Why trust Trusted Feed?
There's a growing grey area in the search engine marketing space, in which paid-for and free results are displayed together in the listings. It's thanks to a service called Trusted Feed offered by search engines including MSN, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, Lycos and HotBot and has been enthusiastically embraced by Amazon, eBay and more.
Trusted Feed works by allowing a 'trusted' third party, usually a search engine marketing company, to 'feed' a web site's entire online inventory, in database form, directly into the search engine's own database or index, bypassing the usual submission process. Inclusion in the index is guaranteed, but not position and the site pays a fixed cost-per-click agreed in advance, rather than bidding for particular search terms or positions.
Trusted Feed is good for site owners because traditionally, database-driven sites such as travel, shopping, auctions and share trading are very difficult to optimise for search engines and consequently haven't enjoyed much visibility in the free listings. It's partly because of the content management systems they use and partly because their content changes all the time and it's an impossible task to keep re-submitting pages to the search engines. But with Trusted Feed, data can be resent every 24 hours, to keep pace with changing inventory and the cost is not only fixed, but like all forms of paid-for search engine marketing, based on results. What's more, Trusted Feed doesn't require any site changes, such as rewriting the text or tweaking the code, to make it more search friendly.
Trusted Feed is also great for search engine users. Firstly, people can find fresh content, such as a newly published book or today's best travel offers. Secondly, people can be taken straight from the search engine listing to the product or service they're looking for, rather than just being dropped at the home page and expected to find their own way from there. Amazon and eBay have both embraced Trusted Feed, for just those reasons.
But, because Trusted Feed results are indistinguishable from the natural listings, it raises serious concerns. In theory, Trusted Feed results should be just as relevant as the other results in the listing but who's to blame if they're not?
It's the search engine marketing companies, who act as intermediaries between sites and search engines, who are partly responsible. While the majority are perfectly ethical and prefer to work with, rather than against the search engines in order to boost their clients' online visibility, others are not. Although pages submitted by Trusted Feed are subject to the search engine's standard ranking algorithm (the system by which positions are determined) and the search engines carry out rigorous and random checks that their trust isn't misplaced, there is room for abuse. While the search engines are particular about who they award Trusted Feed licences to, many more companies are offering the service and managing it, unlicensed, through a convoluted channel.
These companies are often the same ones who employ unethical techniques known as 'spamming' designed to mislead the search engines into giving a site a higher ranking that it might otherwise merit. The search engines have publicly stated their commitment to stamping out anything that damages the integrity of their indexes and, as a result the quality of their search experience. It's ironic that, through Trusted Feed, the democracy of information could be in the wrong hands.
Globalisation through optimisation
Do you remember how, in the mid 1990's, when companies were buying the domain names for their online businesses, there were several distinct attitudes to the URL suffix? On the one hand were companies who insisted on having a .com suffix to take advantage of the global business opportunities, while on the other were British businesses who had no intention of trading internationally, and were happy with a .co.uk web address. Then there was a third group, those who would have liked a .com URL but came too late to the global domain marketplace and had to settle for .co.uk. And let's not forget the fourth group, the companies who created a locally-specific URL for each country in which they were already doing, or planning to do, business.
It would be interesting to see whether the companies who chose a .com URL have indeed become global e-businesses and likewise, if those who settled for .co.uk, either by choice or necessity, have remained focused on the local market.
The answer is undoubtedly a bit both. By the nature of business, there will be some .coms who have never traded outside their country of origin, while other, sprightlier companies will have refused to let their horizons be limited by a .co.uk URL and gone global.
But what this demonstrates is that there's no physical barrier to building a global e-business. The Internet is itself an international medium and if you have a web site you already have a global e-business by default. The difference is simply one of attitude. If you want to increase your revenue in overseas markets and you have the local resources, support services and distribution network in place, you can.
An increasingly popular way to do it is through search engine optimisation and marketing. Survey after survey has shown that search engines are the most popular means by which web users find web sites, ahead of banners, pop-ups, viral campaigns and email. At the same time, search engine listings have been shown to outperform banners by nearly three to one in terms of sales, In other words, someone clicking a search engine listing is nearly three times more likely to buy than someone clicking on a banner. This is due to the fact that a search engine user is actively seeking information, products or services and is therefore more highly qualified as a prospect and, as a result, search engine marketing campaigns tend to get a higher return on investment than other forms of online promotion.
