Is Search Marketing No Longer Sexy?

I started writing this article about the sexiness of search from the “green room” at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA — so in case you don’t already know me, you can probably surmise that I might be a geek.

Why was I at the Museum? That’s where the LiveRamp 2014 conference was held. Amid the annual event put on by the data technology company, I was inspired to step away from the noise and reflect. After a fireside chat with 30+ year CMO veteran Patrick Connolly, currently of Williams-Sonoma, I couldn’t get one particular idea out of my head: Is search still sexy?

The LiveRamp marketing conference was all about the latest trends and the future of digital marketing. There was a great deal of discussion around topics such as “audience accuracy” and a plethora of acronyms around marketing tactics like DSP, DMP and SSP and RTB. But SEO? It was absent from the Alphabet Soup.

The conference was mostly an executive crowd, and as far as I’m aware, there were over 1,000 attendees. That’s not a massive data point, but I think it’s an indicator that SEO is losing its allure in the C suite.

SEO Was Never Sexy To Begin With

Then again, according to an Altimeter Group study conducted back in 2012, SEO was way at the bottom of the Sexy scale to begin with. The study below was composed of 56 interview subjects: 25 from global fortune 500 companies, and 31 were agency employees, consultants and thought leaders. Check out how small SEO is on the scale.

I find it interesting that this 2012 study didn’t peg display and retargeting very high, and that social or mobile weren’t at the top.

Fast forward to today, and it seems marketers are all abuzz about these two marketing vehicles. And as evidenced by the conference sessions, it seems that improvements in audience segmentation technology and remarketing are suggesting that display and remarketing are going to be increasingly important in 2014, as well.

Of course, this makes total sense. Marketing is good. Targeted marketing is better. Today, understanding your target audience is age-old marketing 101 that’s coming back in style in a whole new way.

With all of the data at the hands of current marketing professionals, everything about the average web surfer’s habits, including where they go online and offline is available for use. It’sBig Brother for everyone.

Let’s talk about how an efficient, integrative SEO/SEM process works:

While SEO priorities in 2014 seem low on the totem pole and other targeted paid media is getting more attention lately, in my opinion, it’s a mistake for C-level execs to exclude SEO from broader, more sexy discussions about cross-channel marketing.

Case in point, with paid search, it is generally expensive to buy awareness keywords, especially when we consider that performance marketers traditionally focus on return-on-ad-spend (ROAS). Yet, this is where SEO can really shine. Furthermore, SEO strategies can go well beyond attempting to improve organic positions for high cost CPC terms. Here is one such strategy.

The Integrated SEO + Every Other Marketing Channel Strategy That No One Is Talking About

• Build a list of high CPC keywords that will have an impact from a demand or conversion perspective.
• Group this list into campaigns to target different types of audiences based on strategies that speak to different audience personas, aka cohorts.
• This data is then handed over to the SEO team to determine the top websites that are ranking in Google for each of those profiles/personas.
• Identify the top ranking websites (in SEO or paid results) that reach the consumers that search on those specific high-cost keywords. Use these SEO ranking results to refine your strategies around your display content efforts.
• As part of the display strategy, marketers might also take steps to ensure they are deploying tracking that will allow them to improve targeting within paid social campaigns.
• Plus, if email info is obtained, marketers can improve the relevancy of email campaigns, as well.

At SMX this week, I had a conversion with Tim Mayer, who is an expert in such strategies. Currently, Tim is serving as CMO of Trueeffect.com. I asked Tim about his take on aligning SEO and other marketing vehicles, particularly with display, and here are a few additional points that he shared with me that are worth mentioning:

There are a lot of advantages to tagging your search clicks within your display ad server:

1. You can truly figure out attribution and who was the last click. This means you won’t end up paying out the CPA to ad networks when the last click was really a search click, as well as paying the PPC to AdWords. Often, advertisers run search and display in different silos and end up double paying for conversions!

2. Leveraging first-party cookies as a tracking mechanism, you will also enable longer strings of ad activity and better understand the impact of the many touches that happen prior to a conversion event. This will help justify the impact of upper [sales funnel] activities such as display.

3. Passing your AdWords Ad group id through in the tag is also a good idea as it can help you better recreate the customer journey/story with your data.

As you can see, SEO data can be used to improve paid search ROI by improving the way we target paid social, display and email campaigns. It’s a truly holistic approach to integrated performance marketing; yet, as far as I can tell, no one else is talking about this much.

Why is that? To me, this makes SEO very sexy, and I’m just trying to bring sexy back.

How Two Top European Clothing Giants Overpowered the Search Marketing Competition

Editor’s Note: The comments at the end of this article have indicated one of the companies mentioned in this post may not be as “white hat” as the author assumed in her research. We appreciate our readers’ feedback and comments on this! -Kelsey

There has been a monstrous wave riding through Europe’s search market and it’s crushing the competitors with the force of Poseidon’s trident. The brilliant search marketing conducted by companies like Zalando in Germany and ASOS in the UK reveals strategies to be mirrored, no matter what industry or market you are in.

