I was going to try to send a link to the actual site where you could design your shirt to the rest of my classmates (it was fun to do, after all). After some quick searches, I found the URL from the contest: http://www.mystarbuckstshirt.com/. But guess what? The page doesn’t load!!!

So, here’s where coffee meets SEO (although it already does every morning in our office) MyStarbucksTShirt is a valuable site for Starbucks. It has links pointing to it:

If I was consulting for Starbucks, this is what I would recommend and the same holds for anyone in a similar situation. If you’re going to run a contest, promotion, etc. with a vanity URL, keep track of that URL. Monitor it to see what kind of buzz it is getting and how many links it attracts. When your promotion is over, think about what you are going to do with that URL. If you no longer need to keep content on that URL, consider 301 redirecting it to your primary domain (or at least a page on your main domain that says something like “Sorry but this promotion is no longer available” with additional navigation to pages on your site). With the 301 redirect, then you’ll be passing all that great link juice that you worked so hard to get with your great promotion. It’s also better from a usability perspective. Don’t just leave it out there as a dead end!

PS Funny thing happened while writing this post. I wanted to make sure I was using the term “vanity URL” correctly, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Oh, the irony when the second example on that page is ANOTHER Starbucks vanity URL. The good news? This URL is redirecting to a page on www.starbucks.com. The question I would ask Starbucks is “Why are you using a 302 redirect? Do you plan on reusing this URL?” If yes (particularly if it’s an annual promo), then we’re cool; if not, I would change the 302 to a 301.

Social Media & Customer Service Lessons from the Cable Giant

Prior to joining SEER, I spent almost six years working for Comcast. The instant anyone found that out, I would be bombarded with questions and (too often) complaints about the service they’d received previously. To this day, I still get calls from friends asking why their DVR no longer records their favorite program. People just want to know that someone’s listening.

When I read about a Comcast employee reaching out to fellow blogger Michael Arrington over the weekend, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. For anyone not familiar with the story, Michael had an outage and started posting about it on Twitter, just to rant about the problems he was dealing with. Imagine his surprise when Comcast actually called him twenty minutes later to help fix the problem he was having. It turns out a manager at Comcast, Frank Eliason aka @comcastcares, has taken to monitoring mentions of Comcast on Twitter and has slowly and quietly been responding to people for the past six months – a revolutionary idea and a brilliant way to actively connect with customers. This was picked up all over the blogosphere, and was even written about in one of my favorite sites – The Consumerist.

I spoke to Frank about the work he was doing and how he was changing the customer service industry. The most amazing thing for me to hear is that he’s manually tracking, reading, and responding to these Twitters on his own, as Comcast didn’t expect this service to become public knowledge for some time. Frank explained that “the challenge to the publicity is that we must be seen, when in the past we were a little more quiet reaching out when we could. We know we need to improve, and this is a small part of that effort.”

So what can you, as a company owner, learn from Comcast’s example?

• Create a Twitter account – Not only can you connect with people quickly, but you may have access to people in your industry that you never expected to get to communicate with.
• Set up Twitter tracking – This can be done in several ways. Through your Twitter account, you can set up tracking on IM or SMS with a simple “track @rachael823” command. You can also use sites like http://www.tweetscan.com to show you history of the term you’re searching for.
• Smart business owners would track their personal name, company name, domains, competitors’ names, and even top keywords for their industry to see who’s talking about anything related to them.
• Do this across all social media sites and blogs.
• Set up Google Alerts to notify you when any of these terms come up.
• If anyone is talking about you, positive or negative, it’s such an easy task to reach out to them, especially on Twitter. How long does it take you to type 140 characters? The effect that effort has on the recipient is well worth it.

Media Bullseye had a great question: Where is everyone else? Is anyone out there already taking action to monitor their reputation online through social media channels?

I mean, let’s be honest, how many brands accurately reflect who they SAY they are?

