Why Super Brands Don’t Care About SEO

In the last couple of months, various studies and blog posts have cropped up regarding the SEO performance of large (super) brands. These posts and studies all show pretty much the same thing; lots of super brands don’t rank for diddly squat in the organic search engine results.

US brands

In an article over at Advertising Age, they summarised a study of America’s top brands by Covario. The study noted how these brands don’t rank organically for some (loosely) related generic search terms. Yeah, I know, what a shocker.

This article was met with a swift (and slightly brutal) response over on the Outspoken Media blog by Rae Hoffman, where she explained why these sites don’t rank and how just tweaking a few title tags wouldn’t really help. This is all true, but what interests me more is why these big brands don’t invest more in SEO. It’s absolutely right what Rae says about generic term ranking often being more about vanity and less about ROI, but I wanted to delve deeper into the nitty gritty with my post (more on that later).

Finally, I read about a survey in the US by Conductor about big brand SEO rankings over on Search Engine Watch. The data is nicely summarised by one of my favourite speakers, Mr. Greg Jarboe.

UK brands

So, focusing now on our side of the pond, a similar study was carried out by SEM agency Epiphany Solutions. They profiled 50 super brands in the UK and noted ranking performance for generic related search terms.

The study was then blogged about by Econsultancy; the general synopsis being that a survey from an SEO agency shows that big brands need to invest more in SEO. I mean honestly, I wouldn’t have seen that coming, would you?

So, is this useful research? 

God no. The fact is, all these studies about super brands not ranking organically are, frankly, a complete waste of time. Well, a waste of time for the reader, but good link-bait for the publisher

Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure all those companies I’ve mentioned are very good at SEO (see, a nice link there) but these studies are really trying to report on an issue that I believe isn’t as significant as you might first think.

You see, most super brands just don’t need to care about ranking for generic terms. It’s just not worth the effort. Don’t worry if you disagree, I’ve got some serious facts and figures coming your way…

Marks and Spencer

One of the super brands that fared quite badly on the Epiphany Solutions ranking test was high street favourite Marks and Spencer. Now, anyone who works in e-commerce knows that M&S have invested heavily in their wesbite in recent years, but evidently not so much on the SEO side as they rank for…. well, not a lot. Even basic things like their title tags are pretty horrendous. Still, they were the 9th most popular retail site in the UK in April 2010 based on Hitwise rankings, so the traffic is coming from somewhere. Hence, I decided to break down the data in my favourite tool (yep, still Hitwise) to see what was going on.

The search terms M&S were tested against in the Epiphany study were:

• Furniture
• Women’s clothing
• Food
• Men’s clothing
• Wine
• Clothes
• Currency exchange
• Kids clothes
• Home furnishings
• Electrical appliances

OK, so these are all terms that are related to what Marks and Spencer offer their customers online. Some terms are pointlessly generic, but ranking 1st for any of those terms would generate some revenue, so I can play ball.

Step 1 – Establish comparative search volume

One of the great things you can do in Hitwise is create a keyword portfolio. This allows you to see the proportional amount of search volume for any terms you add, based on actual data from over 8m UK internet connections.

So, I created a portfolio with all the terms used in the Epiphany study, and the top 100 search terms that drive traffic to the Marks and Spencer website. Just to be clear, I looked at the terms based on total UK search volume, not just the volume of traffic the terms send to the M&S website. I took this sample from 12 weeks of search data, up to the week ending 08/05/2010.

The most popular UK search term out of the portfolio I set up was marks and spencer as you’d expect for a brand of that size. The most popular term from the Epiphany study list was clothes. So, how much extra search volume does the term marks and spencer generate versus the term clothes. A bit more? Twice as much? Five times as much? Well, take a look at the following graph in which I’ve mapped out the comparative search volume for some of the terms from my little Hitwise portfolio:

The answer in fact is that over the 12 week range I extracted UK search volume for from Hitwise, the term marks and spencer was searched for 57 times as much as the term clothes. Wowser. So, you can probably see which term Marks and Spencer care more about now, right? But don’t worry if that’s not enough for you, I’m far from finished.

Step 2 – Consider the click through rate

The data above is just based on search volume; once the search as been performed, you still need any potential customer to click through to your site. I can tell you without any hesitation that the Marks and Spencer website would conservatively achieve double the click through rate for the term marks and spencer as they would for the term clothes if they ranked in 1st place on Google for both terms.

It makes sense really when you think about it, but you can easily prove this to yourself with the new Webmaster Tools click through volume reporting (some salt is required of course). Look at any reasonably sized site you manage and compare the click through rate of a number 1 brand search to a number 1 generic term and you’ll see that I’m right.

Step 3 – Consider the conversion rate

Brand search is a powerful indicator of what I call “intent to buy“. I went into this in much more detail in my previous post on the subject, but suffice to say that I could pretty much guarantee you that visitors for the term marks and spencer will convert at least twice as well as visitors for the term clothes, even taking into account the offline presence of M&S and that people might just be searching to find their nearest shop etc. Again, this is a very conservative estimate. In fact I’m being so conservative here that I’m starting to feel like Nick Clegg.