What's more, search engine marketing, when implemented in conjunction with a visitor tracking system, is inherently measurable - and therefore accountable. The marketing department can use the resulting data to see exactly where visitors are coming from, which search terms they used to find you (assuming they came from a search engine), how they're behaving on the site including how long they're spending on each page, and where they are leaving from. This data not only provides valuable feedback on the success of your search engine optimisation and marketing strategy, but delivers fascinating insights into the visitor experience of the site. For example, if there's a weakness in the site's navigation that has created a 'quit spot', a point at which visitors give up and leave, it can be identified and fixed simply by tracking visitors' behavioural patterns.
This leads us on to another, little-known benefit of search engine optimisation and marketing - that it makes a site more visitor and customer friendly as well as search engine friendly, as a by-product of the optimisation process. For example, an optimised site is not only easy to find on search engines, but is fast to download, intuitive to use, has the content that visitors are asking for and - vitally, in the light of recent legislation - can be made accessible to disabled visitors who are using assistive technologies such as text readers.
Best of all, search engine marketing is ideal for the global Internet marketer. Firstly, many of the leading search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! offer a country-specific search service to each local audience, which gives global companies the opportunity to build a local presence. Likewise, many countries have their own, regionally-focused search engines. France, for example has 31 while Germany has 59. Even Afghanistan has 2, while China has 21. In other words, it is possible to reach customers all over the world, using a combination of global, local and localised search engines, while managing the campaign from one central base, via email, fax and online banking facilities.
In short, if it's your brief to expand your online business into overseas markets, search engine marketing address the four cornerstones of e-business success: visibility, functionality, customer loyalty and profitability. Whether you're considering or already deploying a global marketing strategy, you can harness the power of the search engines at every stage, from research and planning to testing, implementation, analysis and reporting.
Starting with the research phase, you can use the search engines to see your online positioning, performance and potential from an international perspective. Several search engines provide data on the relative volumes of the search terms their customers are using, which a marketer can use in a variety of ways.
Like focus groups, but without the logistical issues, search term data is a vital insight into the needs and expectations of a specific and un-self conscious target audience. When you know what your future customers are asking for, you can give it to them. You can make sure that your site's content matches visitors' expectations. You can test awareness of or interest in a particular product or service by seeing how many people are asking for it.
But most importantly, for a global internet marketing strategy, you can see the differences between what each local audience is asking for on the search engines and develop a strategy that meets the needs of each. For example, while the domestic market may be quite sophisticated in their demands, , overseas markets may not be so specific and may require a more basic approach. Or the opposite may be true - particularly with advanced markets such as the US, where searches terms are often based on fulfilment, such as a free airport shuttle in the case of a hotel group, or free delivery in the case of a supermarket. So, with search term analysis, you can create a clear picture of the needs and desires of each local audience and develop an approach that satisfies each market.
One vital ingredient at this stage - and subsequently - is to have a native-speaking copywriter for each local market on the team. As the number one rule of communication is to speak the recipient's language rather than your own, the number one rule of global search engine marketing is to focus on the audience, rather than the brand being promoted. So, while a translation service might be adequate for search term analysis, only native-speaking copywriters can really understand what people want - rather than just what they are asking for, in the context of their environment.
When it comes to planning an international search engine marketing campaign, the most important thing to establish is which search engines your international customers are using - and what relative proportion of your budget to allocate to each. While many of the leading search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, offer a regional version, it is always worth checking out each country's leading Internet Service Providers, as their search services are often popular in developing online markets.
The next step is the implementation - to make a site more search engine and visitor friendly - and again, using a combination of search term analysis and native-speaking copywriters is a great advantage. For example, the initial search term analysis may highlight specific content requirements among the audience - what they are expecting to find on the site, in other words. It may identify certain ways of expressing a concept or describing a product, amongst particular national markets. These can be addressed in the site's content, whether you have created a unique URL for each market or, market-specific content, under a global .com umbrella.
Likewise, native-speaking copywriters can also make an important contribution when optimising the site itself at a technical level. From the title and description tags that describe the site's content to the search engine spiders to link-building campaigns to boost PageRank, having a local perspective can make all the difference.. The same is true for pay-per-click search engine marketing campaigns, such as Overture or Google's Adwords campaign. While the campaign can be planned and managed remotely, only native speaking copywriters can really do justice to the creative demands of communicating with a local audience.
Nicholine Hayward
Marketing Director
Weboptimiser Ltd
