Search Engine Marketing: Can this drive more business for you?

Article Contributed by Mark S.
Economic recession has forced most of the small to mid-sized businesses to cut their costs and re-work in a lean and mean way to survive. This involves slashing down those balloon sized marketing budgets and switch over to cost-effective and accountable marketing – SEO is definitely one of them.
Although traditional marketing has its benefits but Internet marketing is gaining an edge due to its attractive measurable deliverables at much lower costs.
One of the toughest things that business owner’s face with web marketing is lack of awareness and knowledge, since it’s just a decade old in terms of popularity. There are conflicts in their expectations on what search engine optimization (SEO) constitutes and what it can do for their business. This confusion is further aggravated when pushy SEO experts spew overblown sales pitch just to lure clients and close deals. Be sure to study and understand what SEO can deliver in form of results to your overall marketing plan.
Broadly speaking one can make SEO accountable by checking up on the following 4 deliverables.
1. Search Engine Rankings:
This is the basic requirement which every SEO campaign should deliver. But the intensity varies as per specific individual circumstances and requirements. As one shirt size cannot fit all, similarly importance of rankings cannot be same for every business.
Search engine ranking optimization focuses on bringing your keyword search on top rankings in various search engine sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, AOL etc. These results cannot be guaranteed or controlled.
Points to remember while demanding a high search ranking from your SEO expert:
· Check the competition for your chosen keywords. If it is highly competitive then it gets very difficult to climb over the top. It can be done, but requires consistent labor, time and resources spent on regular basis and following various SEO rules and guidelines to get on top rankings with search engines.
· Your demand should coincide with the current state of your site. Is your site brand new? If yes, it will take more time and efforts to bring you top rankings as one of the important factors influencing the search rankings is the domain age. Always remember rankings take time and constant efforts to build up. It is not a one day, one week or one month job.
· Do NOT expect your rankings to be on top all the time. Rankings fluctuate on a real time basis and your site rankings might suddenly drop to no-man’s island. Trust your SEO expert to find the reason for unexpected poor performance and take immediate damage control actions.
· Last but not the least, if you are obsessed with rankings, remember, rankings can only do so much. If visitors come to your site and immediately leave, it’s waste having high rankings. What is the use of having top rankings but no measurable increase in your sales or marketing results?
2. Traffic:
Another area to focus during an SEO campaign for your site is site traffic. This means the number of unique visitors to your site everyday and the amount of time they spent there. When your SEO campaign kick starts you should expect to see a gradual increase in the number of visitors to your site.
Important points to know about traffic before you focus on this area:
· Try and focus on quality instead of quantity. Even if you have 1000 visitors every day, if none of them convert into leads, your SEO campaign is not working. Be sure to take time and explain to your SEO expert what type of visitors you want them to target.
· Role of traffic is downplayed if you are in niche industry segment. This is because very few people will be actually searching for your product and services. Focus instead on conversion rates.
· Traffic loses its significance if you already have large number of visitors to your site. In such a situation ask your SEO expert to analyze the type of traffic and what action you want the traffic to take on your site. The emphasis should be on finding what’s working and not working to increase sales.
3. Conversions:
Conversion is the heart of any SEO campaign. You can check yourself the conversion rate by the following equation:
Conversion Rate = [(Total Web Sales / Unique Web Traffic) / Average Sales Price] x 100
To put simply you need to calculate how many visitors are actually converting into your customers. How do you do this?
· You need to tell your SEO expert what you consider as conversion for you. You need to define whether a visitor filling up an inquiry form is conversion or when they click on your ‘buy now tab’ on your e-commerce site or is it filling your contact us form or filling your subscription form/newsletter etc.
· You cannot hold your SEO expert responsible for low conversion rate if you have not clearly defined what you would consider as conversion.
· Remember the final sale depends totally on you and not the SEO expert. They can only bring the visitor to your site and guide them to take the action you want online; rest is totally dependent on you. Try and be reasonable in your expectations and see that you demand for an achievable goal from your online SEO campaign.
4. ROI:
The ultimate goal in every business strategy is to increase your bottom line. You need to ensure that the amount invested in any activity gives profitable return to make business sense. The same scenario is expected when you invest in search engine optimization.
The crux here is to remember it’s an investment. Every investment takes time to fructify. Give your SEO expert the minimum time required for the program to start delivering result. Generally it takes 90 days to start seeing some positive activity through SEO. This can vary as per the keywords, competition and industry. Sometimes it might take 6 months, sometimes 1 year. It is an on-going process and the sooner you begin, the soon you can see some good benefits out of it.
Conclusion
When hiring an SEO expert it’s important to have expectations since you are not indulging in charity. You need to be clear on what those expectations are and make sure to define it clearly in a formal written contract. This ensures a detailed road map or guideline is prepared which can be referred to check progress continuously. Any breach thereby can be clearly found out and dealt accordingly.
One of the major reasons why SEO campaigns fail is, when changes are requested for rankings, conversions, ROI or any help is required off site, it is not followed or provided by clients. They feel once they have dumped the job to the SEO expert, they will perform miracles. You need to help them to help you. Be co-operative, supportive and provide them all the information and help they need to carry out their job in the best possible manner. If still they cannot deliver as per your expectations and contractual agreement you have every right to penalize them and search for a better option.
About Author:
Mark S. is a qualified SEO expert working with Analtyix Solutions (www.analytixsolutions.com) which is a fast growing back-office service company for Finance and Accounting, IT, Marketing and Operational services. Analytix has been doing SEO for various industry websites from business brokerage, outsourcing, IT, dentists to e-commerce industry. To receive a free SEO analysis of your site contact Mark at mark@analytixsolutions.net