Website Marketing Gone Wrong at Yahoo, How Can they Get it Right

Writing by Brick Marketing on Thursday, 24 of January , 2008 at 11:17 am

In a recent article on the SEO Book blog, Aaron wall wrote an interesting post regarding Yahoo’s recent troubles. In many ways, the major search engines are similar to much smaller website marketing ventures. Search engines succeed and fail in website marketing just like any type of business. What makes Yahoo of particular interest to me and no doubt so many other people is that there was a time that they were number one. I do not think that Yahoo went wrong with their website marketing, I think that they failed to adapt to the times. Google marketed aggressively from day one and after clawing their way to the top, went on to take progressively more of the search engine market from their competitors.

The following is a series of ten suggestions that Aaron Wall made in his article, that do merit quoting:

1. Increase the relevancy of their directory by actually featuring it (the directory looks like a sidebar to a blog that occupies most of dir.yahoo.com), and by becoming more selective with what sites they accept. You can appreciate their bad marketing of the Yahoo! Directory by the fact that the Google Directory (a DMOZ clone) has a higher PageRank.

2. Yahoo! is testing integrating Del.icio.us data in their search results. Brand Yahoo! search as human edited safe search and find a way to pay end users for their contribution. Payment does not need to be monetary. Take a look at the success of Yahoo! Answers and Del.icio.us and apply those toward search. Google gives Checkout advertisers free ads and a higher ad CTR (which leads to a lower ad cost). Win search marketshare from your users by giving them rebates on your other products as well.

3. Create a branding and awareness campaign around the new Yahoo! Search. Hire someone to do a fake study proving that Yahoo! Search is more relevant than any of the other players. Make sure Ask or Microsoft is ranked #2 ahead of Google.

4. Let users comment on search results AND on listings in search results. Controversy surrounding this will lead to more people talking about and evaluating Yahoo! Search for quality.

5. Launch a new toolbar with a meter like PageRank in it…call it YourRank (or something the emphasizes to the user) that it is their web and what they like. Heavily push that branding message to users locked into Yahoo! email, Yahoo! Stores, and other verticals they interact with.

6. Create a well branded specialty search for bloggers with innovative features that make it easy to follow the conversation both ways. Also launch creative ideas to buy mindshare with other high authority communities (universities, open source projects, etc.).

7. Easily allow advertisers to do keyword research on Yahoo! outside of while they are setting up search campaigns. Create a reliable publicly accessible keyword tool which actually markets the Yahoo! Search product.

8. Give away a lot of useful search market data (like Microsoft recently did with their Ad Intelligence plug-in).

9. Put the Yahoo! brand on the millions of syndicated domain landing pages they power each day.

10. Increase the relevancy of their contextual ad product and increase payouts to 100% (buy marketshare) BEFORE Microsoft openly launches their network. Perform case studies with publishers who saw their Yahoo! monetization go up AFTER switching from AdSense (and other inferior networks) to the NEW Yahoo! Publisher Network contextual ads program. Perhaps pay key leading bloggers 150% just to get them using, talking about, and giving feedback on your ads. Buy marketshare…

While I do not agree with everything in the article, Aaron Wall does have some very good points. Right now Yahoo needs to be particularly mindful of not just Google, but also Microsoft. Microsoft is getting its website marketing right, and it is entirely possible that Microsoft could start wrestling more of Yahoo’s market share away in the not too distant future.

While Yahoo does still have a healthy percentage of the website search market, jobs are on the line. If they continue to slip as they have been, then they have some very dark times ahead. Better application of some common website marketing techniques is all that it would take to get Yahoo headed back in the right direction. The longer they take to implement some aggressive new website marketing strategies, the further they will fall behind and the harder it will be for them to catch up. Variety is the spice of life and I do hope that Yahoo is able to do something about its performance before it is too late. Google taking over even more of the search market is not in the interests of the average website marketer. One could argue that they already control too much.

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Category: Website Marketing

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