Searching the Web: Your Brand Online

In a day, the average North American sees somewhere around 1,000 ads, spread out across TV, radio, print and the internet. But in this day and age, all those ad campaigns can’t compete with what search engine marketing can accomplish, says Jill Sampey, Global Search Marketing Director at Blast Radius, based in Vancouver, Canada.

“For the majority of brands and industries, organic search marketing is one of the most profitable marketing channels around,” continues Sampey.

People are searching online in record numbers and by ensuring that your brand is found high up in the Google results, search engine marketing can give senior marketers and CEOs the best bang for their marketing buck.

“With organic search, every time consumers search for your product, you’re there,” notes Sampey. “It’s also a very engaged audience; they’re actively looking for you or a product or service that you provide.”

In other words, if you build it, they will come. “So this isn’t push marketing. This is absolutely pull marketing,” she explains.

In 2009 the amount of web searches grew worldwide by 46% and the vast majority of website traffic comes through Googling. Some 31% of people watching TV in the United States are surfing the web at the same time. When a TV ad airs during superbowl, you can see a direct increase in internet searches related to the ad.

Sampey is quick to note that one key to a successful search engine marketing campaign is executive-level buy-in simply because it involves so many aspects of a company or organization, whether it’s the technical, marketing, or writing department. But often, it’s not difficult to get execs on-board. “It’s a very easy sell,” she says. “When it comes down to it, everything’s trackable, everything’s measurable and the ROI is through the roof.”

Unlike online advertising, search engine marketing doesn’t involve pay-per-impressions or pay-per-clicks. The costs of optimizing a company or brand website for top Google ranking are upfront and so the cost of generating traffic dramatically drops. With TV and print ads, if you let the campaign drop off then so does consumer awareness. Not so with search engine marketing. By and large, once a brand website is search optimized it will continue to generate massive amounts of traffic for very little upkeep.

For Sampey, who has been at Blast for three years, being a search engine optimizer is a passion as much as it is a profession. Given that Google’s algorithm has over 270 known factors feeding into it and is constantly changing one might think that conquering Google’s algorithm is a Sisyphean task. Not the case for Sampey: “It’s a lot of data, it’s a lot of research, and it’s also a lot of fun.”