So in the early phases, they truly were fanatical & we liked working with them, then BOOM a major outage. After this recent outage at Rackspace, I saw a link to this page that explained a the incident that caused outages. It is still linked from their homepage and outlined what was happening, what they were doing to fix it, and what steps they were putting in place to keep it from happening again.
That prompted this blog post…

These guys put “fanatical support” on everything with their name, and you know what? They lived up to it. While no service business can ever say that they will never have a problem, it is how they REACT to those problems that separates one company that says…”hey we’re great” from their competitor who also says ….guess what… “we’re great too.”

I only hope that this transparency leads to MORE customers for rackspace, not less. Because at least they don’t hide their wounds, they not doing some spin, they took the mistakes on the chin and are looking to improve.
Problems and friction between customer and client are where the rubber meets the road. I come across this every day in our industry. Picking an SEO company is difficult, why? Because we all sound the same, well not all…but most. It is a hard business to differentiate yourself with bullet points and powerpoint slides.

It got me thinking further…about the Jetblue fiasco and how David Needleman reacted sure, there may have been a PR person whispering in his ear a bit, but the company is one of openness in its culture so this response doesn’t surprise me.

So what does all this have to do with SEER? At the end of the day, I want SEER to always be a company that:

• treats each other, our clients, vendors, partners, and friends well
• values and recognizes the contributions everyone makes to our clients successes
• is “fanatical” about ensuring that the budgets invested in us make solid returns for our clients
• does everything we can to help our clients achieve their goals
• has an impact on our community
• attracts great talented people who want to kick ass and make a difference

To steal a line from Rackspace:

Fanatical Support can’t be captured with bullet points or summed up with a simple graphic.
For every customer, it’s an experience that impacts their work and lives in very different and powerful ways.
So we’ll let them speak for themselves and for Fanatical Support.

For those of you who are selecting SEO companies, stop looking for the bullet points!! We SEO types all have access to the same information, we all read the same blogs, yet what makes ones better than the other?? I’ll be discussing that topic in my next post, stay tuned.

BTW – check out how yahoo has responded to an outage on Cyber Monday for its Yahoo! stores, leaving many merchants unable to transact on the busiest day of the online shopping year. how does it compare to Rackspace? As of today 24 hours later, they are not responding on their own blog…does that sound fanatical to you?

This was a first search, and you can guess a user may then recognize “Camelbak” as a brand based on these results. But where is Camelbak.com?! If they’re not on page one, the user has already been educated and they have the opportunity to click any of these paid links to purchase.

What has Camelbak lost in this transaction? Because Camelbak does not sell directly through their site, a sale would have to occur through such an online store anyway. Even though their goods were sold, there was a missed opportunity. So I wonder…

• Was there an opportunity to upsell a customer on Camelbak’s own site? After all, their site probably has the most extensive product list anywhere.
• Which stores sell goods at the most profitable rate for Camelbak? If a visitor came through Camelbak.com, there’s a chance for Camelbak to send that customer to a more profitable reseller.
• What about their brand?! Of course customers will recognize the product and logo when arriving at any of these stores listed in PPC, but are these stores portraying Camelbak to their best efforts? The only way to guarantee the message is to protect one’s own brand by making sure searchers are getting the chance to hit your own site first.

Yes, we have a habit of picking on big brands at Seer, but it’s a shame to see that ebags.com might know a little more about Camelbak’s customers than they do. If you’re with a company that commands a product brand in the way Camelbak does, don’t let it slip away! Protect it through buying PPC real estate that is going to help portray the company positively and funnel the visitors as best dictated by your bottom line.

It is helpful (which is somehow web 2.0 now) in assisting people in narrowing down or honing in on the right grill for their needs. It uses a very nice interface to make the process smooth and easy! It combines product information, videos, and more in a very digestible and tastefully done way. See our thoughts on the Nike golf ball selector, who has a similar tool, that at the time was tough to find. Looks like it was a success, not to mention Home Depot has some serious numbers to show the REAL value of this tool. In the article it states:

Customers who use the grill finder tool are more than 50% more likely to make a purchase than other visitors to HomeDepot.com, reported Tari Huddleston, senior manager of e-business, who spoke with Schueler. She noted that a majority of visitors to the Home Depot site are women who want information about the sometimes complex products the home improvement retailer sells. “Women are doing their homework online,” Huddleston said. “They want to be educated before they go into the store.”
Ok, “50% more likely to make a purchase” sounds like a great stat, resulting from a GREAT tool. With those numbers behind you, wouldn’t you want to get as many interested grillers to use this wonderful tool, since it helps so much in the conversion process?

