Jon Burney

Don’t worry about the title, I’m not proclaiming and end to domain names altogether, but I’m noticing a new trend in the way websites are advertised in the mainstream media. 

There have been a number of adverts on TV that publicise a search term rather than the URL of a site.  The most recent advert that I’ve seen is for the Madeleine Peyroux album Bare Bones, which asks viewers to search “who is she” for more details. There’s also the advert for the More 4 pub quiz where they say “search online for more4 pub quiz” at the end of the advert (the video is below).

There’s been a few other adverts too, including government adverts for services, and health care. 

I think this is an interesting trend, and shows that companies are starting to realise that having the perfect domain isn’t the most important factor in having a strong web presence. After all just because you have a great domain for your product or service doesn’t mean people are going to know about it. People use search engines every day to find things online, and that’s certainly nothing new, so companies are starting to realise how important search engine optimisation really is. 

The trend towards advertising a search term rather than a domain adds a new twist. In traditional SEO you would identify what search terms people use, and then adjust the content of your website accordingly, in effect you take your website to your potential visitor. But larger companies are now advertising the search term, and creating the popularity and driving traffic towards an already optimised site, for what would otherwise be a mediocre search term.

There’s also the factor of the human memory. Take for example the Madeleine Peyroux website, if I had seen the advert and they advertised, say, madeleinepeyroux.com then I wouldn’t have a clue how to spell it, and would probably  struggle to locate the site. But advertising with the term “who is she” is nice and simple and easy to remember, so chances are I’ll actually find the site I’m looking for.

This isn’t the first time where people have taken an ‘unpopular’ search term and created hype around it to drive traffic. A few years ago somone did just that with the term “miserable failure“, which gained a lot of popularity. That was mainly for a joke, but we’re starting to see commercial companies taking the same approach.

In principle it works, you take an unpopular search term, and create the popularity, but it has it’s down sides. For a start you have to be a fairly large company to have access to the kind of media coverage that’s required to create the popularity in the first place, although it won’t be long before we start to see some kind of guerrilla marketing campaign that achieves the same result. There’s also the issue of SEO itself, you always run the risk that someone else with have a better search engine rank than you. Which undoes all of your hard work in generating the popularity in the first place and could quite easily direct traffic to a competitors website (if it’s better optimised than yours), meaning you’ve spent hard earned money and someone else is reaping the rewards.

This could be the achelies heel in this kind of marketing, but it will be interesting to see if advertising in the mainstream press starts to move away from domain names in favour of search terms.