Search Engine Marketing Works

Arpita Agrawal

IMB2009023

MBA-IT 2^ND Sem

IIIT Allahabad

There are billions of people using the internet today. Many people spend more time on the internet than on anything else. And more than 80% of these people use search engines to find things and information they want. The internet is a highly competitive arena and just using the basic techniques to increase web presence and reach can no longer guarantee success. One need to crank it up a few levels and out markets your competition. Search engine optimization is a long term online marketing strategy that involves many tricks than, just web site design, layout, and keywords. We need to have a bigger picture in our mind, the target group, the segment, the search words, and every aspect is to be considered.

 Search engine marketing, is not a magic bullets. Each web site can be unique due to the product or service it is selling, the target audience it is catering to, the revenue model. One method doesn't fit all, one need to address each web site individually based on revenue model, offerings, and target user. Thus each web-site presents unique challenges and therefore, requires custom solutions based on very specific issues.

 The case lets demonstrate some common problems facing many web site owners and solutions that meet their specific requirements. It may involve any several techniques to increase the effective functional target audience (EFTA) than just the target audience (traffic) .so that the revenue can be maximized. As web site owners are looking for is an increase revenue and not just visitors.

 You need both sides of an equation

An individual had  started  an online business. He had found an unique product  quite and served a very tight but small market . The product was good but he hadn't had one sale in the past 6 months. And was getting no action from the search engines.

 His web site was terrible. He had made some attempt to promote his product and web site but they were unsuccessful. He wasn't even in the search engines, let alone indexed under any proper search terms.

Using seo:

    *  little keyword research came up with several better choices

    * web site was redesigned

    * some related content was also added to  create standard web pages

    *  incorporated a shopping cart

    *  got the web site indexed quickly under the new phreses and keywords

*  used additional ways to market the product through small advertisements on appropriate web sites.

Finding a product with some potential is just half the battle. Getting effective targeted traffic from the major search engines is important to be successful on the internet. You need both sides of the equation.

Getting local response

The first case study involves a company engaged in commercial service in specific local market. The company had a well designed web site, but weren't getting good response from the visitors  or direct sales from their web site.

The consultant was appointed to find out the flaws in their website and thus suggest suitable measures. When their current  site was reviewed  following facts were revealed:

* their web site was indexed butwas  receiving a very little search engine traffic

* it was built around features rather than benefits

* the little traffic they got was from all over the world, not the local area

* local service area i.e. Their address wasn't  mentioned anywhere

The seo consultant re-organized the web site into specific interest areas and re-worked the content to demonstrate the problem, then presented the solution with vivid examples. The location and service areas both were emphasized.

As a result,  the over all traffic went down at first but then climbed back above the original level. They also started getting calls from local businesses and picked up new business on a weekly basis. Now, the company gets 15-18 new calls per month! That's over 200 new prospects per year. Based on their average revenue per prospect, that's an additional $75,000 in revenue.

Quality verses quantity traffic

A totally click based business that sold information to a very specific niche was getting very good traffic numbers. But revenue generated was slow, and the conversion numbers were terrible (less than .002% or 1 in 1000).

A company wanted to know what the problem was since they had done considerable research and paid huge amount for copywriting. The company had worked with a big seo firm and even had contracted Google representatives with little or no improvement.

The SEO consultant took a look at their web site and server logs and here's what we found:

    * The web site was very well designed.

    * The server logs were checked to see if there were any clues to the problem.

    * Their current marketing efforts, ppc campaigns, and targeted keywords and phrases were     reviewed

* The profile of the average visitor was reviewed and it appeared that the main common ground was they were looking for free information, not paid.

The most common mistake in keyword research is looking at the volumes and not at the profile of the traffic. The keywords and phrases had a lot of activity, were dead on in subject matter, but were missing a few key elements.

It was found that certain words and phrases tend to be used more for people ready to buy rather than people just doing some research. And also, the company needed to tightly target their potential buyer using more than number of searches based just on interest. Many times it is how users search rather than how many searches.

After comprehensive research some new keywords and phrases were decided that were more effective in conversions, but much less popular. Because of this the volume of traffic dropped considerably, but the conversion rate was increased. The company went from a few sales per month to multiple sales per day!