A brief search on gas grills using Google suggest showed the following data:
Notice some of the other terms that show up with the root term “gas grills”:

• Reviews
• Ratings
• For Sale
• Comparisons

Then there are other terms like grill reviews, charcoal grills, etc…but I think you get the point.

From what I think, this tool would help grillers find the right grill, but they aren’t going to find this tool, why?

1 – There doesn’t seem to be any concerted effort to drive traffic to this great tool. I didn’t see any PPC effort at the time. If the numbers weren’t so compelling on how well this is working I would say maybe there is a reason, and maybe there is, but I don’t see it.

2 – On the SEO front, certain best practices just were not followed. Basic things like title tags and description tags aren’t included. There’s also no copy relating to grills, or selecting a grill on this page, which doesn’t help either. The search engines don’t have much to “see” when coming to this tool, which is flash intensive. Maybe a non-flash alternative that would contain more easily spidered information could help too. If someone over there just read this SEO guide.

There’s been a lot of chatter about web 2.0 and SEO but to me this has less to do with that and more to do with best practices for just trying to drive traffic to a web site. Home Depot obviously invested heavily in the following to create this tool which has a highly seasonal shelf life:

• web analytics
• video
• photography
• voice overs
• excellent flash development
• strategy
• development / QA

If they invested upwards of 100k to build it, why would they not take the 5 minutes to develop a paragraph of readable copy and a title and description tag (oh and maybe promoting it with social search tools, like stumbleupon (food section) or digg). This 5 minute investment could have gone a long way in maximizing the value of this wonderful conversion machine.
There must be something I am overlooking…have any answers?

Do you stop SEO altogether?

Maybe you do. But what about the mindset of someone who uses these tools?

Why are they seeking out drills and saws?
Could they be repairing their homes?
Is there something DeWALT could offer to add value?

Recently I had the privilege of doing some research around a few kids games online. It became immediately noticeable that many big companies who could easily leverage the strength of their massive domains aren’t thinking of the “application” keywords. Application keywords often focus on how people USE the things you offer on your site.

After reading a case study many months ago on weather.com’s expansion to keywords like “Outdoor Weddings” it has had me thinking for some time.

Since SEO is still so new to so many companies, many are still targeting their primary keywords only and that is a great start! Heck, most companies are totally screwing up opportunities to rank well for primary terms. What do you do when you had a great ROI, exhausted top rankings, and maximized traffic for those primary keywords?

The answer.

You start seeking out secondary and tertiary opportunities that make sense. So for a few industries I found some opportunities and thought I’d post them. I hope this gets your juices flowing a bit:

Opportunity #1 – Follow the KIDS!!!

Companies that are licensed to sell SpongeBob merchandise are sitting on great secondary keywords if they were willing to expand their horizons a bit. By providing coloring pages, games, wallpapers, screensavers, ring tones and the like, big companies like Wal-Mart, Target, Toys “R” Us, and many more could develop content sections around these areas and provide new content or web sites to address this need and easily gain a foothold in the top 10. Don’t believe me? Use SEOBOOK’s tool to see the volume of monthly searches around all types of products relating to SpongeBob.

Wal-Mart is a trusted name. If they optimized their site for kids videos or kids games for many of the products they have licenses for, they could use online games (free) to bring traffic to their sites where maybe kids could create wishlists or they could show available products of the same characters in the space around the game. A screensaver could be a reminder to kids at every boot up of the computer that Wal-Mart is a destination for them to have fun.

