What are the search terms your buyers use to find products and services like yours? Where does your company rank on Google for those terms?

Three months ago, Mike Volpe at HubSpot blogged about his experience speaking with a friend at EMC, a huge company (roughly ten billion US $ revenue). Mike and the EMC person discussed the most important search terms for EMC and came up with two critical ones "data storage" and "information infrastructure."

They then Googled those terms. Remarkably, EMC was nowhere near the top of the search heap for the phrases. Mike came to the obvious conclusion: "EMC is a Laggard Playing by the Old Rules of Marketing."

I thought that was an amazing thing. Here is a company that spends well over one billion US dollars on sales and marketing and they are nowhere near the front page on Google for two of the most important phrases in their industry.

As Mike at HubSpot said: "This is like opening the Yellow Pages in 1990 and looking under 'car rental' and not seeing an ad for Hertz!"

Last week I Googled those phrases again, wondering if they EMC had implemented any Web marketing programs to boost their results in the past three months:

Google search for "data storage"
Google search for "information infrastructure"

At the time I checked, EMC was ranked number 115 in the Google search results for "data storage" and number 76 for "information infrastructure."

Not so great for a company whose tagline is "where information lives."

EMC is not doing a good job at helping buyers find them via search engines.

How about your company? You should be able to answer these questions:
Do you know the most important search terms that people are using to find products and services like the ones you sell?
Where do you appear in the results?
If you aren’t satisfied with your results, what great content can you create (a blog or an ebook or some news releases) to help boost your ranking?

Disclosure: I am a member of the HubSpot board of advisors.

Comments

[Tristam Wallace]

David - Great post and advice that we are continuing to work very hard on at eCopy. It is so vitally important for companies to put themselves in a position where the people looking for their types of products on the Web are finding them without much digging. Page 1 is a goal, page 2 or 3 is nice...but page 10 is far too late.

If you hadn't noticed, btw, EMC launched a new Web site yesterday...coincidence?? EMC's Chuck Hollis wrote about it on his blog today: http://chucksblog.typepad.com

[Mike Volpe]

David - Thanks for the mention and the link.

Tristam - It is funny that they just launched a new website. Though it is also funnier that you still can't find the website anywhere in Google. All this time and effort on a new website that you still cannot find in Google.

[Brian Halligan]

Check out the page title on their home page...

[ed brice]

This is not surprising. Most companies are still focused on what I call Big M marketing (advertising, events and branding). In 2007 we made a major commitment to search engine marketing as the data was finally to overwhelming to ignore (80% of all B2B purchase decisions start with a search engine and almost 100% of all purchase decisions will use a search engine at some point in their process).

A lot of companies still think they control their customers purchase decision process because they control the information. In a lot of cases it’s a battle between the offline marketing forces and the online marketing forces for budget and influence. Truly innovative companies will soon realize they need a new marketing function deployed in an “integrated media” function across offline and online to drive additional synergies and efficiencies.

Yes, EMC is able to leverage their strong brand and category leadership to drive inbound demand, but at what cost? Deploying big event, sponsorships, and ad based budgets that in many cases are not measurable does not bring a high marketing ROI. Imagine how much more efficient their demand generation could be with search.

Key message is you no longer control your customers purchasing process. They are getting information from many places and you need to be in those places at a cost that generates a positive marketing ROI. Search marketing helps us do that today in a way that is cost effective and more importantly measurable.

[David Meerman Scott]

Ed, Very well said. Many thanks for sharing your insights.

Best, David

[Elge Premeau]

Myabe they don't care. McDonald's doesn't rank in the top 100 search results for hamburger but people still know to get hamburgers at McDonalds.

[Glenn Nicholas]

David, now I know how big EMC are, and I know their marketing team is huge. But I wonder whether those keywords are really that important to EMC?

Guessing at keywords can mean missing out on the opportunity to research what customers/readers are actually searching for. What an EMC executive thinks is important may not be important to customers searching for answers to their problems. Both 'data storage' and / or 'information infrastructure' look relatively light on in Wordtracker, maybe there are search terms used more frequently and with a better aligned search intent. A quick look suggests EMC aren't currently doing paid search marketing, not even their own primary brand names ... a bit of a surprise in itself.
Ranking on keywords is of course important, but researching what the important keywords are matters, even for a Fortune 500...

[mike ashworth]

This is very powerful, so many people dont realise that although they need to spend more time on "customer optimisation" and less money on SEO consultants who promise the earth and fail to deliver.

Once you have the basics of search optimisation right for your site, fresh content, using natural langauge that your ideal client / customer would use, will win every time.

Mike Ashworth
Business Development
Brighton and Hove, Sussex, UK