In a recent article, Why Search Engine
Marketing Works, I emphasized
that there are two special advantages of search engines from the marketer's
perspective: (i) targeting, and (ii) legitimacy. Let's stay with these
themes, exploring the legitimacy question in particular. Since their
inception, major Internet search engine companies have needed to contend
with the enthusiasms and efforts of particular marketers, since
these may be at odds with the perceived objectivity or legitimacy of the
search experience for the user. The search environment is now changing, with
business models incorporating not only advertising, but pay-for-placement fees.
While this shifting environment may necessitate new tactics for marketers
seeking "search engine position," I argue that the essentials of the game
have not changed: search engines must act as referees - fair
arbiters of relevance
- or consumers will gravitate
to different sources of information.
Targeting is
of course a staple of most any type
of advertising. How does it play out in the case of search engines? One major form of targeting is the
practice of buying advertisements which will
appear in the vicinity of the search results on your
chosen keywords. The new Google Adwords program, for example, is an easy-entry system
for buying impressions in the right-hand margin, next to the search results.
Was Free Placement a Distortion of What Was Always a Market?
Advertising has always been part of the equation for
commercial providers of web search services. But the Holy Grail for
many online marketers remains the pursuit of search
engine placement as opposed to advertising. These marketers want
their web site to appear right in the search results, not in a banner, text
link, or button "nearby." Why has so much attention been paid to
this? The main attraction for many, it seems, was that the game of
search engine and directory submission cost nothing to
play
. Because this free ride - unpaid
advertising, in essence - made some businesses possible where they might not have
existed in the past, legions of small business owners
and content-creating hobbyists have spent inordinate amounts of their time trying to unravel
the mysteries of search engine algorithms in order to drive
free traffic to their sites.
Indeed, because the no-cost regime was in place for
several years, many site owners have developed an attitude of "entitlement"
towards search engine traffic - they feel it is somehow unjust if they don't get
their share. But seen as one amongst several low-cost marketing options, it
isn't always clear that this feeling of entitlement is warranted. After
all, email marketing in the form of spam is also a low-cost marketing
method. You'd be hard pressed to find a marketer willing
to justify their "right to spam." Spam may be a very different means
of reaching people than search engines - most assume it's unethical.
Yet is it really all that different? One characteristic of
email spam is that it competes for the attention of email recipients.
No matter how fast you click on the delete button, each piece of spam reduces
your patience for the remainder of your emails - spam, personal
correspondence, and everything in between. Similarly,
competing for search engine position is a question of crowding out a
search result from some competitor or keyword-related resource. Rather than a question of entitlement,
in many cases search engine marketers are really
engaged in something closer to a dogfight - or at
the very least, a marketplace for advertising,
be it paid or unpaid.
The immediate incentive for "working the search engine traffic" is obvious, but one wonders if
the artificial economy of free search engine traffic might have diverted some entrepreneurs
from focusing on the long-term viability of their
enterprises or on the bigger picture of what they are
marketing and how best to market
it after the free ride ends.
SEO Can Deliver ROI to Larger Enterprises
Medium-sized and larger businesses have also played the
search engine marketing game, though they haven't always seen the need. A
certain percentage have hired staff or consultants to work on what has
become known as "search engine optimization" or SEO. Web site traffic can
be increased significantly using such methods, such that hiring someone to do the work can be
very cost-effective. As the bio attached to leading SEO consultant Paul Bruemmer's columns explains: "Tracking search
engine traffic to point of acquisition, sale, signup,
or any action, gives you the ability to determine ROI." A look at the
experience of one major content business with many pages of topical content - About.com -
offers convincing proof that SEO makes sense from the marketer's
perspective (see Human Internet Makes Peace with the Search Engine Robots
, Traffick.com, July 19, 2000).
Inktomi Pulls Out the Rug: SEO Will Never Be the Same
But the economics of the game are rapidly changing.
"Because it's free" will no longer be a sufficient rationale for devoting time
and resources to search engine optimization, and strategies will need to be
adjusted to the new pay-to-play environment that is emerging. The most notable
change is with the spider engine Inktomi, which is now charging sites on a
per-page basis to guarantee indexing. Danny Sullivan's thorough report on the change outlines the cost structure: for a 150-page site, the cost would be
$1,310 per year to stay fresh in the "Ink" database.
