Sales and Marketing Management

Search Engine Optimization:
Bringing Prospects to Your Site

Build traffic and get better results

by Alex McDonald, SiteCoach

Every day more and more people rely on the Internet for a host of needs, and they look to search engines to find what they are looking for on the Web. Studies of consumer habits show that people use search engines to research products and services before they buy, and use the Internet to find vendors. A DoubleClick December 2002 study showed 41 percent of people who went to a web site to research a product purchase got there via search engines. These research and buying habits apply to both individual and business purchases.

As a marketer, you have a site describing your product or service. The purpose of your site may be to inform consumers about your offering, to sell the product directly or to register the prospect for further marketing efforts by offering webinars, white paper downloads, e-newsletters, or surveys. In any case, you need to get the right people to your site.

What are potential customers typing into the search engines? Which search engines are they using? Is your site coming up high in the results? Are your competitors placing higher? To answer these questions, a variety of techniques called  "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" has developed and continues to evolve.

Depending on the target market, the benefits of SEO can be very great. A marketing professional needs to know what SEO is, what it attempts to do, what kind of results can be expected and how to fit SEO into the marketing mix.

Major Search Engines 

There are thousands of search engines, but only a small number is heavily used-Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search, Lycos, Ask Jeeves and Excite are among the most popular. These all use different algorithms that affect search results and rankings. These algorithms are changed from time to time, and that changes results. SEO is not a "once and done," but rather a continual study with analysis and tweaking to maintain and increase traffic.

Google and Yahoo clearly dominate search today. Following is a pie chart showing the percentage of searches done by US web surfers in February 2004 that were performed at a particular web site or a network of web sites:

However, depending on your product or service, you may find that your target market includes a higher percentage of AOL Search users if they are searching from home, for example.

Site Design

SEO professionals should be in on the planning of a web site from the very beginning. The structure of the site can make it more accessible to search spiders as well as human users. There are many techniques to increase the chances of a site gaining higher rankings in search engines' natural (non-paid) results-keywords are foremost.

Remember: search engines look for words. They don't do well on photos or graphs or music files. You might want to place these elements on your web site, but don't expect search engines to be able to find them. Multimedia might make a site better looking for a human visitor, but search engines are concerned only with words. Graphically oriented designers may wish to do everything with pictures and sounds, but this can be detrimental to search engine placement.

A wordy site typically does well on search engines. As communicators, many marketers blanch at the idea of wordiness. But search engines look for "content," and by content they mean text. Good design can include a lot of words without overwhelming the reader.  Sometimes the words can be put on out-of-the way pages, but they should be there. And the keywords - those you want to place highly for - should be used liberally and in ways that help the search engine determine that the site is about those keywords.

Once the keyword analysis has been completed, there are many ways to take advantage of that knowledge for search engine ranking: Use of the most important keywords in:

Domain names, page titles, meta tags, title tags, alt tags, mini sites, incoming links, site maps-and the list goes on.

SEO professionals can help you avoid web site pitfalls and can adjust your site so it is more friendly to search engines and, therefore, more likely to place highly in the search results. Placing on the first page of search results versus the third page or tenth page has considerable impact in the number of prospects visiting your site.

Paid vs. Unpaid Clicks

When returning results, engines include "natural" or "organic" results along with paid placements. A computer algorithm that ranks web sites according to what is deemed most relevant to the user's search query produces the natural results.

The paid results, usually called "sponsored" listings, are determined by auctions among advertisers. Advertisers buy the right to have their listing show up for a given search term. Although many Internet users know, at least subconsciously, that the sponsored results are paid for, they are not necessarily reluctant to choose sponsored listings, especially if looking for a product for sale.

Paid listings (called Pay Per Click or PPC listings) can be a great way to direct traffic to your site. Further, your listing shows up only on the search terms you designate, giving you some control over the types of visitors likely to be reading your web site.  The cost per click for these sponsored listings varies from $0.05 to over $10/click for expensive terms.  Because of the auction system, the cost is determined by the competition.

The search term "widget" may be expensive because there are many competitors or because the competitors have found that the sales conversion rate and/or the profit margin is high. The term "brown widget" or "blue widget" may be at different prices and the prices could change from day to day.

Is it worth paying for visitors to your site? It depends on how valuable each visitor is. How likely will each result in a sale, and how much profit does that sale bring in? Marketers with some experience running their web sites may have a feel for these numbers, but hard data is always preferable, and for a new web site or offering, the marketer is often flying blind.

Knowing how much each click is really worth can give you a great advantage in the PPC game. You can use commercially available tracking systems to monitor your site's traffic and determine how effective paid clicks are.

Fitting SEO Into Your Marketing Mix

SEO fits in your overall plan with other Internet marketing techniques, including paid advertising, e-mail marketing, webinars, print ads and affiliate relationships.

Budgetary outlays for SEO are usually front-loaded. The initial site design or tuning requires substantial effort. Optimization typically takes several months before it yields results, and data gathered during this period can be valuable in determining future actions. The longer you run a site, the more information you can get on profitable keywords, valuable affiliate referrals and how effective different pages are in converting visitors to customers.

At least every four months, the web site performance should be evaluated, and paid programs and SEO adjusted.

For large businesses, networks of web sites are often preferred. There are many benefits to having many small sites rather than one big site. Targeted web sites do better on organic search engine results, and linking a number of web sites together enhances the credibility of each one in the search engines.

Your web site will also benefit if other sites link to it. Customers, suppliers and dealer websites are all sources of links, as are providers of complementary products and services.

Game Plan

Every commercial web site needs a tracking program to gather meaningful marketing information. Your web site typically comes with some tracking so you can tell where your visitors come from and what search terms they used. However, to effectively manage campaigns you need more than that; one needs to know buyer behavior rather than just visitor behavior; you need to know where your buyers and quality leads came from, what they searched for and how they navigated your site. This typically requires a more sophisticated tracking system. There are a number of these systems to choose from with different capabilities. Be sure your selection includes a comprehensive reporting function.

For new sites, an initial Pay Per Click campaign is a good idea. For a very low cost, you can obtain valuable marketing data - data that you can use to make decisions. With tracking, the results of your initial PPC campaign can help you determine how the site should be optimized for natural search engine results, and whether PPC should continue.

Alex McDonald is managing partner of SiteCoach, an Internet marketing firm specializing in SEO, PPC management and tracking software with an emphasis on campaign ROI measurement ).  You can reach Alex at 800-295-3260, alex@sitecoach.com,