Search Marketing. The Science of Search.
Search Marketing is largely about receiving more traffic to a website. While converting this traffic is equally important, if the product is not what the searcher is seeking it won’t lead to a sale. This is where the correct choice of keywords and a good deep page landing strategy can be hugely beneficial.
There is also evidence that Search marketing can use science to improve your search conversion rates. Cognitive scientists broadly categorise memory into ‘recall’, this is where we actively try to remember something and ‘recognition, which is when we recognise something as familiar’. For example, it would be easier to recognise flags from around the world with pictures in front of you, rather than recalling them purely from memory. As a rule humans hate recall, as it is cognitively demanding. Recognition on the other hand, we love and excel at. This is because in our evolutionary history it was a highly efficient way to quickly assess threats and identify food sources we liked. In fact, what is important to search marketing is a further subset of recognition: ‘familiarity’.
When someone has just made a search on Google, their search query is fresh in their short term memory and therefore, easily accessible. Of all the text on the result page, those parts that most closely resemble the search query will of course be most familiar. This familiarity causes these areas of the text to jump out, and attract attention. All things being equal, this increased attention is going to bring more clicks, and more traffic. The traffic might also generally be of a higher quality, because it comprises of users who are getting exactly what they are searching for.
How can search marketing capitalise on the human brain’s joy of recognition? It is important to target various search queries and optimising the site specifically for them. This means making them as visible as possible by putting them in your URLs, page titles, meta descriptions and body text – all the elements that can be shown on the SERP.
Google, for example, generally shows the page title, then a snippet, followed by the URL. Google chooses the snippet by looking in the Meta description and the body text, attempting to show as much of the search query in the snippet as possible. If you have targeted a particular phrase and are ranked on the first page for it, you can maximise your clicks by having that exact phrase jump out at the searcher, tickling their sense of recognition.
This theory would suggest that a searcher looking for a new printer is more likely to click on the first example, as it has a higher rate of the familiar word.
Example 1:
Example 2:
This search marketing strategy is most efficient because it works in harmony with the human brain. Search engines will generally rank a page higher for a specific query if it contains a few instances of that exact query. Often the parts of the query that show up in the entry on the SERP will be shown in bold as well, encouraging further attention.
The bottom line is that to be an effective search marketer, you have to recognise the power of recognition. If you can do that then you will get more attention, drive more relevant traffic, and be more efficient with the resources you have available.
For more information about search marketing contact the Search Marketing Group
