Last year I had the good fortune to rank highly (about 4th) on Google for “compare the meerkat” and for a few weeks received hundreds and sometimes thousands of visitors every single day. This goes to show that anybody running an offline campaign needs to carry out some level of SEO otherwise the online search traffic won’t arrive at the right place.
If you have spent a lot of money on a campaign site then you don’t want searchers to arrive at somebodys blog instead.
As you can see from the screenshot below the search results for the Gio Compario campaign have been well and truly taken over by SEO & marketing blogs such as SEOptimise & Andrew in the organic results while several competitors are trying to hijack traffic with PPC ads.
In an ideal world the campaign site http://www.giocompario.com should be ranking first followed by http://www.gocompare.com in second and then Twitter/Facebook third and fourth. If the campaign is going to be a long one then it would be a good idea to try and register a trademark to stop people including the campaign name in their PPC ads.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
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Whilst I’d see the adverts and could see that this was some sort of attempt to compete with the meerkats, I had no idea that this bloke even had a name let alone a website/facebook/twitter account.
With compare the market they made it clear from the off there were two websites, and whilst clearly promoting themarket were at the same time pushing themeerkat – there isn’t even a link from the gocompare website to giocompario.com!
I don’t think this campaign will have anything like the success of themeerkat, in terms of successful character branding, and will soon enough just be recognised as an annoying fat bloke singing – but whether that works for their brand identity I suppose is another question.
More comments from Dave AshworthNice work…this blog post is showing at #7 for the term and also in a news result
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Thanks for sharing this article, it was just what i lookd for.
More comments from dotseoThanks agine, i had addet this site to my rss feed reader now
Genius bit of hijacking, but nothing can take away that the advert itself is probably the most annoying advert in a long time, but hey he was only a tenner!
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Thanks for the post and for sharing such a resourceful article here. It really helps a lot..
More comments from tag44Google needs to improve its results. The search engine says it wants companies to focus on their customers, not on Google. That makes sense, the customer is much better off when they are the sole focus of a company’s investment. This is Google’s problem. It is a waste of time and money frankly having to dedicate resources to compensating for Google’s difficulty in providing their search customers with relevant results when that time and money can be better employed making better products and services for your customers.
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Good point Patrick. You see it more and more on TV adverts, companies suggesting that users just search for a slogan .. but what they fail to do is get themselves positioned in that Top 10 solidly before they start the advertising campaign. Often the slogans that they use are really easy to rank for aswell, so they’re not doing themselves any favours if they don’t think of SEO first and foremost.
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