You can do a lot with $1,310. Of course, if you're
a company like About.com, you won't be getting off that easily. About.com,
back when we were still working under the assumption that search engine
placement was a free marketing tool, was boasting about having
hundreds of thousands
of pages that would
need to be indexed. If they submitted them all, they'd be into Inktomi for
well over $100,000. If they chose to submit only 5% or so, there is no guarantee
that Inktomi's spider would bother with anything but the 5% of pages About submitted for
paid indexing. This kind of outlay is even worse in the case of spiders like Inktomi,
because search engine placement and clickthrough rates are unpredictable, and payment is not
based on clicks. (As Danny Sullivan described it: paid placement in LookSmart's directory or Inktomi's index
is akin to buying a "lottery ticket." However, at a one-time-only payment of $199,
LookSmart's lottery
ticket comes considerably cheaper.)
Because of the burden on content-rich sites like About, it may
be a slight distortion to claim that the new Inktomi fee will give the advantage
to "deep-pocketed" companies, leaving the little guy in the dust. Some big companies
will find the Inktomi cost structure even more prohibitive when weighed against the whole universe
of traffic-driving options. And some of the smallest of small fry might just thrive on the new
regimen: a spam-reduced, pay-to-play Inktomi index. If a site has one page, and the owner sells something on that page,
$20 is a bargain to keep that site listed and updated every 48 hours in
the Inktomi index. On the other hand, if you run a magazine or vertical portal with many
pages of quality content, Inktomi's cost structure could be prohibitive, and now, sadly, topically-curious surfers will have
more trouble finding you.
Could it be that Inktomi is letting the Internet community down in a more
profound way than it realizes -- that the new pay-to-be-indexed regime, in
the words of one indexing technology veteran, "breaks all the rules?"
Should Marketers Bother with Search Engines?
Faced
with a radically changing cost structure, for those entering the search engine marketing
"game" today, it's worth asking: (1) Is the game worth the candle? (2)
If search engine positioning is only one amongst many kinds of targeted
advertising, does it still have a special advantage? (3) As implied
above, do pay-to-index-pages and pay-per-click trends dictate a
shift in business strategies from content and community towards targeted product marketing and ROI
tracking?
The three
answers are: (1) It depends; (2) yes; and (3) unfortunately for those
who have thus far enjoyed the low cost of providing and consuming online content
and community, yes. Big, unfocused content plays will have to
reorient themselves to cut costs and diversify revenue
streams, at least until a new micropayments/syndication regime allows the best content
providers to make a go of it by syndicating their content widely
to paying clients. (This is a few years off yet.) It's no
longer "go big or go home." It's "get
focused or get flattened." And by focus we
mean selling products and services to a targeted demographic, not just choosing a topic and sticking with
it.
There are potentially rough seas ahead, then, for site
owners who have in the past relied heavily on search engines. The
changing environment threatens site owners with a double whammy: not only
will site owners increasingly have to pay for listings and placement
in or near search results, but the second special advantage of search
engines - their perceived legitimacy from the end user's standpoint - may be
jeopardized.
However, this is not a cut-and-dried situation. In the first
place, spider engines like Google will continue to
drive a lot of traffic through their main (non-paid) listings, and will continue
to be trusted by end users for their ability to point to relevant
resources. That's important for those millions of users who still see the spirit of the
Internet as resource first, shopping mall second.
Secondly, insofar as paid submissions to engines like Inktomi and directories
like LookSmart reduce the spam burden on the "relevancy referees," the degree of
usefulness of the search results to the end user might go up, not down. On the
other hand, rampant partnerism and paid listings on some
portals and search destinations threatens the perceptions of
scientific objectivity and editorial integrity which have come to be
associated with the major search engines and directories.
Although they must now make serious concessions to their own business
models and take steps to increase revenues
from search traffic, search engines and directories must continue
to act primarily as great referees, or the game will lose its
meaning. We referred in an earlier column to GoTo's status as a
"high-octane bazaar," and speculated that it would fly because a
bazaar is often what consumers are looking for online. Often, but
not always. Let's not fool ourselves into believing that all
search engines can turn into unfettered advertising vehicles without
some form of consumer backlash. In fact, something more complex
may be developing: a segmenting of online populations into, on one
hand, those with an unusually high tolerance level for advertising
(let's call them the receptives) and those who are turned off by
"all that noise" (discerning surfers, professionals, recluses, and
b2b'ers). The former might be good customers, but they're not good
customers for every business.
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