Why Should You Be Able To SEO For A Brand When You Can’t Do PPC For A Brand?
posted in Affiliate Marketing |
Why should affiliates be permitted to SEO in organic search for a brand (including variations & misspellings), when a merchant already has a restricted paid search policy in place based on the brand?
What makes PPC unique in being isolated and targeted with knee jerk reactions with: over restrictive keyword policies, damnation from some networks & ridicule from some purist SEO affiliates.
Brand bidding is indeed a low hanging fruit, it also serves as a good litmus test to find out how well or poorly a merchant converts to ascertain if that merchant is worth pushing on generics & product related terms.
Putting it simply there is no real difference between SEO & PPC, both are competing for placement on search engines, with SEO there are obviously a whole lot more affiliates doing / exercising this.
SEO is more deliberate, however. A PPC ad can easily appear for a hybrid phrase like “BRAND electrical store” without actually bidding on the brand because they are bidding on on a partial element i.e. “electrical store” “store” or “electrical”. With SEO it’s more deliberate because they physically have to add the brand somewhere into the content or meta tags or url sub domain / directory url. i.e. the brand has to be appearing somewhere on the page/site . With PPC this isn’t necessarily the case & with expanded broadmatch / synonym match / contextual matching on PPC keywords, it’s the PPC’ers that get fingered out by emails or on public forums.
So flipping this on it’s head, if an affiliate can SEO for a brand (i.e. there are no restrictions) why can’t a PPC’er do brand bidding on paid search?
At the moment only a few merchants have SEO restriction policies in place, thankfully. I look forward to the day (not in wanting, but more in dreaded anticipation) when this increases further, this in turn will temporarily deflect attention from affiliates engaging with PPC (and synonym matching issues) where some SEO affiliates quite happily jump on their back. Perhaps they will be able to appreciate how unreasonable it can be when the ball is in their court with the restrictions being imposed upon them.
If an affiliate can SEO for misspells, why can’t a PPC affiliate when there are keyword restrictions in place for paid search bid on variations & misspellings. So what difference is there really between SEO & PPC? I have always considered this blanket rule on not bidding on variations & misspellings inappropiate simply because the merchant is not aware of what they actually all are.
If SEO is rightly or wrongly perceived as NOT being the domain or jurisdiction of the merchant … a taboo area .. then by the same token nor should PPC, let’s remember search engines are a third party & not owned by networks, merchants, agencies nor affiliates. The search engines themselves rank organic listings & sponsored ads according to what they deem most relevant / quality according to their algos & manual tweaks.
To reiterate, what makes PPC unique in being isolated and targeted with knee jerk reactions, damnation from some networks & ridicule from some purist SEO affiliates?
“A merchant should (in theory) be number 1 in search, but in PPC they may be outbid by affiliates – and therefore don’t feel happy about giving commission that way?”
Paid search engines also rank ads according to various “quality” scoring factors & algos, it it’s not uncommon for SEO affiliates to rank higher than merchants for the brand. With hybrid terms & variation / misspellings this is even more common place / common practice. Therefore the merchant is still “giving” (if that is the right word) the commission away. A SEO page might also list other merchants as options to the visitor, thus leakage occurs, or worse still promote an entirely different merchant. There are most probably more cases of malpractice / rogue affiliates or leakage than that from PPC. So why do people of the incorrect mindset tend to consider PPC’ers to be the bad boys/girls?
So next time you see someone appearing for a brand or hybrid phrase on paid search, just look at all the organic listings for that same phrase as comparison, so that you can perhaps gain a little perspective & stop condemning PPC affiliates.
Remember an affiliate doesn’t have to be signed up to program to SEO. So isn’t it better the merchant & a signed up affiliate is duly rewarded with the sale rather than a competitor! Thus isn’t it better to offer an affiliate commission & put in their pocket than the tills of a competitor? Remember an affiliate can still SEO for brand, hybrids & misspells & send to sponsored listings! Where very often the EPC is better than going through the CPA channel, so it doesn’t matter if an affiliate is signed up to the merchants program or not.
Keep remembering merchants DON’T own the search engines!!!
When we see a few merchants introducing SEO restrictions, ask one question, since when has the ownership of an affiliates own website been the intellectual property of a merchant? Never!!! Another risk with SEO restrictions is that the potential customer may end up at a non-affiliate site such a consumer review site or blog where an individual might have had negative reviews about a merchant. People mis-type by re-occuring habit, I understand brand conformality & portrayal in correct spelling, thats another discussion altogether, I am relating more to actual brand spelling & hybrid phrases / longtail, though mispellings do have their dutiful role to assist in directing the flow of traffic to the intended recipient & thus should maybe be accepted by merchants.
You might say with SEO, merchants cannot police all websites whether these are affiliates on non-affiliates that has anything to do with meta tags, content copy etc etc … and that it’s all about control & thus it’s easier to control PPC affiliates.
