\n
\nNavigational:<\/strong>
\ne.g. the user want to go directly to a website e.g. Apple, BBC, Mercedes.<\/p>\n
Informational: <\/strong> Or as Google referes to them: entertainment, enlightenment or information<\/strong>. Which I find incorporates the above categories.<\/p>\n So, if Google determines that a search query deserves a navigational result (one that will show the brand owner\u2019s website at No.1 position, then no matter what SEO you do, you will not knock that website off the top spot.<\/p>\n To make this clearer try searching for \u201ceurpean golf tour<\/strong>\u201d. You will see that europeantour.com is at the top spot. This has nothing to do with SEO directly. This is what Google\u2019s calculates that the majority of its users would want navigate to when using those keywords in that exact combination. And I\u2019m sure they\u2019re right.<\/p>\n My point is, is doesn\u2019t matter how much effort you put into optimising your website for a given set of keywords, you will never out-rank a site that falls within a different category to the one your site is classified as (or optimised for).<\/p>\n Broad commercial keywords have saturated billions of web pages in an attempt to optimise websites. Google doesn\u2019t want to show results to its users that are not relevant to a user\u2019s search query.<\/p>\n Its well worth considering more specific sets of keywords. E.g. if you where selling tennis rackets, try optimising for product-specific terms such as: The downside to the long tail is it will not generally yield high volumes of traffic, which provides enough brand awareness and \/ or space for advertisers. However the main point of this post was to persuade you to consider your own branding when looking into SEO.<\/p>\n Historically, marketing agencies would focus heavily on brand recognition across channels such as direct mail, TV ads, POS etc., without a successful method of measuring their ROI (return-on-investment).<\/p>\n Since search marketing gained momentum (around 1999) more and more marketing budgets have been allocated towards SEO and PPC. Apart from being measurable, an ROI can start within minutes of deploying a campaign.<\/p>\n Going back to my European Golf Tour example, a company called Hi 5 Golf Tours has done a great job of positioning themselves fairly high within their marketplace. For the same query: \u201ceuropean golf tour\u201d they are ranked no. 4.<\/p>\n We’ve been working on brand awareness for a handful of our clients and have reported significant shifts in search behaviour for those client’s products and services. An increasing number of non-branded keywords which were formally used are being switched for branded keyword searches. This trend, I believe, will grow over the coming year.<\/p>\n Food for thought, I hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We are receiving more and more enquiries from businesses who are trying to rank in Google for extremely broad sets of keywords – they have even bought domains which are composites of keywords! There is a perception that this will somehow make their website appear at the top of the rankings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-online-marketing"],"yoast_head":"\n
\ne.g. how fast can a cheetah run? What year was the Battle of Waterloo fought?
\n
\nTransactional:<\/strong>
\ne.g. best price for silver ipod nano<\/p>\n![\"search](\"\/media\/images\/blog\/eurogolftour.jpg\")
<\/p>\nKeyword Saturation<\/h3>\n
The Long Tail<\/h3>\n
\n
\nBabolat AeroPro Drive GT<\/strong> –\u00a0 a very specific product query which strongly indicated the user would like to see prices and therefore a possible purchase – and deserves a transactional result from search engines.<\/p>\nA Solution: Branding<\/h3>\n