Search Engine Marketing and Trademarks
In today’s competitive markets, it’s a well-known fact that trademarks and well-known brand names can achieve a much higher conversion rate than with generic keywords. That statement makes a lot of sense. In fact, the direct response television (DRTV) advertising industry estimates that about 21% of consumers watching commercials for an “As seen on TV†product, type the brand name of the product directly in the search box of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and others.
In the first four or five listings that come up, they then click on the link that will bring them to a website that sells that product. It is also conservatively estimated that about 20% of the people that click on one of those websites will actually buy the product. These statistics are really impressive and prove that trademarks work, not just in TV advertising, but equally as well on the Internet.
REVShare Corporation is a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) media broker for the television industry, and has successfully achieved the above conversion rates for their largest TV advertisers, using the power of well-know trademarks and recognized brand names. REVShare also were involved with part of the search engine marketing aspect of these advertiser’s websites.
How to go about it
The strategies involved in optimizing a site selling major trademarks or brand names are pretty much the same as optimizing a site that sells generic products. Such things as ‘How To’ pages, an easy-to-understand FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section, some helpful ‘Learn More’ subsections are all great places to include and optimize for your main keywords, and especially your trademarks.
Start by creating new pages that will be keyword-rich, using your trademark and your most important generic keywords and key phrases.
Then optimize those pages, using title tags that are short but descriptive. Another powerful technique I use which is very efficient is the use of headlines and sub-headlines, making sure your trademark or generic keywords are included in them.
Headlines and sub-headlines serve two main functions:
1. They are descriptive, helping your users
2. They offer ‘food’ for the search engines to chew on
Like your title tags, keep your headlines and sub-headlines short and descriptive, since they are proven best that way, and they won’t clutter up your page with redundant text. An added feature of headlines is they help you in writing the copy of your pages, while still maintaining an uncluttered look and feel.
The index or directory page
Trademark or not, if you sell more than one category of products on your site, it would be wise to include an index or ‘directory’ page, offering a clear view, along with a short description of all your categories or groups of products.
A small photograph or graphic of your product is optional, but try to keep the size of the graphic small, since about 75% of people on the Internet are still using a slow dial-up connection, especially in most rural areas. Page-load times are substantially increased with larger graphics. What I do is I add a ‘Click here to enlarge photo’ to give them an option in viewing the graphic in a larger format.
Always remember that, when building a new site or re-writing a new page, if it takes more than four seconds to load using a low-speed dial-up access, you will loose more than fifty percent of your visitors to a competing website.
Another good idea is to add a local search function on your website. Such small
search engines will only search within your site, in an effort to help your users find what they are looking for. Such search functions are freely available from such companies as Atomz, Pico Search and a few others, and they are usually fairly simple to install on a website.
Conclusion
Optimizing a website using a major trademark or a recognized brand name isn’t more difficult than it is optimizing for generic or ‘organic’ products. The use of headlines that are short and descriptive will go a long way, in helping both your visitors as well as the search engines.
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Guest Columnist Serge Thibodeau has been performing professional search engine optimization and priority positioning services since 1997. Serge optimizes commercial web sites of small businesses, medium-size companies as well as Fortune 500 enterprises. Additionally, he also serves as CEO for RankforSales.com
