You Can’t Build A Brand Through a Search Engine
You can't be the next Google by using SEO. Search Engine Results are no way to build a brand.
(but you can make lots of money
selling stuff)
Time and time again, I talk to people who don’t understand how search engines work, even though they’re in the online industry. These people think they can build brand awareness through Search Engine Optimization, or getting found at top spots in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. They have forgotten the cardinal rule of making money through SEO, which is that “people don’t care about who you are, they only care about what you do.”
The novice (or ignorant) marketing hack will always come back by saying something like “What about the people who search for Nike shoes online?” The question always answers itself. Nike is a brand. Shoes are a thing. If you don’t know anything about brands, you are going to type in “shoes” and you will go to the site that sells them.
Brand awareness (or “positioning” for the pseudo-marketing types) involves associating an otherwise unrelated term with a product or service. If you picture copiers when someone says Xerox, or computers when someone says IBM, then someone has done a good job with branding and positioning, but they didn’t do it through a search engine. The crowning example of this is Google. How would you know that Google was a search engine unless you originally heard about it somewhere else? Would you type in “Google” into Yahoo search if you hadn’t heard about it and were looking for a good search engine? Of course not. If Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com could do such a thing, they would not be spending so much money on TV, Radio, and Print Advertising.
How do you make money through SEO? First of all, don’t concentrate on your own brand if you want to get found in the search engines. Concentrate on the “service offering” which usually involves selling things, providing a free or paid service, or collecting information you can sell to someone else. Google makes its money by running ads, which is one of the places failed marketers mistakenly think they can build their “brand.” They spend thousands, or even millions, of dollars every month buying ads next to the search results. People may come to their site and buy the service, but very few of these people will remember the site name or even come back.
Building a brand is more important if you want other people to sell your things for you. Coca-Cola spends a lot of money on advertising, but they won’t sell you a bottle of Coke without a distribution or retailing agreement. The advertising gets you to want the product, at which point you start looking for it. If what you want can be sold online, then (presto!) you are going to go to the search engine to find it.
Why is all of this important for people in the SEO world? The answer is simple. People who are trying to build a brand through search engine results are going to be disappointed. They could do banner ads, radio ads, and have public relations stunts, all of which create a brand image. Word of mouth and viral video campaigns work wonders for creating search demand, but the demand has to exist, and the association has to be created, before people will start using your brand name in a search engine. Brand building through SEO does not work because the approach is completely backward. To use an example from above, a search for “shoes” in Google isn’t showing Nike.com in the top 50 results.
SEO clients who think they can be the next brand outlet need to be re-educated. I have seen many Doctors and Lawyers, who consider their names to be brands (that’s right, they’re really THAT crazy and arrogant) and they are always amazed that nobody’s typing in their names instead of the services they provide. For many of these clients, we actually buy their name on local PPC, just so they can see it (pre optimization) and learn how unpopular they really are when no clicks come in. When they start to get clients for their actual service, they tend to cool down a bit.
The important thing to take away from all of this is that you only make money if you match your site up with what people are looking for. If you have millions of dollars to spend, then you should probably build your brand offline by creating a neat site that can spread by word of mouth. If you think of Zappos for shoes, Zillow for real estate, or Amazon for books, then someone did a good job making the association in your brain, but they didn’t do it on the search engine level.
The experts at Google counsel webmasters to “design your website as if search engines didn’t exist.” With this in mind, it should be very obvious that branding by way of SEO is not a worthwhile strategy, unless your brand name happens to exactly match the search term every time.
Time and time again, I talk to people who don’t understand how search engines work, even though they’re in the online industry. These people think they can build brand awareness through Search Engine Optimization, or getting found at top spots in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. They have forgotten the cardinal rule of making money through SEO, which is that “people don’t care about who you are, they only care about what you do.”
The novice (or ignorant) marketing hack will always come back by saying something like “What about the people who search for Nike shoes online?” The question always answers itself. Nike is a brand. Shoes are a thing. If you don’t know anything about brands, you are going to type in “shoes” and you will go to the site that sells them.
Brand awareness (or “positioning” for the pseudo-marketing types) involves associating an otherwise unrelated term with a product or service. If you picture copiers when someone says Xerox, or computers when someone says IBM, then someone has done a good job with branding and positioning, but they didn’t do it through a search engine. The crowning example of this is Google. How would you know that Google was a search engine unless you originally heard about it somewhere else? Would you type in “Google” into Yahoo search if you hadn’t heard about it and were looking for a good search engine? Of course not. If Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com could do such a thing, they would not be spending so much money on TV, Radio, and Print Advertising.
How do you make money through SEO? First of all, don’t concentrate on your own brand if you want to get found in the search engines. Concentrate on the “service offering” which usually involves selling things, providing a free or paid service, or collecting information you can sell to someone else. Google makes its money by running ads, which is one of the places failed marketers mistakenly think they can build their “brand.” They spend thousands, or even millions, of dollars every month buying ads next to the search results. People may come to their site and buy the service, but very few of these people will remember the site name or even come back.
Building a brand is more important if you want other people to sell your things for you. Coca-Cola spends a lot of money on advertising, but they won’t sell you a bottle of Coke without a distribution or retailing agreement. The advertising gets you to want the product, at which point you start looking for it. If what you want can be sold online, then (presto!) you are going to go to the search engine to find it.
Why is all of this important for people in the SEO world? The answer is simple. People who are trying to build a brand through search engine results are going to be disappointed. They could do banner ads, radio ads, and have public relations stunts, all of which create a brand image. Word of mouth and viral video campaigns work wonders for creating search demand, but the demand has to exist, and the association has to be created, before people will start using your brand name in a search engine. Brand building through SEO does not work because the approach is completely backward. To use an example from above, a search for “shoes” in Google isn’t showing Nike.com in the top 50 results.
SEO clients who think they can be the next brand outlet need to be re-educated. I have seen many Doctors and Lawyers, who consider their names to be brands (that’s right, they’re really THAT crazy and arrogant) and they are always amazed that nobody’s typing in their names instead of the services they provide. For many of these clients, we actually buy their name on local PPC, just so they can see it (pre optimization) and learn how unpopular they really are when no clicks come in. When they start to get clients for their actual service, they tend to cool down a bit.
The important thing to take away from all of this is that you only make money if you match your site up with what people are looking for. If you have millions of dollars to spend, then you should probably build your brand offline by creating a neat site that can spread by word of mouth. If you think of Zappos for shoes, Zillow for real estate, or Amazon for books, then someone did a good job making the association in your brain, but they didn’t do it on the search engine level.
The experts at Google counsel webmasters to “design your website as if search engines didn’t exist.” With this in mind, it should be very obvious that branding by way of SEO is not a worthwhile strategy, unless your brand name happens to exactly match the search term every time.
Notes and Special Information
Special note: in search engine optimization, the rules change every day, and sometimes twice. In the past, a Google update lasted months, but we have seen rankings shift on a daily basis. Therefore, a good site today is imperative despite any other factors, and the time to get started is now!.