It’s only natural
In addition to using paid search, retailers are hunting for customers naturally
By Mary Wagner
Since the dawn of Internet retailing, the black box of search engine algorithms has baffled more than a few marketers—so much so that it’s created a thriving industry of search engine optimization vendors dedicated to chasing algorithms on behalf of their clients. So when Overture—now Yahoo—and then Google offered the opportunity to bid on keywords a few years back, marketers climbed on board, relieved to be able to buy top spots in search results instead of just having to angle for them. Paid search spending was easily measurable and less time-consuming, and campaign results were immediately visible.
Paid search still is all of those things. And it’s something else, too: increasingly costly for the most coveted keywords, a function of increasing competition for those top spots. Fathom Online’s Keyword Price Index shows that average winning bid prices for top keywords across industry segments including retail went up by more than 5% between Q1 2006 and Q1 2007.
“Paid search is getting crazy,” says Geoff Robertson, vice president of e-commerce at auto parts and accessories retailer J.C. Whitney & Co. “To get a dollar sale might cost you 50 cents.”
With stories such as Robertson’s in ample supply, marketers who had let search optimization efforts slip as they focused on paid search now are renewing efforts to squeeze more out of less-expensive natural search. In natural search, sometimes called organic search, search engine spiders crawl the web universe looking for content relevant to a keyword search as determined by each engine’s criteria. Unlike paid search, natural search listings are not influenced by payment to a search engine by web site operators, only by site operators’ efforts to make their web content easy for spiders to navigate.
What’s different this time around as marketers renew natural search efforts is they have a better understanding that natural search and paid search campaigns work together to maximize marketing efforts. Whether using it to rebalance marketing spending online, maintain a presence in engines between specific campaigns or pull in searchers who ignore paid listings for whatever reason, savvy marketers are viewing search engine optimization as a key part of the mix.
“A company of our size does not have as large an advertising budget as an Office Depot,” says Eric Nebbia, director of e-commerce at Officefurniture.com, one of five sites operated by National Business Furniture. “So for us it has become more important to focus on search engine optimization. But it’s important to have a strategy that includes both search engine marketing and search engine optimization. We find that many times they go hand in hand.”
Good news
The good news for marketers refocusing on search engine optimization is that properly executed, it can bring in traffic and sales at a fraction of the cost of paid search. Choosing the right mix of keywords and adjusting page architecture, content and copy to make it all friendly to search engine spiders that crawl the web for relevant material is hard work. But the attached cost, basically marketing and I.T. staff time or contracts with outside search engine optimization specialists, generally is lower than the media buy of cost-per-click keywords.
But the rest of the story is that while marketers focused on paid search, search engine optimization grew more complex. The basic principles of what constitutes effective search engine optimization haven’t changed, such as the correct URL structure and readable and current meta-tags and title tags for web pages. The web landscape spiders must crawl, however, has grown significantly larger.
Google, for example, indexes millions more web pages than it once did and as a result delivers more natural search results per keyword, making it more competitive than ever to gain that critical page-one listing. And more online marketers are attempting to optimize for natural search.
Duncan White, director of client services for search engine marketing service company OneUpWeb, says today it’s rare for him to research keywords on a client’s behalf and not find that some of the top-listed sites obviously have search engine optimization in place. “That didn’t happen a few years ago,” he says. And while links pointing to a site still may be part of search engine algorithms, Google has cracked down on link farms existing solely to manipulate rankings in search results, hindering an easy if debatable route to optimization.
Here’s what else has changed: Besides more and better competition from the outside, successful search engine optimization also faces challenges from within a retail organization. A newly-available cornucopia of rich media can make web pages pop from a design and a customer engagement perspective; but in the main, search engine spiders crawl tags and text, not images. That means some demands of search engine optimization can be at odds with web design aesthetics. While Nike.com ranks high under branded keywords such as Air Jordan, for example, it doesn’t rank high in natural listings under the keyword term “basketball shoes.”
“Nike has the brand equity, they have people linking to their site, and they have a lot of what they need to have in place already to take advantage of SEO. But like many big companies, they deferred to having a graphically-based, attractive web site vs. putting in place some of those principles that would allow them to grab positions in natural search,” White says. “But if someone’s looking for basketball shoes and they don’t see Nike as a point of purchase as they are looking through search results, Nike.com may not make that sale.”
With the cost savings of advertising via natural search and the potential instant lift of paid search each having its appeal, smart marketers are actively integrating them and leveraging each for what it can uniquely bring to the table.
Take J.C. Whitney. While always aware that natural search was an important part of the equation, for a time the company focused on the more easily executed paid search. That is, until the escalating cost of paid search and the realization that competitors were placing higher in natural search brought about a change in strategic thinking more than a year ago. The company found more than a way to fix the problem—it identified opportunities it hadn’t previously seen while figuring out how to re-mix its paid and natural search strategies.
