| Introduction
Page 4
Google, a new search
engine with a better way of collecting and organizing search results appeared
on the scene in 1998. It made a big media splash and its success in the consumer
market has been monumental. It has a major and growing share of the search marketplace.
Google established a key fact in the realm of search; Web users want fast, reliable
and high quality results and they’ll gravitate to the search service or
Web site that provides those results. Placement in Google’s main results
isn’t for sale. It’s that fact that gives consumers trust that they’re
getting the best search assistance possible. Search is important to consumers.
It should also be important
to business because it is one of the best target marketing mediums available.
There’s nothing like making yourself available to people who really want
your products, services and brand messages.
Search marketing though
is a different twist on our traditional views of marketing. We’ve been trained
to think of marketing as an aggressive, extraverted activity where you have to
find and trap a prospect and force your message upon that captive target. On the
Internet, prospects can’t be trapped and you can’t force your message
upon them. They will just click away from your message. You must have what they
want and say it in a way that is easy for them to comprehend.
Internet marketing
is more about letting the prospect find you and your message and letting them
experience it in whatever way they feel comfortable with. It is more a practice
of seduction and it requires a sensitivity to the prospect’s needs and preferences.
Search engines are probably the best demonstration of this new marketing environment.
Those sites that do well in the search engines are those that are designed to
be findable. At this point, sites that try too hard to be findable and get lots
of traffic are doing all right. In future, searchers might be more wary that they’ve
been “marked.” The seduction may soon have to be subtler.
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