Brand Search Optimization: Part 2
When I focus on search engine marketing, I generally concern myself with 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN, because I like to start by following the 80/20 rule and give my attention on the top 80% of the search traffic. Acording to J.P. Morgan research, Google is the most popular search engine with 59% of all search traffic. Yahoo comes in second at 20%, and MSN is in third place at 7.7%. These numbers are important because they tell where people go to search, but they’re also important for a formula I created to rank search engine competition on a given term. This formula can be described as follows:
RP is the search results position
PV is the position value
EP is the engine popularity
RV is the rank value
CR is the competition rating
PV = 100/RP
RV= PV * EP
CR = SUM(RV)
If this appears confusing, it may be that you’re like me, and worked on other things during algebra class, but I can explain the formula by showing how it works with an example.
Berkley-Fishing.com is #3 on MSN, #5 on Yahoo, and #5 on Google. By taking the percentage of market share for each search engine and multiplying it by .01, we get the EP values for each search engine. The EP values are .077 for MSN, .2 for Yahoo, and .59 for Google. The PV (position value) is determined by dividing 100 by the results position. This produces a fractional number that is suitably weighted to reflect the significance of the highest positions in RP. For Berkley-Fishing.com, the PV is 33.33 on MSN, 20 on Yahoo, and 20 on Google. Rank value is the position value adjusted by the engine popularity, or share of audience that the search engine has. To determine Berkley-Fishing.com’s RV for Google, we take the position value which is 20 and multiply it by Google’s Engine Popularity, which is .59. The result is 11.8, meaning the RV for Berkley-Fishing.com on Google is 11.8. We repeat this formula for each of the other search engines, substituting the new RP and EP numbers, and sum the results to get the overall Competition Rating, or CR. The CR result for Berkley-Fishing.com is 18.37.
You are welcome to do this exercise on your own, but I have already done the work for you. Here are the individual search engine results and their calculated values for the term “fishing line”.
MSN Bing Search Engine Results
Yahoo Search Engine Results
Google Search Engine Results
Now, here is the competition ranking result for the term “fishing line” among fishing line manufacturers. While we have eliminated all non-fishing line manufacturers from the results, we did not eliminate their positions, so the final Competition Rating illustrated in these results is properly weighted relative to how hard the climb might be to best your next highest competitor, or how closely your nearest follower might be.
Fishing Line Manufacturers Rated by Search Engine Position and Relative Competition Score
Let’s state a few observations. The highest RV on each search engine, earned only by the #1 result, is 59 for Google, 20 for Yahoo, and 7.7 for MSN. The second highest value for Google, the #2 position, is 29.5. Being #2 on Google has more value than being #1 on both MSN and Yahoo. You can see why the #1 position on Google is the brass ring of search engine marketing. While berkley-fishing.com is ranked among the top 5 in all three search engines, they still rank below stren.com who holds the #1 position on Google.
From a search engine marketing perspective, we now have a clear picture of who the competition is. If your brand is nearer to the bottom of this list, you no doubt want to know why these various competitors rank so high? For that answer, we have to dig much deeper, looking at each site to understand how search engine factors have determined their ranking. We can do this because search engines try to think like people, albeit algorithmically, and so they try to analyze what the web designer intended and what the person searching wants to find. We just need to know what to look for, and how to think more like a search engine. We’ll save this next step for another post.
Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com
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June 22nd, 2009 @ 7:52 pm
[...] more here: Brand Search Optimization: Part 2 Posted in SEO | Tags: a-new-homepage-, all-search, and-want, attention, attract-online, [...]