A question of funnels

All of us who have dabbled a bit in marketing have heard of this word. 

Funnel.

It is that magical vortex where supposedly once you can progress a customer , a sale is imminent. No wonder there is so much of brouhaha around this one word. Customer funnel, sales funnel, marketing funnel …ad nauseum it continues.

So it didn’t take long for internet geeks to come up with another funnel. The search funnel.

Like any other funnel it has two ends, the upper end and the lower end. So let’s see how it works;

Say you are interested in camera’s:

The upper funnel consists of words like camera

The lower end of the funnel consists of a term like canon G1X.

Generally a search marketing agency will combine these two words in a keyword pack, bid like crazy on them, optimize the hell out of them, run cpc and ctr graph charts that will make your mind boggle  and somehow tie it to the sales funnel to show ROI.

Everyone’s happy.

Question is did it really work?

When you type the word camera, no one really knows at what level your interest is. Does it reflect purchasing intent or information hunger intent or “I had nothing else to do and hence was just killing time” intent ?

When you type Canon G1X, you have already narrowed down your own query to a point product. Getting a result on that is a no brainer and creating a keyword pack which optimizes that word is plain simple half -assed.

It is the journey between the word Camera to the word G1X where search plans and search engine marketing needs to make its impact. Making a list of nouns and indexing them can  never help in this journey from a planning perspective.

Adjectives, verbs, adverbs, relations, differentiating factors, keyword analysis, keyword optimized content and pronouns are equally important in responding to a complete search query when the surfer is making this journey.

If your search plans don’t help you in tackling this, then it’s a waste.

A waste of your time. And MONEY. Even with high CTR’s which have zero value.