Opportunity #2 – Optimize for brands you sell

Hardware companies are easy to pick on here, so I will. I took a look at the term “Kohler Toilets” which was searched pretty significantly last month according to one tool I use. What amazes me is that Lowe’s and Home Depot both list many models of Kohler Toilets on their web sites but don’t rank in the top 30 for the term. Yet I do find Kohler (of course), ebay, craigslist, and plumbingsupply (while I commend them for high rankings, does plumbingsupply.com exude confidence? Would you use a credit card here??), Yahoo, Pricegrabber, and Nextag. How about a hardware store?

At SEER, we call this an “architecture play” — where large sites of thousands or tens of thousands of pages may not be able to be actively optimized for each keyword for each brand for each product. A big retailer may select their top brands, prioritize those, and allow the development of a proper architecture to help them rank well for the brands and products they carry. You could have fun with this all day (well, this is fun for me but I’m an SEO nerd). Try “DeWALT drills” or “DeWALT tools” next and see the results. Talk about an opportunity!

Opportunity #3 – DIY Projects, Brands and Solutions

You know where DIY TV shows fall short? Most times when I watch them, they are showing me stuff that I can’t use right away. But when I search for “leaky toilet” or “window replacment,” the DIY networks should really make sure they show up as I NEED their help at that time, but anyway… Think about it. When was the last time you searched on Google and got 0 results for a search? So that begs the question — who is going to step up and SHOW UP? Kohler? Ace Hardware? Lowe’s? Home Depot? DIY Network? NOPE!!!

Let’s just put it this way — in the top 15, the only one that shows up for the word “toilet leak” is HGTV, but the page is pretty whack when it comes to helping me fix my toilet. I’ll cut them all some slack though. There tons and tons of keyword combinations that people may type in when the toilet is leaking. The moral is this — when large brands & retailers do not show up, they miss out on many opportunities to:

1. Become a brand that people associate with solutions
2. Introduce products (if you are already fixing a toilet, would you caulk the tub too?)
3. Offer coupons / incentives to drive sales (either as a retailer or affiliate)
4. Get users to interact with your brand
5. Improve your content quality though feedback and ratings
6. Grow e-newsletter subscribers lists
7. Sell ads (for publishers)

Last ones – Wedding registries & Fashion – When searching for wedding registries (Um, why would I do that?), I see some companies in paid search like Bed, Bath & Beyond, Williams-Sonoma, Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn and a few others that are paying between $2 – $3 per click. Yet in the natural results, not a one of those guys are in the top 20. Amazing.

On the fashion side, type “Black Dress” in Google (yes, I once typed in the type of dress I wanted to buy someone as a gift, ok, so I know this process). You’ll see Ann Taylor, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Bluefly, Bloomingdale’s, Avenue and many more paying for listings, yet not a one in natural. Someday we’ll learn, right? Someone’s got to take advantage of the opportunity, but who? While these players are asleep at the wheel, companies like Fashmatch show up to provide creative solutions.

I did a search on Nike as a keyword, and just that word alone came back with over 2.5 million searches performed last month according to the SEObook.com tool, which uses Overture’s keyword suggestion tool. This does not include the long-tail terms like Nike football cleats, Nike air force one, Nike sports bra, Nike golf balls and the millions of other searches done with the word Nike in it somehow. I wouldn’t be surprised if the branded Nike search volume were in the 15 million range.

Then think about all the unbranded search terms where Nike could get people to consider its brand — terms like golf shoes, golf gifts, golf clubs, footballs, football cleats, off-road running shoes, running shoes. You can just imagine that the number of searches done for these terms could dwarf the search volume for Nike’s branded terms. (Not to mention that an iProspect study found that roughly 36% of people associate ranking higher with being a better brand.)

OK, so now we know the potential. Let’s uncover how Nike is missing the boat and how it could right the ship with a slightly more focused effort on SEO and improving the customer experience of customers coming from search engines.

Overall, big brands typically screw up search in two big ways, and Nike is no different:

1. Missing out on long-tail terms: If you are not familiar with the term “Long Tail” as it relates to search, you can get the basic idea from a blog post by the search Granddaddy himself, Danny Sullivan.

