Insight Into Consumer Wants

Search marketing gives you direct access to the desires of your market.

In the past market research was a painstaking process involving surveys, cold calling, mail outs and other time (and money!) consuming tasks. While these methods are still important recent developments in technology have given businesses a powerful new tool to refine marketing techniques: search marketing.

Every day thousands of consumers are typing their thoughts into search engines in the hope that they will find what they need or desire.

Search marketing has evolved from an exercise in finding high value keywords to drive traffic to your web site to a discipline that can pinpoint customer preferences and produce data that can be applied to both online and offline marketing campaigns. It is now possible to track and monitor consumers online to find out which initiatives generate the most interest and can be exploited further by direct mail, telemarketing or other campaigns. Search marketing is fast becoming the centre of every intelligent marketing campaign, and can inform your entire marketing budget.

Danny Sullivan, a leading search marketing commentator has argued that search marketing works in the opposite way to traditional broadcast advertising: "In a broadcast system, advertisers spend lots of money to reach a mass audience, hoping to build desire for a product or service. But most of the audience is not interested in their pitches. Search is the reverse. Each search is an expressed desire, something that someone at a particular time actually wants. Advertisers can tune in to the 'desire-cast' that's going on."

Search marketing and your Web site

Studies have shown that the majority of internet traffic comes from search engines. Most internet users visit search engines more than once a day and for many a search engine is the first point of call when seeking information about a product or service. Making sure your site is visible to people searching for topics related to your business is critical. 90% of internet users rarely go beyond the first three pages of search results and the majority prefer and trust 'organic' search results over paid advertisements and 'sponsored' search results.

The content of your Web site is critical both for enticing customers to the site and influencing the customer to buy. The content of your site, the quality of the writing and the usefulness and relevance of the information contained on each page will also be the difference between being ranked by a search engine or ignored or relegated to the supplemental index. Writing the content for your Web site is not like writing advertisements or other marketing communications. Search marketing satisfies a need: when an internet user wants something you must be ready and waiting to satisfy them with the right content and the solution they desire.

Having the right keywords is only part of the equation. Each search engine has developed an algorithm in order to calculate the relevance of the sites they find. These algorithms work with text so sites heavy with images and Flash animations that obscure text will usually end up with low rankings. Matching keywords to terms that searchers actually use is an important part of the process, but so is the bigger picture. The combination of words, the pages on which they appear, the broader themes of the site as well as the site's architecture and navigation structure, page names and meta-tags are all factors that influence the final ranking of the site.

The optimisation of a Web site is an ongoing concern. As search engine algorithms change and consumer desires generate new niche markets the content of your Web site needs to be adjusted accordingly.