It really shouldn't be a secret to most that e-commerce sites are usually very good, if not persistent search marketers. But what was a little surprising to me is how bad traditional brick-and-mortar (BAM) retailers are, as measured by a Retail Search Presence Study I found on Marketing Charts. [As an aside, I take all things with a grain of salt on Marketing Charts...because as we all know 35% of all statistics are wrong.] There are some other interesting points in the article, but what I think this underscores is the loss that some companies still feel in how to adapt their strategies to ever changing marketing channels.
Search is a great example here, because I wouldn't exactly consider it a new marketing channel, but it's definitely one that personifies the overwhelming, getting out of it what you put into it cliche. So what should you put into it? Fortunately their is an easy, single word answer that will solve all your marketing problems. Content. Ok, it's not really that easy, but it is the place to begin.
In my previous post I talked about content marketing and creating a single piece of content and then distributing and reusing to multiple channels. Great for boosting your search presence both for paid and organic search. But what I didn't talk about was how you can use landing pages as an easy way to increase your content footprint for your single most important online channel, your website. Landing pages are just basically orphaned pages that aren't usually navigable directly from your website, but rather are specific destination pages from marketing activities like PPC campaigns, email, event registration, direct mail, etc. So benefit number 1, the more of them you have the bigger your site looks to Google. They are meant to be nimble pieces of content that can be quickly optimized based on their performance which means they should be getting updated a lot more frequently than your normal brochure site, so benefit number 2, the more relevant your site looks to Google. Finally because landing pages can be specific to campaigns or individual activities you can deliver relevant messages, specific calls to action and bottom up reporting, benefit numbers 3, 4 and 5. And with benefits like that who needs to throw around statistics.
