Can Big Brands Benefit from Search Marketing? - Reaching Customers
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Let’s pick a big brand out of the hat. IBM is a good one. As a consumer, I think of IBM as a computer manufacturer of notebooks, desktops, peripheral supplies, and that sort of thing. However, after browsing through their website, I discovered that IBM offers a lot of technical and computer training aimed at businesses.
I may be a consumer, but I also work full-time at a company that uses computers, a company that may benefit from any one of the many computer and IT services that IBM offers. However, I never connected IBM with the types of services that they present on their website such as application development/systems integration, technical and IT training, networking, hosting and much more. IBM does not come up in the first 100 results in Google for "computer networking," a term that received over 33,000 searches on the Yahoo/Overture network in April 2005 (this translates to about 80,000 searches across all major search engines). IBM could benefit from a lot of incremental traffic if they showed up for a host of keywords such as “computer networking,” “XML training,” and a wealth of other terms related to their service offerings. Showing up for these terms would help people associate these IBM services with the IBM brand.
Search provides yet another venue for big brands to demonstrate their bigness.
It’s a huge missed opportunity for a big company when they don’t show up in search results (either natural or paid) for products and services that they offer, but consumers may not know they offer. But it’s downright shocking to see how many top brands do not show up in the top 100 search results in Google for even their key product or service. Here are a few examples:
- Pepsi.com for “soda”
- BK.com for “hamburger”
- McDonalds.com for “cheeseburger”
- Bicworld.com for “pen”
- Huggies.com for “diaper”
- Menswarehouse.com for “suits” and “men’s suits”
- Samash.com for “instruments”
- Coors.com for “beer”
- JCPenney.com for “clothes”
- Aquafina for “water”
- Victoria’s Secret for “underwear” and “panties”
- Kia.com for “cars”
- Pfizer.com for “medicine” or “medication”
- HomeDepot.com for “home repair”
This is a fun game, isn’t it? Try some of your own favorite brands and see what you come up with. Clearly the above companies are missing out not only on a tremendous opportunity to obtain additional search engine traffic from their top brand-related keywords, but they are really failing their brand by not showing up in the search results for products that essentially define who they are and what they do. One of the advantages you have if you are a big brand is that you have enough money to properly optimize your website for competitive keywords such as “beer,” “clothes” and “pen,” all three of which received hundreds of thousands of searches in April 2005 ALONE.
All of these companies are missing out in paid search traffic (at least on Google) as well. Coors, for example, has an ecommerce website that sells beer and drinking-related products. They could optimize this site for the term “beer” and/or buy some Google Adwords and simultaneously increase traffic and sales while also supporting their brand. The Internet is obviously not the main driving force behind sales of Pepsi, Coors or Huggies. That doesn’t mean these companies or brands should not show up in the search results for terms relating to their products. However, e-commerce websites like Victoriassecret.com and JCPenney.com are at a huge disadvantage when they do not show up for their brand-defining product related keywords. They are definitely missing out on sales, and lots of them.
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