Pizza SEO is darned important

Image by WOBBLYMOL (FLICKR DOING MY HEAD IN, SO SLOW) via Flickr

Pizza SEO is now even more important than before since search marketing is Domino's Pizza's most powerful acquisition channel in Europe. Robin Auld, Domino's marketing director in the UK tells Marketing Direct (via johnon.com):

In terms of acquisition I would have to say search marketing online – we do pay-per-click (PPC) and also search engine optimisation as well. People go to Google and search for pizza so it’s important that Domino’s is up there.

Moreover, he says Domino's has been cruising unscathed through the recession so far as people trade down to pizza delivery (with their own wine, presumably) from meals out at restaurants.

Although he does not say explicitly, he points to how meaningful "day-parting" can be in all of Domino's marketing channels: TV and door-dropped menus heavy towards the end of the week, when people are at home "thinking pizza".

Domino's segments customers by behaviour (e.g. hardcore loyals) rather than by "artificial" criteria such as age or location. They track ordering behaviour by phone number.

How not to SEO if you are selling Pizza

Image via WikipediaPillsbury of the Dough Boy fame apparently advertises on Adwords. Seems like someone at Pillsbury or an agency used on of the automated keyword tools to generate a list of keyword phrases containing pizza. A little playing around with the dynamic keyword insertion function and voila:
you have an ad for Gluten Free Pizza Crust landing at the Pillsbury Pizza Crust page. The problem of course is that the key ingredient in the pizza crust is wheat flour and that is definitely not free of gluten.
Now if you like SEOMoz member Mike Piper suffer from celiac disease, eating anything with gluten will make you violently ill. Moreover, you will get mighty pissed off if someone's advertising misleads you, getting your hopes up that you have found something you can actually eat.
The lesson, of course, is to insist that your PPC clients prune the auto-generated keyword lists to make sure their ads don't show up for keywords where they could offend and to be double careful if you use dynamic keyword insertion.
Oh and one more thing: memetics is all good and nice but it won't make you a rapper.