Play The Search Engine Game To Win!

Like any sales channel, to maximise results it pays to work to the search engines’ rules of engagement: a compromise is worth £££

Can you remember the last advertisement that actually made you buy something – or even react? Let’s face it, a lot of advertising is clutter and as far as the TV is concerned, it is at best a chance to put the kettle on. But then, we can all recall the ad campaigns that worked; the ones that just seemed to get the balance right between wittily communicating a buying proposition without becoming downright annoying.

There are numerous factors that go into making an ad not just feel right to its target audience, but trigger the right emotions. For instance, ads that feature a ’call to action’ have been proved to generate five times the response from those that do not. In print, changing a single word in a headline can make all the difference between wallpaper and an exceptional selling tool.

Overall positioning, creative interpretation, design and choice of media are all crucial parts of the jigsaw that conspire to put your brand name ahead of the competition.

Pioneers such as David Ogilvy built their reputations around defining what makes effective advertising – in Ogilvy’s case picture and text size was meticulously specified after extensive research. Headlines had to be a certain number of words. Reversed out text? Forget it! Sure, his comments about humour not having a place in advertising have been eclipsed but Ogilvy and Mather created some of the longest and most memorable campaigns in history.

Of course as media becomes more fragmented and its audience has become increasingly savvy, the game is that much harder to win, but look around and you’ll see that many rules are still in place.

Ogilvy and his pipe-smoking chums did not have to contend with the Internet and search engines with their ever evolving algorithms or ‘rules of engagement’ and of course the whole premise of classic advertising, which has to be deliberately instrusive by pushing out a message to consumers is directly opposite to the ‘pulling’ process which attracts motivated buyers that makes search engines such a strong and cost effective sales channel.

But guess what? The best search engine marketing is by no means ‘smoke and mirrors’: there are hard and fast principles that should be applied to your site to establish visibility in the rankings, even if at time you and your web designers may question their relevance or validity at face value from a design point of view.

Of course these recommendations will largely manifest themselves in changes to the source code behind the scenes, but Vertical Leap never lose sight of the importance of the good, visible text a visitor reads – what it says and where it is positioned.

Performing websites are indexed due to relevancy and popularity and it is part of Vertical Leap’s managed service remit to ensure that your website shows its best side to the top search engines.

Effective search engine marketing means never losing sight of the fact that you are wisely investing in your website to bring better returns in the form of more sales leads, and that is top of Vertical Leap’s agenda.

Your site will encompass all your company’s brand values in design and positioning, but in the same way as you would expect a good designer to understand the power of effective layouts including how graphics and text work together to achieve maximum impact, you should expect the team working on your search engine marketing campaign to be proactive in capitalising on existing text in specific places on key pages of your site or even suggesting where the strategic addition of keyword rich text will give that page a lift.

A few lines of text rich in keywords added to the home page can make all the difference between your site being found first or your competitors. Does it affect the design? Doesn’t it look out of place? Initially to your eye maybe, but probably not to your audience who are looking for answers to their search engine queries.

Does that mean ugly pieces of text sprawled across your beautifully crafted website pages? No, of course not. If relevant keywords are recommended, they can be blended into the page through sympathetic design. Result? Brand integrity remains intact, yet that page is already working that much harder in attracting indexing spiders for those all important rankings.

But there are some ‘rules’ of search engine marketing that it could be tempting to break for short term gain, but which can be disastrous in the longer term. Beware the ‘expert’ who suggests they build you a special page that ‘guarantees’ first place results on Google – chances are you’d be part of an enormous farm of interlinked pages designed to distort search engine results, but they’ll be rumbled and penalised eventually. Cloaking – the art of preparing hidden pages specifically for search engines and spamming search engines with numerous submissions will only lead to your site being penalised or even dropped from a search engine completely.

The best websites are built for humans, not search engines. Content, design and usability are crucial to their success: after all, what would be the point of being number one in Google if motivated visitors found the site unusable when they arrived?

Your website is a living, breathing commercial entity that is constantly evolving! As new content is added, it is crucial that it is optimised to gain maximum visibility on the major search engines. You’ve made a shrewd investment over the last twelve months in ensuring maximum visibility for your site – why risk losing that momentum now?

The savvy manager will realise that just as better space, choice of headline and design all have their place in ensuring how well a press ad performs, then strategically placed text can make all the difference in how well your website performs in search engine results. All that’s required is a little compromise and some design tweaks.

As Rosser Reeves, another pioneering advertising giant put it to a startled client: “whaddya want to see, a masterpiece or an increasing sales curve?”