Traditional Agencies + Search Marketing: Are We There Yet?

The great SEO and marketing divide

Fifteen years ago, advertising and marketing agencies were doing market research for their clients, crafting targeted messages, and pumping out TV commercials, radio spots, direct mail pieces, magazine ads, billboards, bus ads and the occasional animated Punch the Monkey banner ad. The primary goal of these agencies was (and still is) to gain visibility and make money for a client through various channels.

At the same time, an underground movement of swashbuckling web-savvy trailblazers was realizing the potential for making money online through quick and easy tweaks to the code of a web page, which allowed them to rank at the top of search results for high-demand terms. These people became known as Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs). The primary goal of those in the SEO industry has been (and still is) to gain visibility and make money through just one channel: search.

Even now, almost two decades since SEOs started popping on the scene, marketing and advertising agencies are often finding it difficult to understand and incorporate search engine optimization, and SEOs largely fail to fundamentally comprehend how search marketing fits into an integrated campaign.

The Case for Agencies to Take on SEO
According to a Jupiter Research study, 37% of people have been driven to search engines after seeing a TV ad; while 30% have been prompted by something they saw in a magazine, 17% from a radio ad, 9% from a billboard, and 10% from ads on vehicles.

Many advertising and marketing efforts still do not effectively leverage search as a channel to reach their target markets. And for those that do, most will take the paid search route, paying a few cents per click (which can be tens of thousands of dollars a month) for a paid ad in search results, rather than trying to figure out the black magic of organic search engine optimization (SEO). Given that 85% of searchers click on organic results, it’s probably not wise to rely soley on paid search to drive traffic.

Vanessa Fox points out a specific cross-channel failure in her book Marketing in the Age of Google, where she points out that Hyundai spent $13.5 million to sponsor the 2009 pregame Super Bowl show and run commercials for the Hyundai Genesis Coupe throughout the game. The commercial provided the viewers with the URL “edityourown.com” at the end of the ad.

What Hyundai failed to realize is that while some people will type the URL directly into the browser address bar, out of habit many people do a search for what they’ve seen in an ad, even when the URL is provided directly. Immediately after the commercial aired, search trends showed “hyundai genesis coupe” and “edit your own” in the list of the hottest top search trends.

Although Hyundai did buy a paid search ad for searches on the phrase “edit your own,” there were no relevant organic search results to be found. 

To make matters worse, the paid ad that appeared in search results for searches on “edit your own” also displayed the URL “hyundaigenesis.com” rather than ”edityourown.com,” which surely resulted in many searchers overlooking the ad. And as Vanessa Fox puts it, “since we’re an instant gratification culture…many people likely gave up and simply went back to watching the game after their failed attempt to find the site.”

Come together, right now, over marketing
The argument as to where SEO belongs in an organization has often been a duel between engineering and marketing, since SEOs are so close to the development of the site but are also involved in its visibility in the search channel. As of this 2008 In-House SEO study by SEMPO, 77% of in-house SEOs reported into marketing. This is a good sign.

But overall, when it comes to traditional agencies’ ability to incorporate SEO, we’re not quite there yet. One way or another, big brands are still failing to gain visibility in search for high-visibility campaigns and keywords that are core to their business. Either the agencies they contract are not focused on this channel for the brand, or the in-house marketing teams are “siloed” or simply lack the resources or know-how to go after the space.

In future posts, we’ll give you some real examples of agencies who have embraced search marketing and are successfully integrating cross-channel marketing campaigns.

— Laura Lippay

Visit Laura at Lip Service, and see some of her previous posts, “Examining Your Backlinks with Yahoo! Site Explorer” and “Defining Your Target Audience for SEO.”