|
|
How Important Is Top Search Engine
Placement For Your Business Website?
The Honest Answer is that it depends on your business model.
We know of businesses who do extraordinarily well, without the aid of search engines in the lead generation process.
Companies not driven by the search engines generally rely on email and referrals to drive their marketing efforts. This includes many of the affiliate networks, whose affiliates drive a lot of business to them, for a commission.
Since 1999, our own busnesses have been driven by links on third-party websites placed using the article marketing methodology. This has led us to where our websites have strong link popularity numbers according to the search engines. As a result, nearly two dozen of our important keyword phrases for our main website are ranked in the top five results on page one of the search engine results. Many of those search engine placements are in the first or second spot in the Google search results -- even with millions of pages competing for those specific search terms. Our other website does nearly as well, but it has only been operational for just over one year.
What is Your Marketing Mix?
- We know of one business that is driven by a marketing mix of: 80% email lead generation, 15% referral, and 5% search engine traffic. They are generating better than five figures in sales each month, but their costs for email leads are quite high, in the range of fifty cents to one dollar per email lead.
- Affiliate networks do not have the same direct promotional expenses, but they do pay anywhere from 5-75% in commissions depending on the program, and they have their affiliate network administration expenses on top of the commissions they pay out. Network administration expenses often include: approving new affiliates, tracking sales, reporting sales and commission statistics, Keeping legal paperwork in order including the 1099 form for the IRS, sales tracking, creation of training materials and sales materials, sales training, affiliate network and customer support.
- With our two highest-traffic websites, we were able to pull some interesting numbers to share with you here. Both websites have more than one hundred articles in circulation to support their promotion.
- Our biggest website, serving 150,000 unique visitors in 2006, received traffic from 152 countries and 38 search engines during the year. 41% of all its traffic for the year came from: links on third-party websites, referrals, and direct bookmarks.
59% of our traffic arrived as a result of searches conducted at the 38 search engines noted previously. 96% of the search traffic arrived from Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and MSN together. 73% of the search traffic (43% of our total traffic) arrived specifically from Google. So, Google actually accounted for 64,000 of our total number of visitors. (86,000 unique visitors found us through methods other than Google.)
So, how important is top search engine placement for your business website?
It is pretty important to our business.
- Our other website is a niche website with a very tight focus. As such, we don't expect nearly as much traffic to that website.
For our niche website, during the year of 2006, 61% of its traffic for the year came from: links on third-party websites, referrals, and direct bookmarks. 34% of its total traffic came directly from Google. The remaining 5% came from the other nine search engines that sent people to our website.
How Much Does It Cost To Get Found By Potential Customers?
Once again, it depends on your business model. As we have shown previously, there is a lot of ways to get people to your website outside of the search engines. But, these other methods tend to be quite expensive. Even if you rely upon Paid Listings in the Search Engines, this too can become a very expensive method to get traffic to your website.
The beauty of finding your way into the Organic Search Results (Free listings) is that that the traffic is free for as long as you can hold your position in the search results.
But, there is a question that begs to be answered.
Is it necessary to be the #1 result in the search results?
Not necessarily, but it sure would be helpful. Let me explain...
Who Gets The Most Attention In The Search Results?
It is not necessary to be the "best ranked" website in the search results to draw traffic to your website. What is required is to have the best title and description in the search results, as it relates to the keyword being searched.
For our purposes, the next time you go to Google and type in a search term, take a look at the paid listings to the right. Which advertisement (Sponsored Listing) draws your attention above all of the others on the right hand side of the page?
Once you have seen which one has drawn your eye, look at each of the listings and take them apart from a copywriting standpoint.
Some of you may naturally gravitate to the first listing, but the majority of you will gravitate to the advertisement that most closely offers a solution to your problem. (As I wrote this, I pulled my last search on Google to see how I would do. The Sponsored Listing that got my attention hands down was the fourth one on the list.)
So with this knowledge known, what really matters most is how well your displayed description represents the search term used by your potential customer, as it is compared to those of your competitors.
Your listing needs to fall within the viewing frame of the searcher, and your listing needs to answer the question of contextual relevence better than anyone else's listings.
Where Do You Need To Be In The Search Engine Results?
Over the last couple of years, I have shared numbers similar to these with my customers. To get some backup validation to my point of view, I researched and uncovered a report from the iProspect Search Engine User Behavior Study - April 2006. While their numbers were a bit more generous than mine, we were really close in our assessment of the state of affairs on this matter.
When people request search results for a specific keyword phrase in the search engines, people will generally behave in a specific way while they are searching. Here is the breakdown:
- 100% of people will look at the First Four Search Results. 23% of searchers only look at the Top Four results, ignoring everything else on the page.
- 77% of people will look at all of the First Ten Search Results. 62% of searchers only look at the First Ten results, ignoring everything else on the following pages.
- 38% of people will look at Page Two of the Search Results. 81% of searchers will never make it to page three of the search results.
- 19% of people will look at Page Three of the Search Results. 90% of searchers will never explore beyond page three of the search results.
- 10% of people will look at more than Three Pages in the Search Results. According to Google Analytics, one of my websites generated 79 visitors in March of 2006 from a search listing that appeared at #69 in the Google search results. So it is possible to attract traffic beyond page three in Google's search results, but we are only talking about potential traffic from 10% of the people who originally searched for the specific keyword phrase.
Written by: Bill Platt, President of Platt Services, Inc. - Owner of KeywordText.com
|
|
|
Last Update: 2007-12-03 08:45:58
|
|
|
