Killing the Goose (Part 2)

In my last article I talked about how email marketing, which was supposed to be the greatest new thing in marketing, became just another direct response technique (with a particularly strong potential to annoy customers – or just be ignored by them). Now I want to talk about the “new big thing,” and we might avoid having it become another example on unfulfilled potential.

Search engine marketing is the hot topic in online marketing now. That’s because search engines are the key to your web audience. When people are looking for information – whether it’s a news article, a place to buy something, whatever happened to that old high school buddy, whatever – they usually start with a search engine query.

And Google has risen quickly to the top of the search engine heap, for a very simple reason; its results have usually been better. Google shows people links to the information they are searching for. So people use it.

The marketing potential here is obvious. If someone is searching for “widgets,” and you make widgets, they are probably a good buyer. If they are searching for “FDA-approved widgets” or “widgets with automatic re-widgetizing” the odds get better. You want to be in front of these people.

There have been two main approaches to achieving that. The obvious one is the ads that appear on search pages. Joe User does a search for “grade-A widgets,” and along with a page of results, your ad appears. Joe, probably in widget-buying mode, may click on it and visit a special landing page on your site where you can tell him about Acme Widgets and invite him to learn more, sign up for your widget newsletter, take advantage of special promotions, and so on.

Consumers are savvy. They know that those things appearing around the results are ads. (It took a while for people to catch on to Google’s simple text ads, which look a lot like more results, but it’s safe to assume that most people understand what’s going on.) They are also realistic – they understand that those ads are paying the bills, and may in fact be useful to them.

The second approach to using search engines to market is to make sure your page comes up in the “organic results” – the actual list of pages that match the query terms. Unlike a search engine ad, you can’t just buy this. You need to adjust the content of your site so that when search engines index your site, you will match common search terms for your market. You also need to have links to your site, since more sophisticated search engines look at the popularity of a site (as measured in links to the site) as a sign of high-value content.

This is where things get dicey. Remember why search engines are popular? It’s because they point people to useful sites. If you optimize your site and start showing up in the top ten hits, people will start coming to your site as a result of search engine queries.

However, if your site is not actually a very good match – just a site that’s consciously added the right content to generate hits – people will not stay long. And if they keep ending up on low-value sites, they will start to distrust search engine results. And then the value of search engine marketing starts to drop.

This is why the folks at Google and other search engines carefully guard the methodology they use to determine results, and change it often. They do not want you to know. Because they know that we marketers, if you have the operating manual to search technology, will game the system so our pages come up, destroy the value proposition of search engines for consumers, and kill the system. (We’re good at that. Remember email.)

This is already happening. I remember how much I loved Google a few years ago. You typed in a search term, and the pages you wanted appeared before you. It was an excellent experience. Today, it’s okay. You can find things, but it takes more searches and more wading through junk.

Recently I was trying to find information about Houston flood plain maps. I am in the market for our house, and one important consideration when you buy a house in Houston is whether – no, pardon me, how often – it is going to flood. (We’re on a giant flood plain. It’s going to flood. The question is, will that happen every five years or every fifty? And for any Californian snickering about that, I can only say, “Earthquake.”) When I did Google searches on terms like “Houston flood plain” or “flood pain maps,” I got some useful sites, and a whole lot of sites that wanted to sell me flood insurance.

Now, if I were looking for flood insurance, I would have typed “insurance” in my query. I didn’t. These were stupid results for my search. I found myself annoyed at the companies whose sites were appearing, because they clearly were doing some search engine optimization to show up in my list of results, making the task at hand for me more tedious.

Here’s the interesting part – I just did the same searches now, a few weeks later, and got much better results. My guess is that Google has adjusted their search algorithms to improve the results. Of course, marketers for insurance companies are now busy adjusting their sites to get them back up in the rankings.

It’s an ongoing arms race between search companies and marketers. Here’s my prediction on where this goes:

If marketers are wildly successful with search engine optimization, we will make search engine results into catalog pages and consumers will stop using the search technologies we’re good at optimizing. End result is that in a few years SEO will cost more and accomplish less, and a useful tool for people looking for information on the web will be much less useful. It’s the lose-lose-lose scenario.

In reality, though, the early leaders in SEO will get great marketing results from it. So, everyone will follow – it’s already happening – and a whole new industry of SEO consulting will appear (it’s here actually). As more people do it, the marginal benefits will shrink, until it’s just another one of those things that you have to do, but that doesn’t buy you much.

Should you do SEO? Of course you should. You should also be sure to only do optimize your site on terms that make sense. Otherwise, you’re just that car salesman who won’t leave the customer alone while she wants to simply look at some of the brochures until she’s ready to move on to the next stage in the purchase process. In other words, the car salesman that made me buy my last car at Carmax – but that’s another story.