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How Realistic Are The Nigritude Ultramarine SERPS?

SUMMARY. The Google search results pages for the term "nigritude ultramarine" resemble the results for many, highly competitive markets, with two distinct differences. A marketer viewing the results knows at a glance several important things.

July 6, 2004.If you are a marketing consultant taking on a new account in an unfamiliar industry, one of your first steps might be to run a search in Google on what you think are the industry's prime keywords. If you run a search in Google for "nigritude ultramarine" what you get back in the search engine results pages - known by all as the SERPS - actually resembles many industries, except for the lack of ads.

When you see the very keywords you searched for densely packed into the results page, lined up in military formation, and rushing at you from every Title, description snippet, and URL - as you see from a search for nigritude ultramarine - then you immediately know several things.

You know that you're a latecomer, and that the industry is already filled with professionals fighting for share. So it will be a serious business to take share through optimization methods - costly for your client - and even more serious to keep it once other webmasters become aware of you.

--2--
In a real industry, a results page looking the way nigritude ultramarine looks would also be crowded with AdWords along the right. You know from your first glance that there will be twenty to thirty advertisers here, spread throughout the first three pages of the SERPS, and probably with markedly higher bids taking the very top ad placements, implying significant jumps in cost to move from low in the page to high in the page. But this is where you'd probably start playing, because you know the customers are seeing what you're seeing too.

You know that all these web pages and ads have played a part in educating the customers. The searchers for the term become quickly aware that no further searching is required - it's all right here, and it's a buyer's market. Searchers and customers will have to sift through the sites for likely best matches, and if they were in a hurry they'll probably slow down as soon as they see the information density.

Searchers may take a couple of weeks now, and they're probably bookmarking, making a short list of preferred vendors, from both the ads and the natural results.

Surprisingly many will choose from the ads alone, figuring these vendors are running a more professional operation. [for a percentage breakdown of searchers preferring ads in Google versus Yahoo versus AOL versus MSN, see our latest UPDATE - Search category April 2004]

Often searchers will browse on the weekend, and come to work Monday ready to make a purchase through their final choice.

--3--
Impulse buying on the part of the searcher is not the primary dynamic here in a SERPS as crowded as the nigritude ultramarine has become in just two months. In this kind of environment, advertising becomes a very appropriate thing for a webmaster to do. It's the easiest place to gain the greatest income from the least effort, and in the greatest safety from competitive attack.

What's odd about the nigritude ultramarine SERPS is the lack of advertising. It is almost inconceivable in today's online world that any object - even something totally non-commercial - could generate this much attention and hard work from webmasters without a lot of people seeing a potential monetization value that appears worth paying the cost of advertising to realize.

For a fuller treatment of the advertising potential of the nigritude ultramarine contest, and to take a look at the solo advertiser who did take the plunge, see the story called "The Man Who DID Belong".

But before that, there is another oddity that separates the nigritude ultramarine SERPS from the real world, namely the site at the very top of the list, which we deal with in the following story, called "The Man Who Didn't Belong"...

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