With 117,000,000 Google results using the search word “coke”, the Coca-Cola company is a prime example of shining web content delivered via search engine marketing. For over a century, Coca-Cola has led many successful marketing campaigns boasting exceptional content using both traditional and non-traditional media. This great grandfather of a company has evolved its marketing strategy to include various social networking sites to include an online newsletter, The Optimist, and their blog, Unbottled, which positions the company as an activist in environmentalism, humanitarianism, and thought leadership to name a few. Then there’s the Food & Recipes page with recipes such as “Coke Fried Chicken” and “Cherry Coke Pie”...hmmm, interesting… (Coca Cola, 2014)
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| Cherry Coke Pie (a la mode) |
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| Picture from Coca-Cola's RAIN campaign website to replenish water in Africa |
Coca-Cola has multiple social networking sites to include
YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, LinkedIn, and Google+. On it’s Facebook site,
Coca-Cola has over 94 million likes. On Twitter, Coca-Cola has over 2.8 million
followers (to include Mark Schaefer) and 125 thousand tweets, posted several
times a week. On their YouTube site, Coca-Cola publishes weekly content that
reaches their global target market with a focus on enjoying life’s best moments.
Over all social media sites, content is family-and-friends-in-social-setting-focused
with a few strategically placed posts that touch on activism (social and
community responsibility) and what’s trending at that moment. While Coca-Cola
is a global brand, it has managed to connect to people on a local level.
Coca-Cola has been able to create content that connects to its buyer personas
while communicating value touching on all of Scott’s (2013) Elements of a
Buyer-Centric Website: Buyer Preferred Media and Learning Styles, Site
Personality, Interactive Content Tools, Feedback Loop Availability,
Customer-to-Customer Interaction, Current Content, Social Media Share Buttons,
and Pass-Along Value Content that Could Go Viral. Examples of recent social
media campaigns that have gone viral are Share a Coke (personalized coke’s), Unlock the 007 In You (over 11M views), and Diet Coke-Taylor Swift kittens (3.5M views). 
On his topic, “Carve Out Your Own Search Engine Real
Estate”, Scott (2013) states, “if you want to be found on the web, you need a
unique identity for yourself, your product, and your company to stand out from
the crowd and rise to prominence on search engines.” He was clearly referencing
the example of Coca-Cola! As previously mentioned on Google, Coca-Cola appears
first when searching for the word “coke” and has over 117M hits. This is the
same on Bing and Yahoo with over 8M hits. For the term “cola”, Coca-Cola
appears as #6 on the first page of the search while its top competitor, Pepsi,
doesn’t appear until page 4 (this holds true on all 3 search engines mentioned
above). Some marketers think Coke could
do better in SEO for other key terms that are relevant to the brand. Bryson
Meunier (2012) from Mobile SEO Insights states that out of key six words for the
product: soda, cola, beverages, soft drinks, soda pop, and sodas, Coca Cola is
only ranked for the keywords “cola” (#7) and “soft drinks” (#3). While this
article is from 2012, it is not entirely inaccurate even today. When I searched
for “soda” for instance, Coca-Cola did not appear (granted I gave up the search
after page 20) but neither did Pepsi or any other major competitor of the
brand. For the keyword “cola” however, Coca-Cola has moved up one spot since
2012, from #7 to #6. I think for a brand that is synonymous with an entire
product class, I’m not sure if this particular perceived weakness is really an
opportunity for the brand or not. When people order a “coke” from a restaurant
and the waiter asks, “is Pepsi okay?” and the person replies without
hesitation, “sure”...that’s an indication that any cola flavored carbonated
beverage (red canned generic included) could be referred to as a “coke”. With
this amount of market leadership I’m not convinced the missing SEO keywords are
a true weakness especially when their competitors do not lead in these same keywords
either. But Meunier (2012) has a good argument; those keywords are searched
annually over 5 million times globally with 3 million alone occurring on Google
US. Who would have thought?
What do you think about Coca-Cola’s lack of SEO in certain
keywords that would describe their product? Do you see this as a weakness?
References:
Coca-Cola Official Website. (2014). Retrieved from http://us.coca-cola.com/home/
Meunier, Bryson. (2012, March 1). Yes, People Search For Cola Online. But Coca Cola Wouldn't Know It. Retrieved from http://www.brysonmeunier.com/yes-people-search-for-cola-online-but-coca-cola-wouldnt-know-it/
Scott, D.M. (2013). The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, & Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly. Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley & Sons
