subject: Evolve Your Search Engine Marketing Strategies Today [print this page] Search marketing is slowing in terms of Google's recent announcement that the search growth rate is slower than before, it is changing gradually now. However, advertisers still take search engines to market as they did five years ago. But as consumers' search behavior expands to searching via apps or communities or via non-PC devices, marketers will think about search marketing as more than just SEM and SEO. We expect search engine marketing to evolve into that using any targeted media to help an advertiser get found at Forrester.
Do you know what changes will provoke the redefinition of search marketing?
Firstly, there are more content and more and more convenient methods to search for it. Images, pdfs, Twitter feeds, video files, ratings and reviewsnot only web pagesare all now online and want to be catalogued. And searchers go beyond Google to find this content; they search through review sites like Yelp, social networks like Facebook and also across multiple devices like smartphones, iPads or digital video recorders.
Search engines are at last transforming from lists of web links into content curators that can read images, flash files and tailor results to searcher location or prior behavior. Microsoft's Bing determines what content to serve searchers based on search terms, user profiles and social media trends. And Yahoo and Google both now offer richer search ad formats to support images and video. Marketers today have access to better and broader tools to manage and measure paid search and SEO.
As search marketing becomes less about keyword bid management and more about being found online, search marketers will have to adjust. Jon Armstrong, the CEO, of Adlucent, a search marketing agency focused on predictive analytics, summed up the change at hand this way. He told me: "The search marketer needs to become a business strategist, working with pricing, procurement and inventory management." I agree.
Here are a few ways you can strengthen your search engine marketing efforts to make best use of these trends.
Know how your customers find you. Consumer "finding ways" will evolve as the splinternet fragments content access. And the way to place your brand in their path will depend on how they engage with preferred search engines and devices. Since there's no way to track consumers across devices, make use of options such as purchase path mapping and linguistic profiling.
Identify the searcher's demand. When I ask most search marketers what their goals are for their search program they respond, "to drive leads" or "to drive online sales." But I challenge with "why search, specifically?" What is it about search that makes it invaluable over another media option for your goals? And might the goals search suits be something beyond just driving traffic and response volume? A great example of creating search-friendly content that doesn't have conversion as a specific goal: Carnival cruise lines launched a video library specifically to showcase the experience of being on a cruise to people who had never taken a cruise before. Carnival's business reasons for using search marketing were to distribute these rich videos across the web.
Optimize customers' conversions process. Most search marketers concentrate the top of the funnel by optimizing bid placements or customer acquisition. But promising customers can't convert if their post click experience isn't relevant. You can fix this by tuning in to searcher intent, not just keyword use.
Support a strategic adoption of search marketing with implementation. As search becomes an important part of all brands interactions, everyone working in an organizationnot just the site and search teams, so they should understand search marketing and its value to the business. And the best way to learn what works is by trying new approaches.
Evolve Your Search Engine Marketing Strategies Today