Step 4 – You do the math

So, let’s consider everything in total. The term marks and spencer receives:

• x57 Search Volume
• x2 Click Through Rate
• x2 Conversion Rate

compared to the highest traffic term (clothes) from the study above. Even ignoring AOV, you could therefore (very) conservatively deduce that Marks and Spencer’s biggest search term generates them 228 times the revenue that a number 1 ranking for clothes would generate.

Step 5 – The acid test

Remember, with this data I’ve only been looking at search volume. M&S will obviously generate a large proportion of revenue through direct traffic and so on, but I’m just focusing on search as this is what all the studies I’ve seen have been whinging about. Now, the simple challenge I have for you is this:

• Open up Google Analytics (or whichever analytics software you use)
• Go to your keyword report and set the date range for last month and order by descending revenue
• Make a note of the revenue generated by your top term
• Divide that revenue by 228 (yeah, I’ll let you use a calculator)
• Apply a filter and list keywords that generated this new revenue figure or less
• Look at the new top term and ask yourself “do I really care about that term?”

Now, be honest with yourself: I’m not your boss and I’m not your client. Look at that term and really think about how much time you’ve ever directly devoted to generating revenue from it. I tried this myself on a £multi-million turnover e-commerce site that relies on generic organic terms for a very large proportion of revenue. The answer to the above question for me was still, most definitely, no.

If you don’t care about SEO for generic terms that are so proportionally insignificant, why would you expect that super brands should care?

But isn’t reliance on brand search a bad thing?

Er… why?

More than once I’ve read something along the lines of “xxx is too reliant on brand search” when discussing why said site doesn’t rank for generic terms. I mean seriously, does anyone really believe this? There are two really key things about brand search:

• Brand searchers have greater intent to buy from YOUR site
• If you’re a super brand, you will ALWAYS rank 1st for your brand terms

The 2nd point is important, providing you’re a sufficiently large  brand. You can buy a gazillion links and cloak your big brand site to hell, but unless you do something really, really horrendous, Google will always keep you in number 1 spot for your brand term. Sure, you might be Google’s token “1 big brand a year temp ban” for 2010 (ala BMW a few years ago), but even if that happens, you’ll be back ranking 1st within 2 days.

On the other hand, if you’re relying on revenue from ranking for the term clothes, this is really a much more perilous position. Someone else could buy the domain clothes.co.uk and point a million crappy links at it and then you might find it considerably more difficult to compete for that number 1 spot. So, which term do you think you should rely on more?

The other commonly levied piece of duff information about relying on brand search is this; if your brand reputation is severely damaged, people won’t search for you. Again, I consider this nonsensical for the simple reason that if your brand reputation was destroyed, no one would purchase from you anyway, regardless of how they got to your site.

Doesn’t this all go against the SEO love-ranking-for-everything secret code?

I spend a lot of time ranking for generic terms, in some cases even reasonably competitive ones  But honestly, I’m not so vain that I wouldn’t trade every single number 1 position I’ve ever achieved on a site without much brand awareness for the brand traffic of a term like marks and spencer.

The important thing to remember is that like every other business on God’s green earth, SEM is all relative. A small independent furniture retailer would benefit hugely from ranking 1st on Google for a term like furniture. However, as I’ve demonstrated conclusively above, M&S would see nowhere near the proportionally same level of benefit, so naturally they’re not going to be too arsed about it.

And it’s also worth pointing out that any big brand can target any (generic) term in seconds with PPC without having to build content and links via SEO. I recently looked closely at Amazon on Hitwise as they wanted to get traffic for the term Windows 7. Did they build content and links to try and compete with Microsoft and Wikipedia in the organic SERPs? Of course they friggin’ didn’t. They just ramped up the PPC bids and in came the traffic, as if by magic. Go figure.

In conclusion

Obviously, some very sizeable brands do invest in SEO, and good on them for doing so. When you have a domain with a lot of authority and loads of incoming links already, ranking for plenty of generic terms is a very real possibility (just ask Wikipedia) if you invest in SEO.

Having said that, I’m really on the side on the super brands when it comes to categorising SEO as “not that important”. No company has unlimited resources and everyone is always looking for the best ROI. As I’ve demonstrated above, heavy investment in SEO will often not be the right investement for a large brand e-commerce website.

So, all I ask of you is this. Next time you see (yet) another study detailing how super brands don’t rank for generic terms, before you jump on the “this is an abomination, everyone should invest in SEO” bandwagon, take a step back, possibly crack open a beer while you ponder, and have a good long think. Then, ask yourself this: Would you would really care about those terms if they had the maximum potential to generate such a proportionally minute amount of your total revenue?

Catchy question to end on I know, but I think you get the picture now

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