In the first six months of 2005, paid web search results - where advertisers bid on keywords in order to appear in the sponsored links section of a search results page - delivered 拢197.3m in revenue in the UK. It has become a 21st century marketing phenomenon, launching search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and MSN into the corporate stratosphere and delivering new business for thousands of advertisers.
But why pay for search results that you could enjoy for free - and which carry extra credibility among consumers anyway?
After all, there are plenty of ways that you can maximise your impact in free search results. Today, there is new breed of consultants that offer search engine optimisation, which promises to enhance a website's visibility in the free search results by customising site design and building links to the rest of the web. It does, however, have its drawbacks. "I challenge in what sense this is free," says Jonathan Beeston, operations director of search marketing for MindShare Interaction. "No one should underestimate the enormous costs and time taken up in developing natural search and getting direct results."
Ideally, search engine optimisation should be considered right when you start planning a website and it needs to be balanced against many other design considerations.
Search engine software prefers simple, clean websites. It loves plain HTML, but baulks at Java and Flash. It favours text over images. It finds websites where the content comes from an underlying database - for instance, a product list - hard to penetrate. Basically it dislikes everything that makes a cutting-edge consumer website.
The other big factor is relevancy. This is judged not only on a website's content - the words used on the site and elements called meta-tags that describe the content on individual pages - but also on its popularity with the rest of the web. A site with links from a thousand other sites will rate higher with a search engine than a site with links from just five others.
Ross Taylor, digital director at digitalTMW, the new-media arm of agency Tullo Marshall Warren, says Unilever's recent launch of www.florahearts.co.uk drew on these principles to enhance its results in natural search listings for consumers looking for health information.
The agency made sure the site's content, design and navigation was search engine-friendly before writing a single line of code. "Consumers are becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the difference between paid-for and natural search and there is an inherent extra value for a brand in being 'found' organically," Taylor says.
Ammon Johns, search engine optimisation director at search marketing agency The Search Works, argues that following government accessibility guidelines for the sight-impaired also increases the site's appeal to search engines. "It's lovely because that's exactly what a search engine is - blind," says Johns. "It can't see images, but it can read text just like a text reader. Marketers generally want to use an image to tell 1,000 words, but sometimes 1,000 words are better."
Search engine optimisation can level the playing field for smaller sites that lack third-party links because they are more nimble and less likely to have Flash or complicated product databases than larger competitors. Yet it takes time and effort to rebuild a site with these considerations in mind and to convince other sites to exchange links. It can then take several months to reap the rewards, as search engines only update their indices infrequently. Once that is achieved, there is no guarantee that competitors won't do the same, nor that the search engines won't undo all that hard work by changing their software search algorithms.
It can be tempting to take shortcuts, but this is a dangerous game, as BMW recently found to its cost. Google blacklisted BMW's German website - removing it from its search results entirely - after it accused the luxury carmaker of displaying one page for the benefit of search engines and another one for actual internet users.
Mike James, European business development manager for independent search engine Mirago, says it is foolish to attempt to outwit the search engines.
"You need to respect the fact that they have algorithms for a reason - because they are trying to serve up the most relevant results for users," he says. "You can change your site to a certain extent, but blacklisting occurs if it's not above board - for example, having pages of invisible white text saying "holiday, holiday, holiday, Florida, Florida, Florida" is one surefire way to get kicked off."
BMW was removed from Google's indexes for only a few days, but the consequences can be far worse, as MindShare's Beeston points out. "Smaller sites that are blacklisted don't have the privilege of picking up the phone to Google and sorting it out - it's a far longer and more laborious process," he says. However, the sort of behaviour that leads to blacklisting is usually fairly extreme and most experts say it's unlikely to happen by accident.
In many ways, paid search is the polar opposite of search engine optimisation - and this is why marketers love it so much.
A pay-per-click campaign can begin almost instantly and generate immediate results. The costs are controllable and the return on investment is highly measurable. It also requires no changes to an existing website - a database-driven e-commerce site with lots of images and Flash can claim pole position simply by paying for it.
Paid search also enables the advertisers to write the copy for their ads, keeping within certain word limits and constraints set by the search engines.
Drew Davies, e-marketing specialist at Chameleon Net, says the advertising creative is the weakest element of most pay-per-click campaigns. "You can write different copy for different keyword searches to target specific areas," Davies says. "But it's not just about traffic but also about qualifying the audience - if you only make blue widgets, you don't want people coming to the site for red or yellow widgets because you are paying on a pay-per-click basis."
Jonty Kelt, managing director of DoubleClick's search division Performics International, says marketers should really be using both techniques.
"According to a survey from Enquiro, 77 per cent of inquiries come from natural searches and 23 per cent from paid ones, so if you're not doing both together you're missing a trick," he says.
The survey also also revealed that if you just do a paid search campaign, the click-through rate is two per cent, while if you just do natural search, click-through is three per cent. Do both together however, and the figure surges to 6.5 per cent.
It makes sense to use paid search to gain instant visibility while search engine optimisation is still in progress. Once natural search results rise, you can reclaim the pay-per-click budget or reinvest it in more search optimisation work. P
CASE STUDY: CONSORTIUM INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT
It usually takes weeks or months for a search engine optimisation project to yield results, but commercial property fund Consortium Investment Management started getting results within days.
Before Chameleon Net took on the brief to recalibrate Consortium's website for natural search, the company did not even show up on a search for its own name.
Drew Davies, e-marketing specialist at Chameleon Net, says the task was to open up Consortium's website to search, but also to meet legal obligations by ensuring certain pages were not accessible unless the visitor had already seen disclaimer information.
Chameleon redesigned the website in a few weeks last December, including rewriting all the content and embarking on a campaign of strategic link-building.
Because some of the terms were so new - EPUTs or "exempt unit property trusts", for example, is a branch of finance that was about to become law - the search engine algorithms immediately rewarded the site for its topicality.
"We were indexed within two or three days of launching the site - usually it takes a couple of months," says Davies.
However, other terms - such as SIPP or self-invested personal pension - are more common and will take longer to show up on natural search results.
Davies is confident the natural search results will improve across the board, but says it's still a work in progress.
At the end of February, the company embarked on a small pay-per-click campaign to ensure visibility while the natural search optimisation fully kicks in.
TOP TIPS
Start at the beginning
Natural search
1. Do design search optimisation into a website from the outset.
2. Do consider location - the location of the servers, location references in the site and location-based URLs such as '.co.uk'.
3. Do use metatags rigorously and ensure they mean something.
4. Don't assume all prospects are equal - understand your most valuable customers and prioritise their search terms in order to acquire more customers like them.
5. Do put up a holding page on the URL for a new web project so the linking and indexation process can start.
Paid search
6. Do model return on investment (ROI) all the way through to total customer value, not just the initial transaction.
7. Don't get blinded by wanting to be number one - being third or fourth may give better ROI.
8. Do diversify search terms. If the obvious terms are competitive, go for more specific terms.
9. Don't stop refining, learning and adapting.
Source: digitalTMW.
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