PPC and SEO are no-brainers for specialty brand marketing

October 18, 2011  |  by John Kuefler

Specialty brands – brands that appeal to niche audiences – have the opportunity to use search engine marketing to their advantage much more effectively than mass brands do. That’s because a specialty brand’s key audience is made up of category enthusiasts, who tend to be more knowledgeable about a brand’s products or services than general mass-brand audiences are. And those savvy category enthusiasts use that knowledge in their search habits. What does that mean for specialty brand marketers? Cost-effective search marketing opportunities that produce great results.

One of the keys to success in both SEO (the optimization of organic search in order to rank high in free search results) and PPC (pay-per-click search marketing, or paid search) is to stand out from the crowd by ‘owning’ specific keyword phrases that searchers enter into Google, Yahoo or Bing. It is significantly easier to own esoteric keywords than common ones. For example, entering ‘bike’ in a Google search produces 347 million organic results, including ten paid search ads just on page 1. By contrast, searching for ‘technical trail bike dual suspension’ brings only 1.5 million results and just two ads. The more esoteric the terms, the fewer the web pages that contain them – and the easier it is to get to page 1 in organic results. And in PPC, bidding on less-popular keywords is much cheaper than buying common terms. Think of it in terms of winning the lottery: you’re a lot more likely to win when the odds are one in 1.5 million than when the odds are one in 347 million. Of course, with a little effort you can actually guarantee a win with search marketing (unlike with the lottery).

How specialty brands can take advantage of this opportunity

Successful search marketing concepts can be consolidated into this one simple idea:

When a prospective site visitor (a shopper, customer or client) types search terms (keywords) into Google, Bing or Yahoo, those should be the exact same words that appear in paid search ads and on specific landing pages on your website.

You can call this alignment of what searchers want with the content you are delivering congruence. It’s like the planets all aligning. Not only does the searcher love this because they got what they were looking for, but Google loves it, too, because they’ve delivered what the searcher wanted, which fulfills their mission.

Here are the steps for what to do to achieve this congruence – without going into all the granular detail of how it’s done:

1. Initiating keyword discovery, which involves keyword research using various research tools to understand the specific keyword phrases people are likely to use.
2. Optimizing website (SEO) landing page (PPC) content to ensure that select pages within your website are rich with the content that your target audience is searching for. This includes, most critically, the H1 headlines, the page titles and the text on the page, but also encompasses URLs, image alt tags, META page descriptions, link tags and site performance, including load time and mobile experience.
3. Writing PPC ads that include the identified keywords that appeal specifically to your target audience’s unique knowledge of your category, products or services.
4. Bidding for keywords in Google Adwords (Google) and Microsoft adCenter (Bing and Yahoo), including contextual ad opportunities – especially on Google and Microsoft network sites targeting your category enthusiasts.
5. Measuring results and repeating these 5 steps continuously in order to optimize the effectiveness of your search marketing efforts.

While there is a lot of both art and science behind creating an effective SEO or PPC effort, the most critical factor should be fairly intuitive for most specialty brands: the content that is unique to your brand. Sit down and make a list of all the search terms that only a knowledgeable customer or shopper – a category enthusiast – would use to search for your products or services. Be technical. Be esoteric. OK, I’ll just say it – be a snob. If you’re a specialty brand, be special. If you assemble a list of target keywords that only an elite few will understand or appreciate, you will get exactly the kind of traffic you want, and at a fraction of the price that mass brands must pay to attract their audiences using generic, common, expensive keywords.