Lesson 2, Online Search, perhaps the greatest advertising product ever invented. Search engines are firmly at the center of the evolution of digital marketing. Five important things that we will talk about. We will discuss how online search provides insights into consumer intent like no other marketing platform or data source. We'll talk about how Google is the dominant search engine in the market today and just how dominant its position is. We'll show how recent increases in "near me" searches indicate new online searches and opportunities for brands and how that has evolved. We'll talk about brands management of online search marketing and how that typically has the singular goal of improving their search rank and why that is important. Finally, we'll hear from a small business owner who discussed the primary role of search plays relative to other important channels that he uses. Ethan Zuckerman, Internet activist, I think, really summed up the need for a search engine appropriately here, "A world where everyone creates content gets confusing pretty quickly without a good search engine." We are certainly living in a world where everyone has the ability to create content, and we see that all the time with all the growing content everywhere around us. Without a search engine, navigating that kind of content would be hopeless. When we are searching, we are really talking about Google. This is the share of search engine referrals and variety of different engines. But you can see Google at nearly 93 percent of those page referrals is by far the most used search engine in the world. Google has evolved quite a bit. If you think back to 1998 when the site was launched, it looked very different, it acted very differently. If you did a search then for, say, Christmas, you would get a number of returns all about Christmas as Google sought to find the information that it felt was relevant for you. With the billions of searches that are happening every single day since that time, Google has learned quite a bit and really understands very much more what consumer intent is. So today, when someone enters in Christmas, one of the first things that they receive as a return is Sunday, December 25th. It's not because when people enter Christmas, they need to know what Christmas is or they need to find some place to buy Christmas gifts. More often than not, they are wondering what day of the week does Christmas fall on. Google has just learned this through the experience of all the searches and now strives to provide that data to consumers quickly. There are other evolutions that we've seen. There's been a huge batch and rise in consumers on mobile devices searching for things near me as search has become a very important part of the consumer decision journey. That has spawned a number of different services and responses from Google, which make the results much more personal. You can type things in like my package, my flights, other things unique to you and get, based on your interaction with different providers, specific unique results for just you, which is something that Google has evolved to provide. Let's take a look at what this Search Engine Results Page, or what we might call the SERP, really looks like. There are a couple of really important elements. At the very top, the keywords that someone is entering in is what we call the query. That can be one word. It can be a phrase. This is the thing that consumers are searching for and looking to an engine to help them find an answer to. There's a couple important other elements as well, ads on the page. There are things that we call product listing ads or shopping ads. These are the texts or the visual-based ads that demonstrate product. These usually show up at the top of that page. Then right below that are the traditional, what we call, text ads, the blue links that are denoted through little symbols as ads as brands seek to provide you, the searcher, with the opportunity to come and see the information that they have, that they think will best answer your query. Below that are what we call organic results. Now these are not ads, these are just content that is pulled from across the Internet. In much the same way that the ads are pulled and ranked, the difference being that the ads always include some bid from an advertiser for that space. The bid does not alone determine the ad rank. There's a number of things that go into whether you turn it up as the first result or the third result or somewhere else. Organic results work much the same way. You just aren't able to buy your way into that results page with the organic results. Now, why is it important for a brand to get a result that is near the top of the page? Well, this eye-tracking study, I think, really answers that pretty definitively. Consumers who go to Google.com and type in a search concentrate on the top results that are returned. These are the places that receive the majority of the clicks that every single brand is seeking. Their intent is to provide some information that they think a consumer would find interesting. So being in the first result is a very choice position for a brand, and there's a lot of things that go into earning that spot for sure, and it can get complicated in the way that the exchange operates. But suffice to say at this point that being returned at the top of that list is the objective of every brand. Now, to get a little more texture into online search as a channel, we're going to talk to Mike Mueller, who is the owner and founder of Federal Moto in Chicago. He'll talk about the unique role that search plays in promoting his small business and how it works relative to other channels, particularly social that he uses. I heard you mentioned Instagram and Facebook. Are there other types of digital marketing? Yes, we just started paying for advertising because of the service department. The custom end of the business is just completely run-off of advertising-wise, off of our website, off of magazines, off of publications, you name it through social media. If I wake up or I get e-mails throughout the day from people who are like, "Hey, I saw your bike in this website or this magazine," and the work just seems to just flow in without a single penny spent on that end. The service end though is different. People go online, they type in tire change. I mean, the competitors are there. So that's why we started typing into Google. Google, we pay for keyword searches that bring up Federal Moto, and it's been great. It drives business. We have the analytics that we see there. We can see what days of the week people are more active. What keywords work, what keywords don't work. So yeah, it's all there from those custom end to the service end, and circling back, it's custom, cool, free service, not as much fun. You got to pay for it to make money.
