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Search is some­times referred to as the “data­base of intent”. The reason is simple – never before have pro­spects so clearly told advert­isers what they want before they arrive at the site. The trick is to max­im­ise this opportunity.

The concept of deep-linking isn’t spe­cific to search. It applies to all online mar­ket­ing activ­ity, such as dis­play, email and social. The dif­fer­ence how­ever, is that the search phrase is an addi­tional data point that should be used to seg­ment and effect­ively fun­nel the user towards desired action.

Con­sider the site struc­ture below for a moment:

Just a few years ago, it wasn’t rare to find cam­paigns that were all point­ing to the home page (or worse, the many times severely lim­ited internal site search functionality).

The first issue with this approach, is that someone arriv­ing from a spe­cific search such as “product x specs” will not imme­di­ately see the product they are expect­ing, and pos­sibly just hit the back but­ton in frus­tra­tion and appear as a “bounce” in the site analytics.

Secondly, even if they are determ­ined enough, and decide to give the site a second chance, they still have to find their way through via internal nav­ig­a­tion and search func­tion­al­ity. This leaves them vul­ner­able to get­ting lost, frus­trated and ulti­mately giv­ing up, and return to their search engine of choice for a bet­ter match to their ori­ginal query.

Simplist­ic­ally, there are two levels of seg­ment­a­tion when it comes to keywords and land­ing pages:

1. Type: e.g. Cat­egory, Product, Service
2. Intent: e.g. buy, com­pare, com­plain, trouble shoot

At the first level, advert­isers will send cat­egory searches (e.g. “print­ers”) to a cat­egory page, and product spe­cific searches (e.g. “brand X model Y”) to the product page. Isn’t that nice and simple?

At the second level, the advert­iser will util­ise the search mod­i­fi­ers to bet­ter under­stand what the con­sumer wants. E.g. a search for “brand X model Y spe­cific­a­tions”) will send traffic to the cor­res­pond­ing sub page or sec­tion of the land­ing page.

While this might seem like com­mon sense and straight for­ward to imple­ment, there are a few things to con­sider. The second level of seg­ment­a­tion increases the com­plex­ity of the cam­paign by quickly mul­tiply­ing the num­ber of indi­vidual land­ing pages. These indi­vidual land­ing pages need to be checked so they are up to date, access­ible and have the required call to action for up sell or cross-sell.

In return when all stars align, advert­isers can expect hap­pier site vis­it­ors and improved con­ver­sion rates.