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Profit from Search EnginesBy Stephen Orr, Web 4 Marketing John
O’Brien of Irish Gifts Online is very clear on the lesson he learned in 2001:
“In my opinion people should spend a minimum of their budget on web
design and the maximum on search engine positioning.
A fancy website that doesn’t appear before people isn’t worth a
damn.” John only had his website ready in the second week of November and yet a month later was welcoming an average of 800 visitors a day of whom 1% were ordering. After spending the early months of the year working with a web designer who failed to deliver an effective solution, he transferred his business to Barry Lloyd at MakeMeTop. Through him, John won top rankings in Yahoo and Looksmart and expects that the other search engines will produce high listings shortly. Why is it so many sites struggle to get an occasional sale, when there are many reports of the billions now being spent on-line? How do you get your share? It helps of course to have a top-class brand name and the financial resources to go with it. The likes of the BBC, or Tesco, start with the major advantage of their off-line heritage. This gives them the immediate credibility and trust among their on-line visitors, combined with the management and money to create sites that bring visitors back regularly both to surf and to buy. Their visitors probably know where they want to go before even turning on the PC. Attracting attentionBuilding customer awareness and telling them about your website is a basic need for any marketing department. One of the greatest attractions of the internet is its ability to make new contacts between customer and supplier. Moreover, done correctly, it can be far cheaper to find such customers via your website than via traditional forms of promotion. Once someone clicks on your site you have an opportunity to interest him in your product or service. The more difficult part is how to get a prospect to visit in the first instance, You must think like your potential visitor. The internet is a medium where the Customer is King. You can’t force anyone to look at your site; you can simply make it easier for them to find you. Fortunately there are more people actively looking for more suppliers on the internet than anywhere else. And the tools they use are the search engines. Search Engine solutionsYour prospective customer will start his search by typing a keyword in one of the search engines. In fact most will now already have learned that just putting in a single word will result in such a long and irrelevant list, that they refine their search and use a ‘key phrase’ rather than a ‘key word’. Even then, most searches result in lists too long for the surfer to look at them all. The majority of searches end at the 10 results that come up on the first page. Some determined searchers may go on to check the next 20. After that, even if your site is somewhere on the list, it will never be seen. Website owners must therefore choose relevant keywords and then ensure major search engines rank their site in the top 30. The choice of keywords is not easy. Your objective is not just to get more visitors. The only visitors worth having are those with a real potential to buy your product (assuming that is your primary objective). So you need to find the words that your target market will be using. Once you have the right keywords there is still a choice to be made. Do you go for the most popular or confine your efforts to a phrase less used but where your chance of a top position is better? 10,000 searches on a keyword listing you at number 93 are less profitable than 100 searches listing you at number 1. Optimising for Search EnginesSearch Engines are designed to help the surfer find relevant information. Each uses its own method of indexing and prioritising information. The main distinction is between the ‘directories’, where a human reviews and classifies the data, and the ‘crawlers’, which automate the process. The distinction is crucial when submitting your site. Directories will look at the site description submitted to them and modify it if they judge it necessary. Once listed in the directory it is difficult to change the entry so it must be right first time. ‘Crawler’ algorithms are subject to regular change and are not published - to avoid webmasters misusing the information just to obtain high rankings. They revisit sites regularly to keep track of changes. Hence search results also are constantly changing. The situation is further complicated by the use of more than one source of information. Thus Yahoo, the major directory, also takes information from Google, the major ‘crawler’. The consequence is that to obtain top rankings you have to spend a lot of time and effort to test and retest a variety of solutions. Many webmasters give up. The wise ones hire a specialist to do it for them. However, hiring a ‘specialist’ is easy. There are hundreds of claimants to the title, all prepared to take your money. Only some have the proven expertise to give you confidence in the results. A recent survey by Web 4 Marketing, the internet marketing consultants, has identified which UK search engine specialists have been most successful in achieving top rankings for their own sites. Since obtaining top rankings is such a competitive sport it is important to know who are the winners in their own field. Web 4 Marketing checked the nine major UK search engines for each of two relevant key phrases: “search engine submission” and “search engine optimization” (using the American spelling) and found the top ten companies listed by each. Out of 175 top positions possible, five companies clearly performed better than their rivals with 18% of the total. MediaCo came first with MakeMeTop and Spannerworks tying for second place, Receptional was fourth and Broadcaster a close fifth. Is it worth the effort?Sometimes it can be difficult to measure the effects accurately. As Tom Brialey of Action Storage Systems explains: “There is no way of telling how much the web has increased our turnover because I do not know the extent to which the web has substituted other advertising media. MakeMeTop has got us good positions in the UK search engines and in the last 12 months we have generated £40k of gross profit from new customers placing their first order on our website. It is our most successful media. The worst casualty is Yellow Pages because I think they have suffered at the hands of the Search Engines”.
Naturally much of the business done on the web will be transferred from other channels. But if that’s where you now find your customers, what will you do? -Ends- Note to editors: Full survey data is available at www.web4marketing.co.uk/seo_suppliers.htm
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