Our recent study into how the top SuperBrands use (or don’t as the case may be) search marketing, unsurprisingly found that the majority of super brands do not implement search marketing as part of their online strategy but instead rely on their strong brand names to drive search traffic.
Many people have argued that super brands do not care about search because they do not need to- happy instead to rely on the high amount of higher converting traffic generated from brand related searches.
I, however, am inclined to disagree. I believe that a lack of awareness of the potential or even existence of search marketing is a major factor as to why super brands are not engaging in search, likely due to senior management and decision makers being relatively new to the online world.
Marks and Spencer’s have been used as an example of why super brands do not need to implement search marketing but instead can rely on the huge amounts of traffic generated from brand related searches to be successful online. And I’m sure they can. But this supposed attitude of “we don’t need to do that search marketing because we are doing well enough with our brand traffic” doesn’t ring true to one of the UK’s most successful retailers. If this had always been the attitude at Marks and Spencer then they would likely still be running a stall in Leeds market.
How do you know M&S Aren’t Implementing Search Marketing?
Currently the M&S website, from an SEO’s point of view, is pretty poor. It would pretty much miss every tick-box on an SEO architecture review: awful title tags, hardly any textual content, un-readable URL’s, massive duplicate content issue…….. the list could go on. And the back-link profile- although amassing over 30k links, has an anchor text distribution consisting of…. well take a look below.
It would definitely be fair to say they are relying on their brand name.
But, all these issues could be relatively easily fixed using fundamental SEO methods and with relatively little investment, especially when compared to the TV and other traditional market budgets being thrown about by M&S.
The combination of the M&S sites organic power and authority, due to the M&S brand name, combined with a strategically targeted search marketing strategy, both on and off page, would give the M&S site the ability to rank highly for a huge range of high traffic driving, non-brand terms and therefore greatly increase its current traffic levels.
And I believe, if the decision makers and senior marketers within M&S understood this then they would invest in search marketing in a heartbeat, as would their peers at other Super Brand companies.
Super Brands that Do Use Search
One super brand, currently sitting at the top of our brand search ratings, who have identified and successfully implemented search marketing despite their strong brand name, are Thornton’s, the UK based chocolate confectioners.
Unsurprisingly, Thornton’s rank 1st in Google for “Thorntons” and a whole host of other Thornton’s related keywords, and dominate the first page of Google with a range of universal search results- already a hint that Thornton’s are implementing search marketing.
Thornton’s dominance of the search engine results pages for brand related terms is likely to bring them a fairly large amount of high converting traffic. Despite this, Thornton’s have not sat back, as has been suggested of super brands, and relied on this brand generated traffic. Instead they have targeted a broad range of generic key terms related to the online chocolate confectionary niche by implementing a search marketing strategy, encompassing both paid and organic search, in order to further increase the amount of traffic visiting their site and thus growing there business as a whole.
The Online Chocolate Confectionary Market
Similarly to the online clothing market of M&S, the online chocolate confectionary space is one comprised of a mixture of global MegaBrands (Cadbury, Nestle etc), comparatively small online specialists and those like Thornton’s who fall somewhere in-between. This makes this online niche an excellent case study to show how successful a targeted search marketing strategy can be, as well as demonstrating how SuperBrands are potentially missing out by not implementing search.
The Thornton’s Strategy -
To view our full analysis of the Thornton’s search marketing strategy head over to our Market Insights section.