Shifting search strategies to keep up with a fast-changing market
It was more than five years ago when site operators began to notice that certain words on pages did a better job of pulling in search traffic than others did -- and today, search has become a huge advertising market. Along the way, it’s changed considerably, and so have the rules for getting the most out of it, a concept participants will discuss in a panel, “Search is Changing: Shouldn’t Your Strategy,” at the upcoming Shop.org Summit.
“You have to know that search is a gigantic field. It’s not just Google,” says Allan Dick, panel moderator and general manager of Vintage Tub & Bath. And gaining an appreciation of the differences among search engines is a key to effective search campaign spending.
There’s enough reliable data available on those differences to help marketers make decisions, he says. For example, “MSN users are more likely to buy online, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore Yahoo, which has the lead among users aged 18-24,” Dick says. “If you don’t know what to do, and you are selling to the youth market, emphasize it on Yahoo,” he says.
Dick contends that there are two types of search marketers: those who are still trying to figure out the basics, and advanced search marketers, already with a broad reach across engines, who look at what their next step should be to grow. Dick says the panel will offer something for both.
The bigger online marketers are generally the most advanced in their understanding and implementations, Dick says, but not always. Where organizations are large, he notes, organizational issues sometimes get in the way of search marketing. Smaller retailers don’t get the attention from search service vendors that bigger ones do, which forces them to get creative and get involved personally. “When you run a small business, you have to kind of duct-tape it together. You have to teach yourself – that’s how we did it,” he says of his own company. “It’s not impossible to learn."
Dick says the panel will address how retailers can identify where they are having trouble in their search strategy, internally-run vs. outsourced search services, the relationship between paid and natural search, the protection of trademarks and brands and the rise of shopping portals and vertical search.
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