These two domains have taken the Clothing & Accessories industry as their own and what’s even more amazing is their share of search. Inspiration from these companies can put you on the right path to great visibility in the SERPs. Just wait ‘til you see the tremendous advantage that these guys have over the mere fish in the sea!

ASOS and Zalando: Search Marketing

Let’s take a quick look at the search marketing situation in the Clothing & Accessories Industry in Germany and the UK.

This data refers to the share of search of each domain on January 20, 2014. Asos.com and zalando.de are showing incredible search visibility in several Clothing & Accessories categories in the UK and Germany, respectively. The percentages in the infographic are based on the top 100 most visible domains in each category and the visibility of these domains derives from the top 20-25 most searched and competitive generic keywords per category.

These two domains take the #1 position in the categories above and what’s even more amazing is the share of search of the next ranking domain. The graph below shows the search market situation for Boots in Germany and the difference between zalando.de and the #2 domain (which varies over time) is almost constantly about 30 percent. Do you think Zalando is lonely up there?

So who are these guys and why are they so good at being seen? Maybe we can get some tips to increase our own visibility and rise above the tide? Let’s take a closer look.

ASOS Reinvents Themselves

ASOS, originally As Seen on Screen Ltd., is a UK-based online fashion and beauty retailer that was established in 2000. They sell branded and own-brand fashion items almost all over the world. In 2008, they received high acclaim for their online store from famous magazines like Cosmopolitan, In Style and Maxim. In 2010, ASOS received e-commerce Awards for both Best Direct Retailer and Best Use of Social Media. I could go on about their awards and recognition online and off, but I won’t. The fact is, in almost 14 years of service, they have become UK’s largest online fashion and beauty retailer and Google doesn’t mind at all.

What Google is really happy about, is the augmentation of search engine marketing that ASOS underwent last year to make their website even more retail savvy. SEM is important for any company that plans to convert traffic into revenue, regardless of whether they are actually selling products online or not. According to Marketing Week, ASOS increased their digital marketing efforts in 2013, focusing on country-specific campaigns. Gemma Lovelock, Director of promotions marketing agency Lock-In Marketing, also said that ASOS made sure that their online store was accessible to customers from anywhere and with any device. You can find details about the search marketing strategies of ASOS in recent a blog post by Lara Vogel that compares brands and retailers online. They’re not doing so bad on social media either which supports their organic visibility with social linking.

Large e-commerce sites may find it challenging to implement good SEO, but ASOS has managed brilliantly. According to Ruth Attwood, SEO Manager at 4Ps Marketing, large e-commerce websites should “[c]ome up with a process for optimization, train [their] staff to do it properly, put quality procedures in place, measure the result of those changes, then rinse and repeat.” As someone who monitors share of search results on a daily basis, I can tell you that finding the right service to measure the results can be tricky, but it is definitely an important step. Apparently ASOS has done a great job and even managed the rinse and repeat with the unveiling of a new design for it’s men’s and women’s category pages, focusing strongly on product ideas and good content.

Zalando’s SEO Excellence

Zalando.de success all started in October 2008, with a small range of products from selected brands. Now, Zalando is live in 14 European countries and offers thousands of different brands. It won the 2012 German Marketing Prize for outstanding marketing performance and the 2012 European e-commerce award for best transnational online shop at the Global e-commerce Summit.

Zalando has excelled in many ways as far as marketing. They have poked around in social media, fancy TV ads, Google ads, and with the use of good content and linking, they have managed to optimize their page emphatically. I guess their idea was “go big or go home!” But it worked for them and it’s very likely that it would work for all kinds of industries. In 2011, Sebastian S. Vlasich of Business Development Strategies told us that Zalando uses social media to get potential customers to interact with them. He also talked about how they launched a new business concept, selling their own brand in a Pop-up store in Berlin, while offline, as an inaugural event for the brand. Although this doesn’t really have an effect on share of search, it definitely affects the brand’s recognition.

In an interview by State of Digital in June 2012, Alessio Madeyski, the SEO Manager of Zalando at the time, states that Zalando practices only white hat SEO as it is not a matter of the color of the hat, but what the user gains. “I strongly believe that the brand belongs to the user, not to the company. So we, as Zalando, are trying to do all we can to listen to what the user wants.” He prefers the term “idea building” instead of link building, as he believes in developing authentic relationships brought on by good content and creativity.

Now you know more about the monstrous waves in European search marketing and as you can see, there was no Greek God behind their amazing share of search. They simply followed the rules that we all know and aim to master. Of course, there was a bit of creativity in the mix and that should always be welcome. Gain inspiration from the success stories like these and use them as a guide for your own success, regardless of your industry or market. It might even be an opportunity for a little fish to grab a trident of their own!