No, is the simple answer to that one. SEO or Affiliate websites can be simply requested to use javascript links or images where the merchant’s name is referred to in the content & ban the brand name in meta tags or even insert ‘no index,follow’. Why do you think this is unreasonable? It’s similar to the same ludicrous PPC restrictions which are enforced where you can’t mention a merchants name in the PPC ad copy.
In my opinion SEO gets manipulated ethically or abused unethically with dubious practises or suffers greater leakage via SEO on brand related terms a whole lot more than PPC.
It seems daft that you can’t do PPC but you can do long term SEO which can’t be switched off or changed or corrected as easily as PPC, the latter having greater flexibility & speed in portraying a brand or current offering correctly. Compare how quickly a PPC ad can be amended to a webpage being amended and indexed. The PPC ad wins hands down.
“If PPC’ing a brand you are spending money advertising in order to send traffic to the brand owner or divert traffic from the brand owner”
A vast majority of brand PPC is simply to send traffic to the brand owner, however cost has nothing to do with it since both methods have their own costs. SEO affiliates running a website incur elements of cost from hosting to buying a domain to paying employees or out-sourcing & not forgetting those man hours which are an affiliate’s most precious commodity.
“But it’s more like writing a magazine, where as PPC is akin to putting a classified ad in the newspaper saying you promote a merchants stock”
No again, a publisher’s website is still media promoting the services & products a merchant offers, the difference being that a webpage can contain more content on the pre-sell. A PPC affiliate can still direct traffic to their own website in the same manner instead of direct linking to the merchant. However, one advantage of direct linking from paid search is the following blog … Prefill the Basket – Don’t Presell the Customer Twice … where you don’t need to presell the customer twice plus you get 100% transitional flow of traffic without leakage.
Quite simply there has been the incorrect mindset from the beginning by networks, merchants, agencies & even purist affiliates. The catalyst for this was the introduction of the single URL policy by paid search engines like Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing & MSN Adcenter. There were knee jerk reactions from some networks, merchants & agencies who didn’t think about it properly & have not been trained correctly with regard to the bigger picture.
So what if it requires a cultural change? Well, if the mindset was incorrect from outset then maybe it needs to be reprogrammed to bring back into proper alignment & continuity. It’s quite plain to see how a few networks & some employess “don’t get it” that’s because they were not educated correctly in-house & have a false perception of what is right & wrong in the industry.
Granted, it would be like opening pandora’s box if there is a deluge of restrictions enforced on SEO, but perhaps those purist SEO affiliate who slate & slander PPC should take a step back and think of the bigger picture on how lightly they have got off so far.
Should balance be restored by imposing the same restrictions on SEO where there are PPC restrictions? That’s open to thought provoking discussion, I wouldn’t advocate it, but it will balance the restrictive policies currently around, it will still have a long way to go to be as far reaching as PPC restrictions are at the moment, why should one be more ridiculous than the other?
If a user types in the brand, hybrid, misspelling or variation into a search engine then in theory only one organic listing should appear in the organic listings … but there isn’t … by the very nature of search engine it lists options … thus there shouldn’t be that restriction on PPC or SEO either.
Therefore the only exception I see pertaining to paid search is the use of the actual brand / merchants url as the display url in the paid search adverts because of the single display url & that is all, nothing else.
Thought provoking isn’t it? Should the encroachment into brand related SEO be a taboo area to impose restrictions upon, when PPC is treated so heavily handed?
Additional note:
A wider issue might be that those merchants which dedupe might do so against seo one day.
If the industry in some quarters prefer ppc brand bidding, where permissible & where there are BBGs, not to overwrite content affiliate cookies (which I agree), then by the same token though not easily implemented I guess, why shouldn’t the same apply to sales from SEO on brand? And by an additional token shouldn’t SEO on brand not overwrite PPC affiliate bidding on generic & product related terms?
Basically imho there is not really much difference between SEO & PPC, the former has to actually include the brand to appear organically & the latter can be achieved to appear without actually bidding on the brand, so why does / should ppc get isolated for targeting & not seo? i.e. why should seo be allowed for a brand but not ppc. Is seo taboo & ppc not?
You never know, it could all turn Interflora or John Lewis or Marks “&” Spencer, where merchant names have to be gifs or jpegs or javascript or can only be mentioned a certain number of times. Then you have merchants who say their name cannot be part of your directory structure or as a sub domain of your own site. … Don’t you just love affiliate marketing? If it’s not one thing it’s another.
If that is the case then, then search engines should list only one website when a user is searching for a brand or variation, but they don’t, they are search engines by their very nature! & no affiliate, merchant, agency or network owns them.
A question is will this now see an increase in seo restrictions later in the year or was it bound to happen anyway because affiliates were too apathetic & networks too yellow bellied to call a halt to the domino effect by saying “no more”. If it does affiliates will have the 2nd chance & opportunity to stand united, but I won’t hold my breath. On the flip side merchants with an IQ above that of an amoeba or geranium might actually start opening up their keyword policies to a certain degree.
