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Branded Keywords And Organic Exposure 
By: Mr. Frog 2006-06-19 Last week, SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (http://www.sempo.org) announced that it will be publishing a limited but current subset of Hitwise's top search term data on its Website.
This data will be selected from several categories; right now what's there are the Top Ten search terms in the Entertainment - Television category; which happen to be:
These searches how powerfully established brands influence behavior, and how offline events drive search patterns. The question for me is this: how well are marketers leveraging this behavior after the search is made? How easy are they making it for searchers to get to their branded properties? I decided to perform these searches myself on each major engine and draw up a scorecard based on the performance of each branded term on the engines SERPs. Naturally, I expected that branded terms such as "American Idol" and "Disney Channel" would universally rank #1 organic rankings, and each branded did perform extremely well (only CNN.com got a #2 ranking, because of a higher-ranked but related site, CNN International). The problem and the challenge however, is that each engine does not display the #1 organic result in exactly the same way. Generally, Google puts the #1 result much higher than Yahoo or MSN, making it much easier for searchers to find it. Yahoos interface is considerably more cluttered, and frequently displays competing Yahoo-related products (eg. "Yahoo Weather") above the #1 organic listing for a given site. Furthermore, all of the engines sometimes put Paid listings above organic results, which succeed in pushing the #1 organic listing for a given branded term further down the page, far away from the zone which eyetracking studies have demonstrated is the most-clicked on real estate on a SERP. To attempt to quantify the idea that "All #1 Organic Rankings Are Not Alike," I have coined the term "Effective Organic Position" to take account of the phenomenon that a #1 organic position does not automatically result in occupying the "sweet spot" where most clicks occur. Top 10 Branded Keywords and Organic Search Engine Exposure
Several observations follow from this brief survey: 1. Effective Organic Position is Reduced By News Items, Competing Products, and Paid Ads. As can be seen from this chart, all of the branded keywords did extremely well in terms of their Actual Organic Positions in every engine, but there were marked differences in terms of how visible the primary site associated with each brand was in each SERP. Some keywords (especially those which came with a .com extension such as Nick.com and Weather.com) caused results which occupied the "sweet spot," but some fared much more poorly. In the case of the keyword "American Idol," Googles SERP pushed the site target (Americanidol.com) down several lines by news items pertaining to the talent competition, as was the case on MSN. On Yahoo, two paid ads plus a competing Yahoo product (Yahoos American Idol TV Page) pushed the organic listing down. 2. This problem will get worse as search engines continue to morph into media companies. If Google, Yahoo, or MSN decides to cut a deal with the Cartoon Network, or with ESPN, to provide pay-per-view video content, which way will users be pointed if they type in "Cartoon Network?" To the Search engines video server? A news item pertaining to the new deal? Or to the brands main Website? The answer is probably "all," which will tend to reduce the brandholders Effective Organic Position. The more search engines behave like media companies, the greater the likelihood that users will have a harder time finding the primary site associated with each branded term. 3. None of the owners of these brands were running any paid search campaigns which used any of the keywords associated with their brands. While this decision may be justifiable for brands with high Effective Organic Positions, it is not for terms such as "American Idol," which generated results in which the target site must compete with paid ads, news items, and competing products offered by the search engine. In the case of "American Idol," it was an especially unfortunate decision because there now appear to be two main sites associated with the talent competition now in operation (idolonfox.com and americanidol.com), the second of which does not even appear in Googles organic results. Users clicking on the listing for idolonfox.com are directed to a site with a prominent "Whoops! Please update your bookmarks. Our web address has recently changed to americanidol.com" message." Some brand marketers may believe that they can coast along on high organic rankings, but this course can be risky, especially in cases where Effective Organic Position rates are depressed by other elements competing for scare SERP real estate. Furthermore, relying on organic listings alone deprives the marketer of a powerful opportunity to establish a marketing touchpoint (perhaps with complementary messaging) tailored for searchers who have already demonstrated the fact that a given brand has equity in the searchers mind. Conversely, as competing marketers learn how to tap the power of their competitors' brands when those brands generate searches that may not be protectable as trademarks, it will become increasingly important for the brand holders to consider the impact of sitting out of the paid search marketplace. Mr. Frog anticipates some changes in marketing budgets as brands realize that they are giving huge gifts to their competition by staying out of paid search. About the Author: Mr. Frog is a leading Search industry visionary. Mr. Frog is a member of the Did-it Search Marketing team which accompanies him to most major marketing conferences. |
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