As this is my first post on my shiny new blog I thought I would make it a fairly straight forward and uncontroversial post. Inspired by the new Google site links in paid search, the topic I’m going to discuss touches on reputation management, user interaction with Google and branding.
There are mixed feelings among marketeers about whether bidding on your own brand is a waste of money or good sense. I am going to come out and say that I believe you should always bid on your brand. No exceptions.
Let’s take a case study (they’re always fun) to illustrate my point of view.
Meet Berg. A German/Swedish 37 year old businessman from Porjus, Sweden. He owns an established fashion clothes shop in a trendy part of London called “Hot 2 Trot Leather Fashion”. It is a clothing & Accessory shop that specializes in leather for mature women. He bought the domain name hot2trotleatherfashion.co.uk and set up a website by following a tutorial from his favourite magazine – Läder Veckotidningen.
Berg’s business is well established locally and nationally thanks to a mail order service he has been running for a number of years. When his website went live he notified all his customers, put a sign up in his shop window, updated all his stationary and reminded everyone who came into his shop to “besöka honom online”.
Berg had submitted his website to Google and Bing and, on the advise of his bookmaker, he hired an SEO company, Peekaboo Search, to “make it work in Google”. He searched everyday for his website but it never appeared, until one day he did. Berg was happy, he was in position 1 on Google.co.uk for his brand “Hot 2 trot leather fashion”.
Berg ’s happiness was not to last, however. A number of his regulars mentioned to him that they couldn’t find his website when they searched in Google for it. “It’s know where to be seen” they claimed. Puzzled, Berg called his SEO agency and left a message on their answering machine. A few days later they called him back. Berg told them what his customers had said. They informed Berg that although he ranked for his full brand term it would be a while before he would rank for the variations and because his brand name was quite long, his customer were shortening it. They informed Berg that this was quite common but said they couldn’t chat any longer as someone had left a pint of milk on the counter and it needed to be put back in the fridge. The line went dead soon after.
Berg tried some variations on his brand name in Google and found that his website lurking on page 2. Berg went to the library and checked out the only book they had on search marketing called “The Ladybird Guide To Search Marketing”. In it it was suggested that consumers would also search for a brand by prefixing or suffixing their query with a brand name to help them find a particular site in the context of a product or service. Berg tried some searches to see where he ranked for this type of search query. Berg found he sometimes did appear, but often with other sites and competitors above and below him.
Berg also noticed that every time he did a search his competitors were appearing at the top and down the right hand side of the search results. Of particular annoyance for Berg was that his main competitor, Hide On Your Hide, always seemed to appear. A quick glance in his new search marketing book informed Berg that this was known as paid search listings and he could set up and account in Google Adwords and bid on any search terms he wanted to be listed for. Even his competitors terms.
So Berg learned everything there was to know about PPC and made a list of all the keywords he wanted to appear for, including branded terms, and began to bid. Almost immediately Berg’s business increased and he was very happy. Especially when he realized how cheap it was to bid on his own brand name and how well that traffic converted to a sale.
Eventually more and more leather fetish websites began linking to Berg’s website and he began to rank naturally for all the keywords he was bidding on. Berg, now a confident Adwords expert, noticed that rather than his branded traffic being split between Organic and Paid search traffic, the sum of the two platforms was more than the original paid search total. His sales continued to increase.
Berg’s competitors and copycat sites were also bidding on his brand terms. So Berg used the creative and Google Adwords Site Links to make sure anyone who searched for him could see his latest sales message and deep links to his best deals on his new line of 9inch leather stilettos. His competitors couldn’t compete with Berg’s high relevancy for his own brand and were relegated to the right hand side while Berg had the whole top of the page to himself.
A while later Berg decided to close his high street shop and go 100% online. One day Berg’s competitors got a bit nasty and cursed Berg’s website with some black hat SEO. Berg’s website dropped out of Google’s index all together. Berg was very upset and informed Google straight away. It took a few months to get resolved but Berg’s business survived because he had an established paid search campaign which also included brand terms.
So now whenever someone tells Berg that he his wasting his money by bidding on his own brand, he simply smiles and says “Den där er vad du tänka kompis”.
Tags: Branding, Google, Organic Search, Paid Search, Reputation Management, User Interaction