The Marketleap Report
Volume II, Issue #9, May 1, 2002

Digital Marketing - A Deeper Slice
Digging Into What Search Engine Marketing is Really About
By Keith Boswell

A few weeks back we covered the emergence of more definition for marketers between digital marketing and online advertising. Definition in this case helps us all because marketers are beginning to understand the subtleties between their online marketing choices. Smarter buyers mean smarter markets. It also means internet marketing firms can layout a variety of options for their clients and show where they fit into a bigger picture.

Zooming in on the concept of digital marketing, search engine optimization stands out as a portion of digital marketing that is vastly misunderstood. People routinely lump paid placement in search results into search engine optimization. Consistent, long-term strategies are confused with short term buys for a particular keyword.

Paid placement means just what it says. A marketer pays to have a highly visible listing for a specific keyword or term in a search engine, typically presented as a sponsored or paid link. Overture is selling an advertising buy inside of search results.

You as the marketer are writing a headline and copy to accompany your media buy. It feels like digital marketing. You can manipulate your rankings in real-time, buying at higher rates to achieve higher placement on a search results page. You can purchase keyword pre-qualified traffic searching for terms related to your services.

This is typically considered a short-term traffic booster and not a long-term search engine marketing strategy, except for those companies that can afford the monthly or daily recurring cost of buying high search result placement. This is online advertising. It performs exactly what you want it to.

A more strategic approach, and one that dives directly into digital marketing, involves a marketer with IT knowledge or an engineer with marketing savvy. These people are capable of assessing, proposing, and delivering integrated marketing/IT changes to a website. Search engine optimization is a long-term tactic meant to expose as much relevant data to search engine spiders as possible about a website.

They chase the algorithms with logic, expertise, and a more global focus on results. People don't just look at the top three results on a page. If they are really searching for something, they dig deeper.

This isn't media buying at all. It's a manipulation of data to ensure consistency and relevance. Search engine spiders go out and search through the web looking for new content to index everyday. It is estimated that four to five million pages go live on the Web daily. If a site is not optimized properly, search engine spiders may not even know you exist, or better yet, will ignore huge sections of a website, sometimes as much as everything but a home page or single sub-level underneath. The best search engine crawlers known (Inktomi, Google, Fast) are said to index no more than 20% of the World Wide Web.

By optimizing, a marketer is investing in their website to ensure that it is seen and indexed as deeply as possible. Consistent, long-term search rankings are a mixture of analysis and good content. This ensures that relevant content on a website can be found by those searching for it.

To understand search engine optimization means to grow as the search engines do. Innovation and change are an almost guaranteed constant. Understanding this also means to stop confusing a paid search result with a good search engine ranking. Definition is the golden rule - digital marketing isn't advertising.

Maintaining good search positioning, without paying for it outright, means keeping your site updated with content that is relevant to the markets you serve. It may seem like a lot of work. Just remember that search engine results provide the most highly sought after types of clients, extremely pre-qualified ones. And the associated ROI for most online markets smokes anything happening with online advertising.

This week's question
What has been your experience with paid placement versus search engine optimization? Which has worked better for you?

Send us your feedback and we'll do our best to discuss them all in the next newsletter.

Responses to the last Marketleap Report:

People responded to the news that marketers are planning on taking over your web browser sooner than later with questions and mixed thoughts.

"Shouldn't there be some sort of Board or Committee that can limit these awful tech apps invading browsers? Industry or government driven maybe? These hucksters only damage a great industry for their own limited short-term profit. Freedom of speech doesn't cover intrusion into a private choice-driven medium. As telemarketers are about to find out as we all know. My two cents anyways."
- Eric Perrault - Montreal, Quebec

"What is the defence against such unethical practices?"
- Douglas Lampi

"I agree with your comments about under-browser pop-up and the new technology sounds even more intrusive and ugly. So what can we do to stop it? Is there some organization to whom we can protest -- other than the Feds, and I'm not sure they would do anything for years."
- Eleanor

My recommendation to Douglas was to start using a web browser like Opera. I tried my own advice and found the browser to be a good one and I was impressed with the level of control that I had to block unwanted actions. But many of the sites that I visit regularly didn't work as well. I found myself drifting back to Internet Explorer, even as I dreamed of blowing it up.

I think my answer now is different. We, as citizens of the Internet, must demand that companies like Microsoft and AOL deliver web browsing software that allows a user to walk through a setup targeted at finding their tolerance for various types of marketing and interaction. I don't care if 7 out of 10 people find it confusing and not immediately user friendly. It shows them the respect of at least asking them before clubbing them over the head.

If we don't give the browser permission to pop-under or take over the user experience, the marketers trying to browe-jack us will have to resort to more traditional methods of reaching us. The government will never be fast enough to react to marketers' ability to exploit web technologies. Instead we must turn to the makers and lay out our demands.

We must also insist that web browsers all follow the same web protocols, so that wonderful software like Opera stands a chance of being adopted by the masses. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) does us no good if big money has the ability to alter and adopt proprietary versions of web protocols at their own discretion. The W3C was setup originally to ensure that there were common protocols developed for the rapidly growing Internet. Somewhere along the way, as Netscape and Microsoft pushed varying degrees of the same technology but incompatible by design, the power to enforce or guide was lost.

Someone has to have a stamp of approval and it can't be the company releasing the software. I'm not sure who it should be. Business has shown at this stage it is not prepared to organize for our common interest. Maybe it's all of us. Grass roots, software burning, crazy to speak up kind of people have to start talking to others about these ideas. They can't just lay dormant in cyberspace and newsletters.