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Another common way to divide up a Web site is by country, and like all the other ways discussed so far, it makes a lot of sense. (That’s why companies do it!) Your company probably does not sell the same exact products in every country, so it makes sense that each country might have its own Web site for customers in that country to visit. Each country might have different languages, currency, cultural norms, laws—it is easy to understand why Web sites are so frequently divided this way.
But this clever organizational idea, once again, hurts search marketing efforts. Some searchers use country-specific search engines, but many use global search engines, such as Google. What happens when a Canadian searcher enters “four-slice toaster” into the global search engine? Google might be able to determine the language of the query as English, but there may be excellent English-language pages on toasters in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, the United States, and many other countries. Your company might also have excellent matches for all of those countries—each toaster page is similar to those in the other countries, but is specific to the country. (It shows the toaster that conforms to UK electrical standards and is priced in British pounds, for instance.) Google might just show the UK pages, even though it is not the one the Canadian searcher wants, and suppress the rest as being “similar pages.” If the wrong country page displays, your visitor cannot buy your product easily—he might be asked to pay in British pounds when he has Canadian dollars in his wallet.
You can see that if your corporate Web site is divided by country, you might find Web teams responsible for different countries battling to capture searchers with the same query—they want their pages to “win” so that your other country pages are the ones suppressed. Worse, you might have well-known brand names, such as Coke, that are used in many countries regardless of language. How do you know which country those searchers want? Figure 1-17 shows how Coca- Cola handles this problem on its home page, but your company could face this problem for hundreds of brand names that cannot all be listed on your home page.
Figure 1-17 Handling country sites. Coca-Cola highlights country selection on its home page to get searchers and other visitors to the right place.
Once again, there may be no incentive within your company for different country teams to collaborate on search marketing—they are not required to work together on most other things. All together now: “It’s your job.”
Until now, this discussion has focused on the problems of multiple Web teams driven by the choices your company has made about how to organize. However, another problem grows as Web sites grow: the technology menagerie. A Web site can employ a dizzying array of technology:
Content management systems help authors create and store the content for each page.
Web servers display pages on the visitor’s screen.
Application servers run programs for the visitor to perform tasks on your site (such as viewing an appliance’s service records).
Commerce servers display your merchandise and enable visitors to purchase.
Portals display content based on the visitors’ interests (such as showing items for sale that are related to items already purchased).
Each of these components (and more) needs to be carefully configured to support your search marketing efforts. This configuration is complicated when your Web site has been pieced together across a large organization, however, because your site probably uses different components in each part of the site. So, your multiple product sites (or audience sites or country sites) might each have its own team using different technologies to run each site. In the initial rush to get every part of your company on the Web, a divide-and-conquer strategy might have ruled the day, with each division doing its own thing. Unfortunately, you are paying for that now, because every combination of technology that displays a Web page must be configured properly to make search marketing work.
The more technology combinations you have, the harder it is to get them all working for search. Frequently, you need to coordinate multiple changes to fix one problem because, for example, the content management system and the portal are both contributing causes. And (by now you are waiting for it), none of these technical specialists will think search marketing is part of their job—it is your job to get them to fix each problem.
If you find that your Web site suffers from the technology menagerie or any of the other problems listed here, don’t despair. We show you how to solve each one.
Since the rise of the Web in the 1990s, more and more of your customers have turned to the Web, and more specifically to Web search, to find what they are looking for. Most searchers are clicking organic search results, although some are selecting paid search listings. Regardless, your Web site cannot ignore these searchers without losing them to your competitors. By focusing on searchers as part of your marketing plans, you will raise your sales (or raise whatever your Web site’s goal is).
But paying attention to searchers takes more work than you might expect. To maximize your search marketing success, you cannot focus on just one or two search engines. Search engines come in many flavors and colors, ranging from worldwide sites to single-country engines to specialized shopping searches. Depending on your business, we discuss later how any or all of these might be key parts of your search marketing plan.
It is even more complicated for some organizations because the larger your Web site is, the more elusive search success can be. Large Web sites have multiple teams split by technical specialty, product line, country, and other organizational boundaries. Your company’s organizational structure might be perfectly aligned for its overall goals, but can fracture search marketing.
Organizational splits hurt search marketing precisely because search marketing cannot be treated as a specialty performed by just one department. Rather, successful search marketing efforts pervade your entire Web organization, transforming jobs all along the way. Do not worry if you cannot imagine how you will persuade all these folks to change the way they do their jobs—we show you how.
Your multiple Web teams fail at search marketing because of their search ignorance— ignorance that can be overcome only through knowledge, knowledge that must start with you, the search marketer. The following chapter examines what a search engine actually does. As you learn how search engines work, you will be better prepared to train your far-flung Web teams to transform their jobs and to take advantage of the huge search marketing opportunity.
This content is excerpted from Chapter 1 of the new book, "Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site", by permission of Prentice Hall PTR. ISBN 0131852922, copyright 2005. All rights reserved. To learn more, please visit: http://www.phptr.com/title/0131852922.
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Created: March 27, 2003
Revised: August 15, 2005
URL: http://webreference.com/programing/search2/1
