Whether and how firms can employ
relative rankings in search engine result pages (SERPs) to
differentiate their brands from competitors in cyberspace remains a
critical, puzzling issue in e-commerce research. By synthesizing
relevant literature from cognitive psychology, marketing, and
e-commerce, this study identifies key contextual factors that are
conducive for creating brand positioning online via SERPs. In two
experiments, the authors establish that when Internet users’
implicit beliefs (i.e., schema) about the meaning of the display
order of search engine results are activated or heightened through
feature priming, they will have better recall of an unknown brand
that is displayed before the well-known brands Dou et in SERPs.
Further, those with low Internet search skills tend to evaluate the
unknown brand more favorably along the particular brand attribute
that activates the search engine ranking schema. This research has
both theoretical and practical implications for understanding the
effectiveness of search engine optimization techniques.
Keywords: E-commerce, search engine optimization, web design,
brand positioning