In many market sectors, the traditional retailer is under siege. Take the apparel sector. Discounters such as Overstock.com, flash-sale sites like Gilt Groupe and Rue La La, fast-fashion players including Century 21, massive marketplaces such as Amazon, and fashion blogs like The Style Rookie have created a treacherous landscape for apparel retailers, which can no longer expect offline-branding or retail-footprint alone to adequately secure their online fortunes.

An apparel retailer, or any other type of merchant, that has its marketing and branding efforts siloed and is not evaluating its integrated business is at risk of losing its place in the online discussion.   

Case in Point: “Men’s Fashion”

Before you dismiss this as alarmist, let’s look at a simple example: men’s fashion. This is a good benchmark, as most menswear customers look primarily to retailers to inform their fashion choices. But of all the listings on the first page of Google for “men’s fashion,” only two are retailers.

The threat here is not that content sites such as GQ or About.com are taking control of the men’s fashion discussion, but rather that a straight affiliate play like www.mens-fashion-tips.com could capture more natural-search attention than Armani or Ralph Lauren or even Lands’ End.

These results, of course, are an algorithmic byproduct. Search engines aren’t editorial, so they typically do not favor one site over another for content reasons. They focus on how well the site matches their interpretation of quality and relevance for a particular search query. So why did only two retailers show up on page 1 for this query? Because the apparel merchants let it happen. They have ceded their voice in the search discussion for “men’s fashion.” 

As we dive deeper and narrower with search terms such as “men’s pants,” we see a much more retailer-focused environment, with Kohl’s, Macy’s, Banana Republic, and Gap among the diverse merchants appearing on the first page. And while the term “men’s pants” is still a very broad query, it does express significant intent to deeply engage with pertinent content.  And, at this level of query, the retailer rules the day. Why?

For the top-level query, such as “men’s fashion,” the eventual desired destination of the searcher is unclear. It is hard to tell if that searcher wants to learn more about men’s fashion, see videos about men’s fashion, or shop for men’s fashion. Over times, however, search engines have learned that the average search for “men’s pants” yields a click through to a retailer.

The Four Pillars of Optimization

The question remains: How does the apparel retailer—or any other retailer, really—position itself, from a natural-search perspective, to have a place in the broader discussion, at the edges of expressed intent to engage, in order to create a wide funnel and compel as many users as possible to engage with its brand?

There are four basic pillars of search engine optimization that elevate brands to the very widest end of the funnel or to the very top of a particular category.

Pillar 1: Keywords and Targeting. To properly position yourself to be part of a broad conversation, or even to infiltrate a targeted conversation in the search engines, you must have some degree of relevancy or you won’t have the legitimacy, never mind the natural-search ranking, to even be in that conversation. 

To play in the “men’s fashion” game, your site needs to have the keywords “men’s fashion” as a prominent part of it. To be relevant, you must have a clear relationship with the topic at hand. An association with a subject alone does not make you part of the discussion. “Stylish and affordable men’s pants, $79.99, free shipping” doesn’t put you at the table, in the same way that saying, “I once hit three home runs in a high school baseball game” does not reasonably associate you with Albert Pujols, either.

To be part of the conversation, research and target those keywords that show the widest visibility and greatest point of consumer engagement. Create relevancy on your site by creating content that is appropriate to the target keyword, create pages that are appropriate to the target, and create excitement around that target.

Pillar 2: Controllable Variables—On-site Optimization. In the world of the Internet, the only things that you can totally control are the elements of your own site. By mastering these elements, such as titling and tags, as well as search-optimized navigation and site structures, you can create an environment that is more conducive to search engine visibility for the terms that you target. These elements are crucial to the search engine spiders’ being able to access all of your content. And, of course, in order to play at the widest end of the discussion, you need to have great content around the target. (See Pillar 4.)

Pillar 3: Influenced Variables—Off-site Optimization. Off-site optimization, or more fundamentally, link building, is a core exercise in building overall awareness. A laserlike focus on link building from topically relevant sites with anchor text that targets the target keyword is the key to achieving top visibility for a particular keyword.

While this may seem like a dark art to some, targeted link building drives relevance to your site for your target keywords, and the search engines recognize this as authoritative and highly relevant context. The goal is to find the appropriate link partners and craft the right message to get them engaged enough to give you a link with your target keyword as anchor text. We typically find that these kinds of link-building exercises take enormous time and focus.

Pillar 4: Content. Content, they say, is king. And the single biggest reason that apparel retailers in particular have not seen success in infiltrating the broadest kinds of discussion on the Internet is that they do not create much content outside of product descriptions. To compete with the editorially driven sites and earn your right at the premiere place for the largest search volume query, you must have content that is unique, targeted, well executed, and focused on both the search engines and the users.

As with editorial players, the goal of retailers is to drive visibility through the leveraging of your domain expertise. Further, the quality content helps drive the value of your presentation at the edges of search intent. These kinds of presentations create true value for your consumer, and that, combined with the high quality expressed in your brand promise, will help drive the searcher to click through to your site rather than an affiliate site or an editorial site. Once engaged with this content, the searcher is accelerated into your sales funnel at high velocity.

Content is difficult to create, but the double benefit of increased presentation and velocity-driven customers is simply unparalleled. To wit, watch what the Gilt Groupe has done to drive natural-search optimization into an ecommerce model.  They cleverly use content, friend-building and in-bound links to drive up their rankings and, most recently, partnering with the television show White Collar, it’s becoming a storyteller rather than a retailer.

Traditional retailers are under attack. From direct brand solicitations to socially savvy shoppers hunting through Polyvore and Shopbop, they have never faced so much competition. But by focusing on the four pillars of search, a retailer can take back its voice, grab hold of the conversation, and drive ahead its editorial voice and shape the market and maximize its unique advantages. 

