Susan the Meticulous on Why the Intersection of Branding and SEO often is a Four Way Stop
April 10th, 2008 by susanPart of the work we do as a b2b internet marketing agency is helping clients choose words to describe their products and services. When we start a project, we ask for a list of the keywords they already use to talk about their goods, as well as for words they might be considering using, have heard their competitors using, or have discovered some other way.It makes for a delicate inquiry, and sometimes an awkward first dialogue. A marketing executive who has spent a great deal of time and money in the creative, analytical, and political work to get agreement on a differentiating way to describe what they sell can be at least disappointed when her SEO agency doesn’t want to work on making their site visible for their new slogan.
After many, many meetings to come up with “Lightspring Cloud Walkers,” hearing us say you’ve got to make your site visible for “diabetic foot shoes” might not be all that thrilling. Or say you’ve spent a year getting agreement on “Mini Mobile Executive Identification Device (MMEID) ” and your SEO agency suggests optimizing your site for “employee badge” and “nametag.” You need the bigger name, you say, because next year the MMEID also will have fingerprint and retina scans built in…and we give back…”security badge.”
Like we say, nobody’s searching on your tag line. At least not yet, anyway.
Tags: b2b internet marketing, branding, selecting keywords, seo
April 11th, 2008 at 7:18 am
That’s right. Only the most abstract concepts are what visitors search for; they’ll narrow it down to brand terms once they’re aware of them, but they need to discover that “lightwalker clouds” are a type of shoe by searching for “shoe” first. Of course, once people know about your brand, you can rank highly for it and reap the high-conversion rewards at your leisure!
April 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Yes, you’ve added an important point - that many if not most folks searching start with the basic category, like “shoes,” or “badges.” Even when a brand has enough mojo to be a decent-volume search term, a key piece of the online marketing strategy continues to be getting and staying visible to searchers entirely unfamiliar with your brand. Thanks for your comment!
April 11th, 2008 at 11:04 am
This makes me think of big, big corporations like Dell and HP. They make a ton of products beyond computers, but people don’t really consider them because they don’t come up in search for things like digital cameras or flat screen televisions.
I have no idea if they’re good products or not because I don’t associate their brand with, say, cameras. For all I know, the optics are amazing and they perform better than most everything out there. But when I went to buy? I looked at Canon, Nikon, and Olympus. Nobody else. Wonder if that would be different if they had come up in search when I was doing research…
April 12th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Yep, Sara, exactly. If those big, big sites don’t optimize for the category words like “camera” and “flat screen tv,” they miss, among other things, the chance to draft off of existing brand loyalty by showing new products to already happy customers. Many thanks for your thoughtful remarks!