Google Search Ads Rile Its Big Customers.
The issue is that big brands are angry because of a practice called 'Piggybacking" where smaller competitors or resellers use the brands trademarked names, slogans or catch phrases to compete for display ad or pay per click traffic. The example on the right show's the ads the display when someone does a search for Holiday Inn Orlando.What's interesting is that Holiday Inn wins the entire front page organically on this search. If I'm typing in Holiday Inn I would think I'm looking for Holiday Inn and 99% of the time I'm going to click on the organic results anyway.
What the Brands are missing while they focus on this, is all the other terms that are associated with travel that they should be targeting.
This is where a widespread corporate blogging strategy will help them a lot. Blog posting software that organizes content around topics and perhaps more importantly in travel blogs; location. All this will expand the reach of any given brand and drive much higher engagement.
What's interesting about this is that the Big Brands are ceding local search to the smaller local companies. Blogging has proven to be a great tool for local search (watch for a new whitepaper shortly) and because of the low cost and easy adoption of SaaS tool like Compendium Blogware, it's the local SMB's who are the early adopters.
But this is also an amazing opportunity for the big brands. They have more people, and they have people who are in the local community..this combination gives them the unique resources to generate more content more frequently and will lead the big brands to ultimate search success.