Search is powerful…but only when you use it.

Last week, Yahoo Search disappeared. While not the first search engine, Yahoo was the granddaddy to almost every major innovation in search. Yahoo was fast and nimble. They were experimental and innovative. And perennially underappreciated.

A long time ago, I worked at Inktomi, a former high-flier in the search space (before the crash in 2000). Yahoo was the major competition. There was Yahoo, and everyone else. Yahoo acquired Inktomi in 2002 and incorporated the best parts of the Inktomi algorithm and technology into Yahoo. So I feel like I owned part of Yahoo’s backbone. And truly, I am sad to see Yahoo’s search engine disappear. But it is being replaced by an equally innovative, laser-focused search engine, Bing.

So there should have been a seismic event last week when Yahoo replaced their natural search experience and replaced it with Bing, but I am not sure that anyone noticed who isn’t in the search game. For marketers, nothing changed,  except that instead of considering the potential impact of three major search engine (Google, Yahoo and Bing) now there are only two. Perhaps life got a little easier last week. I don’t really know. But what I do know is that a once great search engine collapsed last week, and it barely kicked up any dust.

What this tells me is that there is no one algorithm that rules the roost. They are all interchangeable. For the marketer, natural search is a channel to maximized regardless of what the underlying technology approach is. The natural search algorithm is there to be understood and engaged with an eye to creating your brand’s unfair advantage.

The name on the engine doesn’t matter. Focus on results and opportunity, not on the logo near the search box.

Before any impact can be assessed, however, it’s good to know where we’re starting from, so let’s take a moment to assess the status quo.  Just who are marketers already reaching via the three big search engines?  Is the Bing searcher the same as the Yahoo! searcher, and the same as the Google searcher too?  Not exactly.  comScore data for July reveals some notable demographic differences in age, income and household size.

Bing Skews Older, Fits Well With Yahoo!

While Bing has made modest gains against Google in the overall share of searches since its launch, it isn’t capturing as many younger searchers.  One-quarter of Bing’s searchers (26%) are under age 24, while the comparable share for Google is one-third.  The good news for the integration of Yahoo! and Bing is that the two have very similar age demographics overall, with most segments within one percentage point of each other.  Of the three engines, Bing has the absolute largest share of the 45-54, 55-64, and 65+ age brackets.  So while Bing is no doubt serious about taking search share from Google in the long run, it probably won’t be able to do so without a concerted effort to grab more of the younger segments.

High-Income Searchers (Slightly) Prefer Google

Household income demographics for the three search engines vary less widely than age demographics, and moreover, income data hews closely to the distribution for the entire Internet.  That said, Google does have a slightly larger share of the highest-income searchers ($100,000+).  Bing has a slight advantage among middle-income searchers, while Yahoo! has greater share than its competitors in the lower income brackets (under $40,000).

Yahoo! Has More Singles, Google Has More 3+ Households 

Household sizes for users of the three search engines largely mirror those of the entire Internet user base.  Yahoo! has a slightly larger share of single-person households, while Google has a slightly larger share of 3+ person households, presumably families with children.  (Presence of children data, not shown here, indicate that all three engines have a similar share of these households, at 55-58%, which again closely mirrors the average Internet user’s household.)

Search is a big channel. There are die-hard people in the SEO world who never think about paid search as part of search…it’s advertising they say. There are PPC jockeys who have disdain for anything that doesn’t have an easy metric and a quick way to A-B test. Anything else is squishy, they say.

Well, any debate that pits natural search vs. paid search is missing the synergistic whole.

It’s all SEARCH.

Search is about the traffic that comes from results to specific queries. And while there is a difference between the way paid and natural search works, as a marketer, it may help you to think of them as a single channel, because they work together so well.

Imagine that your best paid keyword is dog bones and you pay $1.00 per click. And you drive some high quality traffic through paid search. And then you start to grow your presence in natural search. Let’s say you get dog bones into the top 10, and you start driving big traffic from that word. You might think about giving up your paid search budget for that word, because your natural search has started driving traffic at volume, and you have become overly efficient in your paid advertising for dog bones. You can no longer amp up the paid search volume by bidding more…so paid search can no longer put the pedal to the metal, as they say.

What has happened here? Has paid search lost it’s magic? NO WAY.

Let’s jump into some math – if you generate 5,000 clicks from dog bones via paid search per month, you are spending $5,000. If you are making a good ROI on that amount then great! But as your natural search visibility creeps up, you may find that it is only possible to spend $4500 at the same efficiency. Does this mean that that dog bones is no longer a good word? Absolutely not.

If you expand your focus and look at paid search and natural search together as a single channel, you might see a different story. Your TOTAL traffic from the word dog bones may have skyrocketed. Think of your 4,500 clicks from paid search in the context of the 5000 clicks that you are also getting from natural search. If you look at this as a whole channel, your average cost per click has just been more than halved (or your ROI has more than doubled). And if I use my fancy MBA calculator, I am pretty sure that either result is pretty great.

If we go back to your original budget of $5,000 for 5,000 clicks, and we look at your current situation of 9,500 clicks for $4,500, you will see that you are in a much better position with regard to the word dog bones. And you have at least $500 of budget that you can apply to testing new words, or amping up the volume on a word like dog bone holders where you don’t have premiere organic search visibility.

Search as a whole is a more powerful tool than looking at the natural and organic sides independently. Search is too big to be contained in silos. Let’s think that paid and natural search are different sales funnels, but they all point to the same cash register….yours.

Tim Kilroy is Vice President of Natural Search at PM Digital.