Search marketing maturity model (draft)

This is a follow-up to our commentary A Search Marketing Maturity Model that ran this morning in MediaPost.

Talking with hundreds of search marketers over the past several years, I’ve been struck by two massive sources of variance:

• the level of sophistication any given organization has in search marketing;
• the many different dimensions that contribute to optimized search marketing;

Search marketing is a relatively complex discipline, yet many companies still seem to underestimate the scope of the challenge. It’s not clear to them what are all the steps they need to take, in what order, and how they interrelate to each other.

So they focus on a handful of issues — whatever seems to be on fire at the time — while losing sight of others. For instance, they might invest a lot of effort in keyword targeting, but drop the ball on improved analytics.

In our business — providing software and services for high-performance landing pages and microsites — we frequently encounter search marketing teams who are busy getting clicks, but have little control in what happens after the click. That’s like having two people drive a car: one takes the wheel, the other has the pedals — oh, and both wear blindfolds and earplugs. Search marketing only achieves ROI when the post-click follow through works.

And the range of synergy between pre-click search and post-click follow through is immense. Landing pages aren’t simply a check-the-box, yes-or-no proposition: yes, we have landing pages; no, we don’t. There are at least four dimensions on which you can measure how good an organization is at leveraging landing pages in their search marketing:

• how easily/quickly/cheaply they can build and deploy new pages;
• how coordinated landing pages are with keywords/ad creatives;
• how specifically do different landing pages match different ads;
• how sophisticated is the testing done in landing page optimization;

These are intertwined with broader issues such as performance metrics, audience segmentation, and reaction speed to market opportunities and threats. Their success is dependent on everything else that’s being done to cost effectively get the right people to click. And it goes up the chain to the overall management of search and how deeply executives are involved in its mission and integration with the rest of the organization.

That’s just one example of the complexity of good search marketing.

Given all these facets of successful search marketing — and their interdependency — I think it would be helpful to have a maturity model for search marketing that lays out all these different aspects and provides a roadmap for how companies can advance on them, strategically and in parallel.

The benefit of a well-defined maturity model is that it gives practitioners a common framework by which to assess their organization, benchmark it against others, and develop a plan for improvement. Often, there is not just one achievement associated with a particular level, but rather a series of capabilities across several dimensions.

Here is my initial draft of a Search Marketing Maturity Model:

Search Marketing Maturity Model (draft)

I emphasize the word draft, because although we live and breathe the post-click half of search marketing, there are many other search marketers and agencies who have greater experience in the pre-click half of search marketing. I heartily welcome suggestions, objections, refinements — any wisdom that you have to offer to make this model better and more accurate. Please contribute your expertise!

This is not an ion model — there’s no copyright on the above image. This is an “open source” project. I think everyone in search could benefit from a common frame of reference that systematically slices up the complexity of search into a logical, unbiased maturity model. As this moves forward, we’d be happy to move this under the umbrella of SEMPO or another vendor-neutral organization.

Before starting this project, I searched to see what other maturity models might already exist for our industry. I found a great Web Analytics Maturity Model by Gartner, an SEO Maturity Model by Search Enginuity, and an SEM Maturity Model that had been promoted by SEMDirector, but I can’t seem to get to anything other than the Covario home page when I try to reach it now. If there are other models, please provide a reference to them.

Our goal should be a holistic model that incorporates the best of all these perspectives.