Holiday Searchers Looking For Presents – Will You Be Found In Time?
By Sage Peterson
January 2005
Okay – if you were hoping to be found atop of Google’s natural search results on or before Christmas and you’re just staring now here’s some helpful advice: give up. Go home. Turn out the lights as you leave the building, it’s over.
That’s right. It takes time to optimize a website, submit it, and then wait to see if it will show up near the top of the search results. Often as long as 45 days!
But wait! This is 2004! We have paid search!
From zero to top-10 ranking in 48 hours!!! From fired loser to board room superstar overnight! From loafing, retarded, Chinese food take-out ordering, couch potato, slacker to marketing maven with just a credit card and an Overture account. As fast you can say, “my career is redeemed!” you can be on top in the search engines! Yes, it’s true. But time is a wasting…
We know that only 40% of people who perform a search will click on the paid ads -- those text boxes to the right of the search results on Google and on the top, and to the right on Yahoo! -- but it’s still the fastest way to ignite your last minute hopes to attract shoppers to your Web site in record time.
Paid inclusion is only offered by Yahoo!, but in a mere 48-hours, your SEM firm can feed your website directly into Yahoo!’s database and, with a little luck and hard work, right to the top of the natural search results – not the paid ads!
As you may or may not know, paid inclusion is an extraordinarily efficient way of feeding your Web site directly into Yahoo!’s search results database without your having to fix any of the problems with the site itself. No fussing with HTML or meta tags, no need to fix the dynamic URLs or anything that might hinder the site from being spidered by the search engine’s crawler -- your SEM firm can address all that ails it in the data feed to the search engine.
While it’s true that some 60% of people click on the natural search results, the actual algorithmically determined results that show up in the main area of the search results page, when you combine paid search advertisements with Yahoo!’s paid-inclusion service which gets you into Yahoo!’s actual search results, you can reach nearly 55% of the searching public across all major search engines – in just 48-hours!
Google’s AdWords program provides text ads to itself and to AOL, and Yahoo!’s Overture service provides ads to itself and MSN. Add in paid inclusion and your instant online advertising campaign just reached the advertising area of every major search engine and the natural search results of Yahoo!’s search engine.
Of course, it will be necessary to track the conversion rate from your ads by keyword, time of day, day of week, landing page and creative to ensure that you maximize the conversion rate and the spend -- but that’s fodder for another article. Besides, as everyone knows, the holiday shopping seasons extends well into January as people return items and look to buy the presents they didn’t get. So happy holiday marketing!
