Some Tips on Search Marketing

• by Dan Bailey

Last night I attended the AiMA (Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association) meeting on search marketing. Here are key takeaways:

1. Search hits can land on any page of your site, so every page can become your home page. Consequently, many people drop off after landing due to nowhere else to go. The moral? Treat every page as your home page (with call-to-action).
2. Ensure your tagline(s) come up in SEO search results (as well as other branding, elevator pitch and sales terminology.
3. Ensure your advertising keywords achieve tangible, logical SEO results (an example of what not to do was Hyundai’s ad campaign “Edit Your Own,” which ran in the SuperBowl but had not SEO planning or organic link landing page listings).
4. If your ads capitalize on your brand name, your search results (such as home page) should correlate or direct people to your campaign landing page.
5. Ideally, ad keywords would match URLs.
6. Per your keywords (and SEO results), who are you really advertising for?
7. “Good organic is good usability;” and “Search is search,” meaning that to your audience, search is not differentiated. Users go to a search engine – whether Google, social media, YouTube, etc. – and they just search. The results can show organic listings, PPC text and display listings, and video or image listings – all on the same page. Does your search marketing strategy consider this?  – Joshua Palau, Razorfish
8. Bing and Google are now starting to search by (personalized) intent.
9. Bing could be considered a “decision wizard.”
10. “Google Buzz” is on the rise (Google’s social media site).
11. 12. YouTube is now the number two search engine!