E-commerce chief Robertson started by boosting dollars allocated to search optimization, focusing on more dedicated web development, marketing and content production staff, and eventually, outside consultants. On the technical side of natural search, “There are different activities, and some have a faster payoff than others,” he says. “Changing title tags and meta-tags and doing some manipulation of content has a faster return, but it might be very specific to categories. An architectural change could have a much broader effect.”
The team initiated the difficult work of page architecture adjustments to make all web pages readable by spiders. The next step was to produce copy and content for the pages that would serve up what search engine spiders look for when determining the relevancy of the content they crawl.
Initially that was hit or miss. But when efforts at optimization started to bring J.C. Whitney up high in natural search results on targeted keywords, it was time for paid search to kick in, too. “If you can present yourself really well on the natural side, it balances out your e-marketing spend. And if you are No. 1 on paid search on a term, and you start coming up in natural search, you may not need to spend so much on paid. You can reallocate those dollars. It becomes this virtual cycle,” Robertson says.
When to pay
At the museum store of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, web site optimization efforts didn’t start until 2003, though the site’s been up in its current design since 2002. The initial optimization review—with search engine marketing company MoreVisibility, still the site’s search services vendor—was “an eye-opener,” says Janice Yablonski, manager of e-commerce. It turns out the web site was doing everything wrong from the perspective of spidering, Yablonski says. Major changes in site architecture and content management tools followed, and optimization has continued at a steady pace since then.
A very broadly assorted yet relatively small number of products on the site dictates how natural and paid search are used together. “Many of the museum store’s 2,000 to 2,500 SKUs are proprietary products developed internally, and they range from books to scarves to paperweights to toys and more,” Yablonski says. “For a retailer with that broadly focused range of products but only 2,500 SKUs, we have challenges in how we market this assortment.”
Greek history
Much of the product text on the web site consists of historical references, and that constrains certain types of optimization efforts. “We can’t say ‘Greek jewelry’ on a page 50 times above the fold. So we use paid search techniques for Greek jewelry,” she says. “With paid search, we are able to be present where we might not be found strongly using optimization.”
Yablonski adds that conversion is higher on orders that come in to the site through natural search. And with seasonal exceptions, average order size also is higher, and natural search produces longer site visits and more page views.
“We spend so little on optimization compared to pay-per-click marketing and we get such good results, optimization should be taking up even more of my time,” Yablonski says. “When the budget runs out on ‘Greek jewelry,’ you would take the word down and you’d have no presence. But with natural search, you are always present. That’s how the two complement each other. They make up for each other’s deficits.”
When Nebbia arrived at Officefurniture.com last year, the entire online advertising budget was focused on pay-per-click and comparison shopping engines. Nebbia was concerned about the rising costs of pay-per-click advertising and also with research suggesting that some consumers pay attention only to natural search listings.
A consumer eye-tracking study last year from research firm MarketingSherpa in partnership with software company Eyetools showed, for example, that in a product search on Google with two top ad units displayed, the top organic listing beat the two sponsored links in both clicks and in getting users’ attention.
Marketing efforts that lean exclusively on pay-per-click thus potentially miss out on a large part of the company’s potential market, Nebbia figured. So now, Officefurniture.com’s search strategy includes both kinds of search.
Insights from one side are used to inform action on the other. “If a keyword works well from paid we will try to add that content to our web site to get more traffic from an organic perspective,” Nebbia says. For example: Keyword analysis showed that in paid campaigns, singular terms in some cases performed better than plurals of the same term—“computer desk,” for instance, vs. “computer desks.” That intelligence went into writing copy for the site with an eye toward creating content that would rank high in natural search.
Working with search marketing vendor iProspect.com Inc., Nebbia and his team identified a list of keywords to pursue for high rankings in natural search. That and optimization efforts have helped produce a 35% lift in sales from natural search since 2006. Officefurniture.com also has added many of the terms successful in natural search to its paid search program.
“SEO is one of those things you can’t do just once and then walk away from,” Nebbia says. “It’s something you need to keep on top of because things change so quickly.”
For smart marketers, search engine optimization has never dropped out of the plan. But there’s no doubt that at times it has seemed easier to simply pay for a keyword, measure the return and present the numbers in a neatly tied package to those in the organization to whom they’re accountable. So since search engine optimization’s effectiveness is harder to measure against ROI, marketers are learning to value it by other yardsticks: as a way to test strategy, offset other ad spending and maintain a consistent presence online, as well as build traffic and sales.
“If you can do well in natural it really helps you fund your other marketing campaigns,” Robertson says. “If you can get sales at a low ad cost ratio, then you can start using your marketing dollars toward buying more or more expensive paid terms, or spending more on e-mail or affiliate programs. It’s a really important program from the perspective of maximizing marketing dollars.”
mary@verticalwebmedia.com
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