Have you ever thought of what you would do if your site was well positioned for all of your main keywords? Say you are DeWALT. What happens when you rank well for drills, miter saws, electric drills, cordless drills, power tools, reciprocating saw, etc, etc?

Do you stop SEO altogether?

Maybe you do. But what about the mindset of someone who uses these tools?

Why are they seeking out drills and saws?
Could they be repairing their homes?
Is there something DeWALT could offer to add value?

Recently I had the privilege of doing some research around a few kids games online. It became immediately noticeable that many big companies who could easily leverage the strength of their massive domains aren’t thinking of the “application” keywords. Application keywords often focus on how people USE the things you offer on your site.

After reading a case study many months ago on weather.com’s expansion to keywords like “Outdoor Weddings” it has had me thinking for some time.

Since SEO is still so new to so many companies, many are still targeting their primary keywords only and that is a great start! Heck, most companies are totally screwing up opportunities to rank well for primary terms. What do you do when you had a great ROI, exhausted top rankings, and maximized traffic for those primary keywords?

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After posting a blog entry on our site titled, “How Big Brands Screw Up Search,” I got to thinking… let me pick out one such company and give a live example. Today, I am picking on Nike.

I did a search on Nike as a keyword, and just that word alone came back with over 2.5 million searches performed last month according to the SEObook.com tool, which uses Overture’s keyword suggestion tool. This does not include the long-tail terms like Nike football cleats, Nike air force one, Nike sports bra, Nike golf balls and the millions of other searches done with the word Nike in it somehow. I wouldn’t be surprised if the branded Nike search volume were in the 15 million range.

Then think about all the unbranded search terms where Nike could get people to consider its brand — terms like golf shoes, golf gifts, golf clubs, footballs, football cleats, off-road running shoes, running shoes. You can just imagine that the number of searches done for these terms could dwarf the search volume for Nike’s branded terms. (Not to mention that an iProspect study found that roughly 36% of people associate ranking higher with being a better brand.)

OK, so now we know the potential. Let’s uncover how Nike is missing the boat and how it could right the ship with a slightly more focused effort on SEO and improving the customer experience of customers coming from search engines.

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Wake up big brands. You are NOT leveraging one of your greatest assets when it comes to making yourselves more visible on search engines! Having started my SEO career working with companies like Barnes & Noble, Mercedes Benz, WWF, De Beers, and the like, I often found myself going up head-to-head with web site managers and brand police that shot down every small tweak to help our client rank well. Brand managers need to understand something has changed a bit and a recent Iprospect study indicates what that “something” is:

36% of search engine users believe that the companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top brands in their field. This represents a modest increase over the 2002 figure of 33% but still reinforces the increasing importance search can have on brand lift.

Big brands like Nike, New Balance, BMW, Infiniti, Lexus, A Diamond is Forever, Tiffany, Lunesta, Ambien, and others typically miss out on positioning their brand at the top of search results because someone in charge of the brand doesn’t understand search and the unrealized potential or opportunity cost of not ranking well. They want to keep the integrity of their flashy site at the expense of ranking highly, which as we see above only helps them position themselves as leaders in their space.

The reason why I mention not leveraging their greatest assets at the onset of this post is quite simply because most of these brands have owned their domains FOREVER (on the web forever is usually about 10 years). Many of these big brands have tens of thousands of links pointing to their web sites, which would significantly push them into contention for top spots on search engines for terms like running shoes, luxury cars, luxury convertibles, diamonds, or engagement rings. If you spoke with the marketing managers or CEOs of these companies and illustrated how often these terms are typed in on search engines every month, then combined that with the understanding that ranking highly for unbranded terms helps build how their brands are perceived by customers, do you think that they would say who cares? I don’t think so.

Remember above we stated that 36% of search engine users associate high rankings with being a top brand.

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