Typically, big brands want to target the big unbranded terms like “tennis rackets,” “golf clubs,” or “running shoes.” I do recommend that they target such terms as a way to position their brand in the minds of people who are searching, but they often miss terms like “golf club reviews” or “women’s trail running shoes.” Typically, these long-tail terms are the ones that convert best.

Even worse, in Nike’s case, it doesn’t show up in the top 10 for the term “Nike trail shoes.” That is a term that includes its brand name. This happens a lot with Nike branded search terms. If I were Nike, I would start on the branded terms because they are the easiest to rank well for given its existing Web assets. They are most definitely the low-hanging fruit, just waiting to be plucked. People searching for products using the word Nike in their search are already familiar with the brand and are probably calling out for you to show up—but there’s Nike, hiding from them on page 80!

2. All-Flash sites with no alternative version: Does it make sense to spend significant amounts of money on heavily Flashed branded sites—but not on driving people who know the brand to the branded site using organic (natural) search engine optimization… AKA free clicks?

So maybe you are saying… “Hey Wil, maybe Nike doesn’t want to use search at all in their marketing.” I thought about that. When I did a search on Google for “Air Max,” I got this page:

Nike is paying to be in a top position on PPC, which means that search matters as a way of gaining exposure, brand awareness, and possibly, just maybe, sales. But when I clicked on the PPC link for “Air Max,” I was taken to the Nike store homepage.

• Mistake No. 1—Nothing from my search query is reinforced on the landing page

I typed in “Air Max.” How about taking me to a page with Nike Air Max shoes for men and women? (Since I didn’t type women’s Air Max or men’s Air Max, Nike doesn’t know which I want.) Why is Nike making me have to navigate the site when my search query specifically indicated that I was seeking Air Max shoes?

Take a look at the homepage. Can you tell me where the Air Maxes are?

While it may be important show me what Nike wanted to show me on its homepage, it should first help me find what I was seeking, then start showing me other info.

Let’s give a real world example of the offline equivalent of what Nike just did: You go to a store to purchase an iPod, and the salesperson ignores your request and starts showing you car stereos, leaving you to fend for yourself, looking around the entire electronics department.

• Mistake No. 2—Not developing a descriptive meta description tag

Notice on the above search that Nike’s site was in the organic listings for Air Max. That is a victory in and of itself. But notice the description of the site in the SERPS: “JavaScript and Flash 8 are required to view this site!”

That is not a very helpful description. How about someone over at Nike trying a description like “Check out the newest in Nike Air Max technology for Men’s & Women’s running, basketball, and tennis shoes—Official Nike.com site!”? Anything would be more helpful than “JavaScript and Flash 8 are required to view this site,” don’t you agree? And it might help a little bit with search.

• Mistake No. 3—Putting “Cool” over helping me find stuff on the site

When I search for something, I am on a mission, and either your Web site helps me to complete that mission or it doesn’t. Nike, more often than, doesn’t.

I was searching for Air Max shoes, remember? If I did click on the “JavaScript and Flash 8 are required to view this site” description, I would get a flashy, sleek site that lets me control how fast a character runs with my keyboard. I guess that is a cool idea developed by the brand guys. Nike didn’t realize that I don’t care much about making some girl run faster on my screen when I am looking for Air Max shoes—and it failed to ask me whether I care.

Nike, how about you show me how cool you are after asking me what I want first? What am I here for? Take some time to find out! Do I want to know the history of Air Max shoes? Am I looking to buy? Have I come looking to play with your slick site? At this point, you don’t know and you don’t seem to care what I just told you I was interested in. I was looking for Air Maxes and instead got something that isn’t helping me find them very easily.

This is just one example of Air Max, a branded term that shows I already know about Nike Air Maxes. Let’s try another: “Nike Trail Running Shoes.” This is a branded search term. Remember, this is the holy grail of search—someone who already knows your brand!

• Mistake No. 4—Driving a user with a very specific query to the homepage can waste parts of pay per click (PPC) budgets.

The beauty of pay per click is that you can easily direct the user exactly where you want them to go on your site (unlike organic or natural search, which can sometimes be more difficult in this regard).

