URL’s are out. Search, is in.
View all posts by Paul AnthonyI noticed today that recently the Royal British Navy’s advertising (created by The Mill in London) has started to use the power of search over actual URLs. Instead of posting the URL to the Mod, (www.royalnavy.mod.uk/careers) as show in their original advert below they are now advertising with the terms “search navy jobs online“, which is the keyphrase that they obviously rank quite highly for, probably to get people more curious, and thus increase clickthroughs. Which shows a move towards the importance of SERP dominance.
Original Advert
This is interesting considering that Cabel noticed SERP searching was widespread in advertising over in Japan, this has now started to filter through into advertising in the UK. With many decent .COM’s now tied up by domain squatters, and Google dominance looking like they can’t be toppled, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more advertising going down this route to market their websites.
Aug 11th 2008
Presumably this is also done on the basis that “navy jobs” is easier to remember than “www.royalnavy.mod.uk/careers”. I also often see ordinary users put website addresses into the search box of Google or Yahoo or whatever is their home page - they don’t seem to know what the address bar is for.
Aug 11th 2008
Hi Dean, thanks for your comments. Yeah, I think this is the way standard issue users seem to use the web, especially if Google happens to be their home page. I dont think its any accident that their search bar is bigger physically than the address bar.