our clients' potential search phrases to
find the best candidates. We make a list of our client's search phrases, measure
the number of times that phrase was used in the course of a month, measure the
client's position on a search engine result page for that phrase, and do the
math to measure out how many people will see the client's listing when they
input a particular search phrase. The math is easy—what is not immediately
intuitive is the reality that creating a useful metric means not trying to do
too much Turn your world for the remarkable alexander mcqueen clutch
and let
it be another must have in your fashion conscious closet.. What makes for good
marketing intelligence is "actionability"—a metric that is too reductive
decreases the ability of our clients to act on the data we are giving them. We
need to keep our eyes trained on the performance of the important keyword
phrases in order to have a sense that we are attracting the "most, best
targeted" traffic to the website. That kind of focus—keyword by keyword—is
critical to developing an effective natural search strategy. It is even more
important when adjusting and tweaking the website.
(This is Part 1 of a
two-part article. Next: The Relentless Art and Sweet Science of Keyword
Selection)