New White Paper on the State of Search Marketing

by 360i

The State of Search – A White Paper from 360i
>>Download the complete report here.

Today, we issued a white paper revealing key trends shaping search marketing strategy and introducing PageShare, a new metric for quantifying the success of a brand’s presence on the search engines. As part of this report, a brand SEO audit calculating approximate PageShare was performed for each of the Top 100 Advertisers in the United States.

Key findings from the report:

Universal search listings appear more frequently for non-brand terms: Universal search listings composed 8% of all results analyzed for the brand keywords measured in this study. For non-brand keywords, universal listings made up 57% of results.

Social media has a small, but influential presence within natural search and these types of results are expected to grow significantly in 2010: Social media results appeared for 7% of all analyzed for both the brand and non-brand keywords.

The majority of social media listings are controlled by a party other than the marketer: 77% of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook listings that appeared for brand searches were controlled by a party other than the marketer.

PageShare values vary widely based on industry, keyword type and more: Across the brand terms measured for the Top 100 Advertisers list, most marketers performed well, although those with many digital destinations faired best.

What is PageShare?
PageShare is a weighted value assigned to a marketer’s presence for a set of keyword terms in the search engines. It is calculated by analyzing the number of text listings occupied by a marketer across the first three search engine results pages (SERPs) for a respective keyword or keyword set and then assigning a weight to each of the marketer’s listings based on their rank.

PageShare helps transform search engine rankings into a straightforward “shelf space” metric so that marketers know their share of visibility for a given term or set of terms. It is a critical component to any marketer’s digital strategy and overall presence in the search engines.

To read more about PageShare and see how the Top 100 Advertisers stack up, download the complete report here.

Filed under: Search Marketing