As the advertising industry moves away from print media and TV viewers fast forward through commercials, marketers scramble to find new ways to get products and brands into the public eye. At the same time, CMOs and CFOs are demanding each dollar work harder. Enter Enquisite’s newest product, released on May 19 into the tumultuous world of search engine optimization. Enquisite Campaign is the latest addition to a suite of services that hope to bring credibility and organization to search engine optimization (SEO). This application hopes to allow digital marketers and SEO agencies to find ways to improve organic search rankings, as well as manage, track, and report the improvements.
There have traditionally been two popular ways to achieve search engine visibility. The first, and currently most popular, option is through a pay-per-click campaign, where a company pays to have its site automatically returned at the top of a results list when certain keywords are entered. The other option, which Enquisite Campaign focuses on, is through organic search results -- the unpaid results that appear below PPC links on a search engine’s results page. These results are ordered and displayed according to rankings based on a number of pre-determined factors taken into consideration by a search engine’s particular algorithm. Enquisite Campaign takes these factors and shows clients what they can do to improve their organic rankings, thereby driving more traffic to their site.
One of the biggest factors in improving organic search ranking is keyword recognition. In other words, a site needs to optimize its use of keywords that are popular terms used in searches. Enquiste Campaign uses a specific algorithm to determine keywords that would boost a client’s SERPs. This algorithm defines the keywords that may drive more traffic to the site, but are not currently being utilized. It then offers the potential value for each of these keywords, telling clients which of these words are the best candidates for optimization. By adding these keywords to a website’s contents, advertisers expect better visibility, and the opportunity to measure and adjust keyword portfolios over time. This helps them find ways to minimize risk and maximize return. According to Chairman and CEO Mark Hoffman, “a few simple clicks quickly validate an opportunity, run scenarios, and quantify expected ROI from organic search campaigns.”
Another major difference between Enquisite Campaign and SEO campaigns of the past is the payment model. In the past, SEO has been mostly contracted out to professional agencies using a flat fee model. “The changes and improvements made through these contractual activities have historically been difficult to measure and specific outcomes tough to track,” says Hoffman. Breaking the flat fee tradition, Enquisite Campaign has decided to follow the PPC example, using a performance-based model – by running the numbers, Enquisite Campaign is able to see what an advertiser could stand to profit, and sets a fee from there. “It provides a baseline organic value for each keyword – analogous to the market-based cost-per-click price paid for search campaigns,” Hoffman explains. This is a new technique for an SEO campaign, but those at Enquisite hope that “by aligning an SEO model more along the lines of PPC pay-for-performance, more significant investment would be expected from search advertisers in organic search.”
Enquisite Campaign hopes to bring order to what the company sees as a disjointed market. Boasting results in real-time, and with capabilities comparable to PPC, Enquisite believes that, in coming years, it will create new standards for organic search and SEO. “In the future,” says Hoffman, “CMOs and their agencies will allocate budgets to organic search in the same way as PPC. Website optimization will increasingly happen in real-time. Customer acquisition will be faster, cheaper, and easier due to the flow of highly relevant traffic enabled through our platform and suite of services, including Enquisite Campaign.”
(www.enquisite.com)