Popular search keywords for electronics products were investigated on the three most widely used search engines: Google, Yahoo Search, and MSN Search. WebPosition 4's Reporter was used to collect data each day from 12/23/05 - 1/5/06 and again on 2/9/06 for the following online retailers and keywords:

The Results

For the dates investigated, the following domains had the best overall organic search visibility as defined by WebPosition 4's Keyword Visibility Index (KVI):

One thing that is immediately apparent from this data is that different companies emphasize search engine marketing more than others do. For example, Dell has strong presence in both the organic and paid search result categories, while Amazon.com has strong organic visibility and makes moderate use of paid search. Clearly, both of these companies are using search engine marketing to their advantage and consider it an important part of their overall marketing strategies.

Targeting specific days for the appearance of your paid search ads over the holiday season is a strategy that may increase sales, and is a good example of how search savvy companies make use of paid search. Dell, for example, made use of paid search for the keyword "HDTV" only on Christmas and the day after, as shown by this WebPosition 4 graph:

By contrast, for the key phrase "LCD Monitors", Dell had sponsored ads running consistently throughout the study:

It appears that Dell places greater value on the phrase "LCD Monitors" than on the term "HDTV" from day to day, but wanted to use the opportunity of the holiday to market its offering of HDTV products.

Other companies, like BestBuy and CircuitCity, have limited organic search visibility, but have made an effort to compensate for this with paid search. This is a good strategy if your web site has limited visibility in organic search for keywords of interest. CircuitCity actually had the highest paid search visibility of all companies investigated. The KVI chart below depicts that CircuitCity maintained significant paid search visibility over the duration of the study:

The organic search KVI numbers for CircuitCity are significantly lower than their paid search numbers, as shown below:

A third group of companies, such as RadioShack, OfficeDepot, and Staples.com, had no organic visibility at all for the keywords investigated, but did have a small paid search presence. There were even a few companies that had zero visibility in either category. These companies either do not value the keywords presented here, or perhaps are not emphasizing online search in their overall marketing strategies. They might be making use of other advertising media like television or radio, or might even be relying on brand recognition to generate traffic for their web site.

Conclusion

The search engine visibility highlighted in this study is limited to a specific keyword list, and obviously does not present a complete picture of these companies' search engine marketing strategies. The study does, however, suggest that some companies could benefit by increasing their organic search visibility on these three major search engines.

In conducting this study, I made no effort to evaluate these web sites for use of best practices with respect to search engine optimization. However, I would like to emphasize that employing search engine optimization techniques with the help of a useful tool like WebPosition 4 can improve any web site's organic search presence.

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