We covered this before, but once again I am indicating to Nike (by my search term) that I am looking for a very specific product, yet it continues to send me to the homepage. Here, Nike is paying per click, so one would think it would want to maximize value. Instead, we’re back to the iPod vs. car stereo salesman who just doesn’t help us get what we are seeking.

The beauty of the Web is that it is a 24/7 salesperson. The question is this: “Is your Web site a blathering obnoxious salesperson or helpful and friendly, asking questions and making it easy for customers to get what they are seeking?”

• Mistake No. 5—Bad landing pages can hurt PPC rankings

News flash—you can’t pay to be No. 1 on Google anymore. An algorithm that decides how well your landing page matches with the user’s search mission will affect where you rank (along with your cost per click, and other factors). Yahoo is apparently going this route as well.

If you noticed in my search, Brooks running shoes (a competitor) outranked Nike on PPC for a branded Nike term. Hey, Brooks, how about sending me to a page about trail shoes, too?

• Mistake No. 6—Flash sites with no alternative version can suppress natural rankings

By having Flash-intensive sites (which otherwise definitely have tons of value), Nike hurts its ability to rank well in the natural search results for tens of millions of searches every month for these terms. Remember that most clicks occur on the natural results rather than the paid ones. Hey, Nike, this is free traffic, buddy! You are Nike! You have humongous amounts of links to your sites. Ranking well for branded terms in the natural rankings could be relatively painless with the right architecture developed around search. Instead, your site wasn’t in the first five pages of Google for a term (“Nike Trail running shoes”) that included your brand. You can fix this!

• Mistake No. 7—Flash shopping cart = no love from Froogle/shopping search

Nike’s flash site, while slick as all get out, isn’t allowing Nike even show up in Froogle, Google’s shopping search engine. (Notice the arrow in the screen capture above Mistake #4 that points to “Product search results for…”)

These sites are showing up for the product searches for your brand. If Nike’s site was developed in a manner that was amenable to search engine rules (like a flash-alternative version), it would have a chance to show up in Google’s product search engine. Again, you are Nike. Get Google on the phone. Find out how you can export your product catalog to get into Froogle and potentially other shopping search engines. Remember, shopping search engines are visited often by people who are looking to shop… AKA spend money! Unless, of course, selling additional shoes and athletic equipment doesn’t matter much to you.

• Mistake No. 8—Investing in great tools and not driving traffic to them

When I type in “Nike Golf Balls,” Nike is once again showing up in the PPC side for terms, and this time I actually get to a landing page about golf… Yes! But there are some hiccups…

Nike got me to a golf-themed landing page, but the landing page doesn’t show me golf balls. It shows me shoes. Nike, I understand that you may want to push your new Air Max golf shoe. Could you “Just Do it” as an up-sell in the checkout process or on product pages? I would have really liked it if you got me to the landing page that actually had golf balls, but what’s a guy to expect?

I typed in “Nike Golf Balls” and got this wonderful looooooong Flash movie about Tiger Wood’s swing and how Nike took digital shots of it using some military grade camera or something. Well, how about showing me some golf balls. After all, that is what I searched for!

Nike, you are not taking advantage of some awesome existing assets. You have a great ball selector tool that helps me select the right golf ball based on my handicap, goals, issues with swing, etc. This is very useful. However, there are two problems with that.

I can’t directly link to this great tool, which I would have done from this article, because the URL never changes as I click through the site. I have to go to nikegolf.com > balls > product selector. This makes it more difficult for people to pass on this great tool to friends via email.

Though the tool is not too difficult to find, the target audience tends to be older, and browsing around the Web for fun is probably not high on their agenda. The absence of a direct link also hurts your ability to build up links from other sites, which would help you get higher rankings.

So, if you are in the marketing department of a large branded company, take the opportunity to beat the others in your space on search as they languish, not fully taking advantage of their Web assets.

36% of search engine users believe that the companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top brands in their field. This represents a modest increase over the 2002 figure of 33% but still reinforces the increasing importance search can have on brand lift.

