MKT 420 Week 1

Agenda

• Syllabus and Course Requirements Review• Project Team Signups• Search Industry Overview• Search Basics

Search

• Revolutionary change in the way we get information• Search engines represent one of the biggest leaps

forward for humankind. • Disruptive event that has led to enormous changes

in our lives. What are they?

Search Engines’ Mission

Searching and satisfying needs (value!)

• Search Engine Land

Searcher Intent

• Navigational• Informational• Transactional

• Adaptive search attempts to understand the intent of the searcher with regards to the type of query because they have varying degrees of value to search engine marketers.

• Searcher intent is not always correctly inferred. 22% of time in fact. Implications?

How do people search?

• Multistep• Most searches that result in conversions (purchase,

call to action, satisfaction of need) feature around an hour of browsing, 10 different clicks, same day purchase (50%), entering keywords/search terms about a half dozen times

E-commerce and search

Heat maps and eye tracking

• SERPs are designed with human factors in mind

• Yet our attention is constantly being altered by SERP design

• Symbiotic

Paid placement compared to earned/organic

Distribution on SERP still predicts CTR

Bringing it together

Taking a step back…

• How do search engines work?• What is going on when you search?

All SERPs are sort of the same…

• Search box• Vertical search navigation • Results information• Paid Advertising• “Product” results• Algorithmic results• Query refinement/related searches

Algorithmic search

• Based upon potentially infinite numbers of decisions• Inferential• Not precise if we define precise as finding a specific

thing only• Totally different from keyword databases• Predictive, contextual and adaptive• Sometimes they fail. Why?

What do search engines see?

• Reading source code is important for SEO but no need to be overwhelmed

• We’ll cover this later but here’s a good primer/overview

Crawling and Indexing

• What search engines do with what they see…

• They interpret and rank for trustworthiness, value and uniqueness of content by indexing and categorizing content of the page as well as inbound and outbound links (putting the web in the world wide web!)

• Not all content is indexed

Ranking Factors

• According to Moz:• Domain level links• Page level links• Page level content and keywords• Brand metrics (social media presence for example;

mentions on other sites)• Page traffic• Social traffic (Google denies!)

Negative ranking factors

• Malware• Cloaking (keyword stuffing for example)• Paid links or purchased links• Link acquisition timeline• Speed of time to load a page