The news this week that T Mobile spends £160,000 per week on PPC campaigns made me cringe. To think of a company blindly spending all this money without devoting any of their budget to organic search engine optimisation is totally amazing.
Of course I’m just guessing that they don’t spend anything on organic SEO since they could get on page one for the “money” phrases such as “mobile phones” without spending more than a couple of thousand pounds. Perhaps they spend a fortune on search engine optimisation but just hired the wrong company.
The large mobile phone networks have access to links most people can only dream of. Sites such as the BBC and all the major newspapers are happy to link to these giant companies and yet most of them waste their link equity by not even trying to rank.
O2 has a PPC ad for the term “iphone” and yet their main iPhone page doesn’t rank because they don’t have the word “iPhone” in the title tag.
Patrick
That’s an interesting post but I think it comes down to the mindset of those inside the marketing department.
People buy what they want, instead of what might be good for them.
In this case, PPC offers the marketing department quick, instant, measureable results for campaigns.
The amount of spend is irrelevant. Its the results that matter.
Remember the marketer has the sales boss on his back every day asking how many leads, how many sales etc. The sales department want instant leads, phone calls to the call centre, traffic to the site.
SEO on the other hands is slow and fairly immeasureable IMHO; these guys can’t wait.
And that’s why I say the conversations about SEO have to happen with the brand people – they are not pressured by daily and weekly results. They are custodians of the brand, responsible for increasing awareness in their business category and generating an understanding of the company’s products and how those products help.
Also, the brand people have the budgets that most seo experts would love to tap into.
F.
Hi Patrick,
I wrote a similar post a while back about Apple. They could easily, and likely profitably, rank for MP3 and MP3 player if they did a bit of bare minimum optimization.
Prior to the Googlebomb change, they -did- rank highly for these terms. While you can argue the semantics of being an AAC player vs. an MP3 player… My wife, dad, etc. do not care about that. The iPod is an MP3 player.
Anyway, interesting blog post and I agree with McCullochs. Most large companies are probably more interested in hard numbers, quick results, etc.
Scott