Losing Out to Better-Known Competitors? Optimise!

Let’s get straight to the point: notoriety, defined as the degree to which consumers recognize your trademark, offers a major online strategy advantage when it is sufficiently strong. Why? Consumers often discover little known, new businesses as they search for particular products or services online. But only notoriety will instill immediate trust in consumers and facilitate their search for a particular company site. Those two advantages often make it possible to convert more visitors into customers, both online and off-line (for each dollar spent online by US consumers, $1.70 is spent off-line as a direct result of consumers’ online product research). [1]

Taking stock of the situation

How do consumers find your site? In 41% of cases, Internet users enter a query in a search engine to find a site that is likely to meet their needs for a given product or service. In 28% of cases, consumers will actually attempt to guess the URL (Internet address) of a site if they can think of a company that they feel will be capable of fulfilling their needs. [2] However, this guessing game is possible only if the company in question benefits from strong notoriety. For example, consumers seeking to purchase a new television will attempt to go directly to the sites of the first potential suppliers they can think of, such as www.sony.com. However, for a small business such as “Maurice’s TVs" (fictional example), this is simply not possible.

For this reason, efficient search engine referencing is one method of getting around a lack of notoriety, at least in terms of the search and discovery of potential merchants selling a desired product or service.

A convincing example

Take the striking example of the flower distribution company FTD. Renowned internationally, FTD benefits from probably the strongest notoriety of any company in this domain. Confident that it would attract customers as easily online as it does off-line, FTD neglected to invest in referencing and did not take referencing concerns into account when it developed its web site and the online tools offered to customers. As a result, proflowers.com, a small competitor largely unknown up to that point, succeeded in stealing a significant portion of FTD’s market thanks solely to an intelligent search engine positioning strategy. In fact, FTD does not appear in the first three pages of search engine results for crucial keywords such as “flower arrangements” or “flower delivery,” whereas the company’s new competitor appears first in the result listings.

The opportunity

US research confirms that, for little-known players, there is a growing sales opportunity to be won at the expense of large companies that rest on their laurels of off-line notoriety and that neglect referencing efforts. Among the top 100 largest US enterprises, only 9% benefit from efficient referencing while 44% do not engage in any referencing activities whatsoever. The other 47% are only now taking their first faltering steps in this regard. [3] Another interesting finding is that the few large companies that give referencing the importance it deserves do not always engage in proper referencing techniques: many businesses will actually reference their sites under keywords that seem obvious to them rather than thinking of their clients’ decision-making processes. In other words, they will optimize their company name for search engines instead of using the search expressions that consumers really enter in their search queries, such as “plasma television” or “high-definition television set” and so on.

Clearly, referencing is a golden opportunity for the smallest players who must compete against well-established trademarks. Opportunities such as this are absent from conventional marketing since large companies do not always have the flexibility needed to adapt quickly to new behaviour patterns adopted by their clientele. So take this opportunity and run with it!

[1] The Dieringer Research Group, Oct. 2004

[2] How US Consumers Find the Web Sites They Use to Research a Purchase, Doubleclick 2003

[3] Oneupweb, Aug. 2004