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in association with DIGITAL WORLD
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Search marketing
s there any word in the marketer’s lexicon more loaded
than cheap? Call it low cost or inexpensive instead; few
expert Mike Grehan
brands would willingly associate themselves with conno-
tations of low quality. There’s just one problem: con-
tells Gordon Smith
I
sumers don’t think like brands do. When they use search
engines to seek out a product or service, chances are
why words hold the cheap is a word they’re using.
key to getting the
Words are Mike Grehan’s stock in trade. Or to be more pre-
cise, keywords are. The terms people use to search on the inter-
best out of search
net have been his business for more than a decade. He has writ-
ten white papers and several books including Search Engine
engine queries, and
Marketing: The Essential Best Practice Guide, one of the best-
received books on the subject. He was also one of the keynote
what implications
speakers at this year’s Search Marketing World conference in
Dublin. Unusual job titles might be par for the course in the
this has for brands
advertising industry, but Grehan’s appears, so far anyway, to be
unique: when New York’s Acronym Media hired him earlier this
year, the company appropriately named him global keyword-
driven marketing (KDM) officer.
Keywords are “the bedrock of a website”, according to
Grehan, who peppers his conversation with anecdotes about
where brands have missed the point. He recalls meeting one of
America’s largest financial institutions and asking the assembled
group of managers the following question: if they could be
highly ranked on Google for any particular keyword or phrase,
what would it be? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the consensus came
back with ‘lend money’. Grehan pauses a beat before delivering
the punchline. “That’s a shame,” he says, “because your cus-
tomers want to borrow money.”
Lost in translation
One of his main arguments centres on how many companies get
caught up using jargon or words that customers wouldn’t use at
all. A company might think it sells compact excavators but it is
disconnected from the many customers who go on the web
looking for digging machines. “I think it is very important to
realise that marketers aren’t as in control of the brand as they
used to be. The consumer is in control. We have to listen to cus-
tomers to find out what words they are using. The average Joe
wants a cheap deal,” he says. “It’s a fine line between what you
as a marketer want to tell your audience and what your audience
wants to hear. ‘Cheap’ has connotations nobody wants to be
associated with, but it’s always going to go down to the lowest
common denominator.”
Cue another story about when Grehan worked with a
respectable carpet retailer in the US, compiling the key terms
people used to find the company’s website. Top of that list
May/June ‘08 Marketing Age 29
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