And My Mother Said I’d Never Learn Anything From Comic Books
I can’t begin to tell you the number of times that I’ve heard e-treprenuers and other search marketers tell me that organic rankings are “the only thing that matters,” especially organic rankings on those super-competitive short-string keywords that are going to do amazing business for their online store when they inevitably get to page one in the SERPs (search engine results pages). While the notion is far from being a pleasant fiction, it’s not the sure thing that it’s sold as, either.
The fact of the matter is that traffic into any Web site is generated by any number of sources, and that each of them has some inherent value. The broad view of SEO isn’t strictly limited to search, but to putting sites in front of eyes in as many ways as we feasibly can. When I talk about this philosophy to people who are stuck on getting top placement on page 1 of Google, the most common reaction is balking at my lassez-faire attitude toward search.
But pursuing holistic visibility instead of simply going after a handful of high-value keywords bears fruit. I’ve got charts.
Being a marketer and a comic book geek, I’ve probably spent an unusual amount of time thinking about the way the major comics publishers market online, and it’s interesting to compare the approaches taken by Marvel Comics and their crosstown rival DC Comics.
DC has managed to snag a first page natural search listing for the term “comics,” which has an average search volume of nearly 3 million per month. Which is a lot. Both “Marvel Comics” and “DC Comics” garner less than 200,000 searches per month, and “comic books,” where Marvel is on the front page, nets under 300,000 monthly queries on average. Also factoring in the most popular characters that each company publishes, we get 2,740,000 searches for “Batman,” and 673,000 searches for “Iron Man.”
Just playing a numbers game here, it looks like Marvel is the underdog. DC has first grab at about 6 million potential visitors from Google, and that’s going to equate to higher traffic, right?
Well, just take a look at the chart:
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Marvel’s nearly doubling the competition’s monthly traffic over the past twelve months.
The big question is “How?” Especially if you’re going to argue that DC has better organics.
First, let’s think about direct traffic. If you look at Marvel’s blue line, you’ll see the beginnings of a massive spike in traffic in March 2008, just at the time when advertising was starting to ramp up for a movie you might have heard of:
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Poster art from MovieWeb.com
Down below that 5.2.08 release date? Check it out:
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IronManMovie.com redirects to IronMan.Marvel.com, which means that Marvel’s domain is benefitting from all the offline Iron Man advertising that was rearing its head at that time.
DC’s viral strategy in promoting The Dark Knight was a success – it generated substantial word of mouth online for the movie – but its Web sites, TheDarkKnight.com and IBelieveInHarveyDent.com, have no connection to the DC Comics site. In fact, TheDarkKnight.com is hosted on parent company Warner Bros. domain. That means that Warner is competing with itself on “Batman” related searches instead of redirecting those sites back to DC’s home domain.
Also starting May, both companies began publishing their big summer crossover events. Marvel ran house ads in its books, aired TV spots and creating other promotions pointing back to EmbraceChange.org. Again, this redirects back into the Marvel.com domain, maximizing captured traffic to the site. On the other hand, DC did a fair amount of traditional press to promote its Final Crisis miniseries, but did nothing to drive clickthrough to its site.
The other component of the equation is the social Web – Web 2.0. Beyond a message board and a podcast that hasn’t been updated for over a month, DC doesn’t interact with social media in any meaningful way. Its crosstown rival has a huge presence on Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and other social sites, all of which send traffic into their site.
In terms of on-site content, Marvel wins in that arena, too, with multiple daily updates, a comprehensive character database, editor blogs and free digital comics. While DC has some online content, but much of it is reprinted from in-print sources. One of the SEO lessons that’s worth noting here is that all of the destination content (content that encourages regular, return visits) on Marvel.com creates a ton of pages being indexed by Big G and captures a huge number of long-tail keywords that don’t get a large amount of search volume, but taken in aggregate, lead to the big traffic numbers on display in the chart above.
So, what’s the takeaway? The real key to getting traffic into your Web site is a combination of:
Visibility
Authentic social presence
Organic search results
Content that engages your customers
Does your online strategy cover all those bases?
jeff.stolarcyk
Great analysis. I really enjoyed your post.
I think the reason for confusion is terminology. When you talk about broad view of SEO I’d say it’s better to use “Internet Marketing”. SEO is a part of your internet marketing efforts that is concentrated on getting high visibility in search engines. But it is not the only one that is effective today, just as you noted. I’d say with everything switching to web, it makes sense to call it just “Marketing”. Offline and online worlds are getting more and more interconnected. And internet marketing even for web only based businesses is not going to be enough. We can see major players in advertising crossing borders more and more often - Google with their video, radio and print ads, major channels and newspapers using web more and more. It makes sense.
Andrew, thanks for the comment.
I think you’re right - in time we’re going to see the “Internet” fall off of Internet Marketing and start viewing on and offline strategies as part of a cohesive whole.
Thanks Jeff, very informative and an even better comparison…