Big brands like Nike, New Balance, BMW, Infiniti, Lexus, A Diamond is Forever, Tiffany, Lunesta, Ambien, and others typically miss out on positioning their brand at the top of search results because someone in charge of the brand doesn’t understand search and the unrealized potential or opportunity cost of not ranking well. They want to keep the integrity of their flashy site at the expense of ranking highly, which as we see above only helps them position themselves as leaders in their space.

The reason why I mention not leveraging their greatest assets at the onset of this post is quite simply because most of these brands have owned their domains FOREVER (on the web forever is usually about 10 years). Many of these big brands have tens of thousands of links pointing to their web sites, which would significantly push them into contention for top spots on search engines for terms like running shoes, luxury cars, luxury convertibles, diamonds, or engagement rings. If you spoke with the marketing managers or CEOs of these companies and illustrated how often these terms are typed in on search engines every month, then combined that with the understanding that ranking highly for unbranded terms helps build how their brands are perceived by customers, do you think that they would say who cares? I don’t think so.

Remember above we stated that 36% of search engine users associate high rankings with being a top brand.
Prescription Sleep Aids
Take the media blitz between Lunesta & Ambien, two major prescription sleep aids (then along comes Rozerem as well). You’d have to be in a coma (no pun intended) not to have seen a TV spot, radio spot, banner ad, etc. from one of these brands. However, when you type in “prescription sleep aids,” Lunesta has the top position on Google. As for Ambien, well not so much. I didn’t find them on the first 3 pages of Google’s organic results and wouldn’t go further.

Let’s go back to the beginning – based on Iprospect’s study, 1/3rd of web site visitors may consider Lunesta to be a better drug because they rank highly for the term. So for the millions spent by these players on TV and print, only one (Lunesta) takes advantage of the brand lift that search can have.

Hey Ambien – here’s a quickie: your homepage is mostly all images. Search engines don’t read images very well. Get some text on that bad boy and maybe you’ll start showing up as well.

Hey Rozerem – thanks for making me wait through the flash video that showed your commercial after it took 20 seconds to load on my broadband connection and I couldn’t turn the sound off; thanks for the annoyance. Here’s a tip – MUTE BUTTON! If I did find your site when searching for prescription sleep aids (which I wouldn’t because you don’t rank well), making me see videos and people talking on every page gets old quickly. I was listening to my own music, thank you!

Luxury Automakers
Hey, you guys are next. While I’ve seen Jaguar, Infiniti, Volvo, Volkswagen, and Lexus all use paid search for the term “luxury cars,” not one of them is ranking well organically for that term, and it seems to be searched well over 200,000 times per month. Type in “BMW convertible” and BMW’s site doesn’t show up in the first 50 results! Don’t even get me started on the long tail of search that these guys are missing out on.

Ahem. Remember that 36% rule above? I did notice that Cadillac and Saab were ranking in the top 10 for “luxury cars” – congrats.

After the BMW German web site used unscrupulous methods to rank highly on Google and got banned, the story was covered by major media outlets like the New York Times BBC, Financial Times, and CNN. I thought that these players would have learned to just go ahead and get some old fashioned text on their flash-heavy pages – maybe just a sentence or two, below that lovely flash that mentions all of their models.

Instead most automakers go with the all flash site, leaving searchers unable find their site when searching for unbranded terms like “luxury convertible” or even long tail terms like “Mercedes concept cars” or “MBW convertible.”

But before we congratulate SAAB, they are teetering on breaking the rules (disable your JavaScript to see their little trick to rank well for “luxury cars”). You know, it wouldn’t be so hard to get a little text on these luxury car sites. After all, these big branded luxury automakers all have ridiculously great link popularity. With a little bit of text on a few pages, their brand could come to the top of the search results for tons of terms.

In conclusion, big brands – wake up! The little SEO companies aren’t asking you to make an ugly site with nothing but text, but how about you help us help you by giving us a little text to play with. Trust me. We’ll get you ranked in the top pages of major search engines if you do, but oh, that probably doesn’t matter much, right? I mean, who uses Google or Yahoo to find things on the web these days?