Last Update: Tuesday, January 04, 2005.
Laptop Battery In this article I show you how to justify a
search engine optimization
budget to your VP of Marketing, CFO, President, or CEO.
For most websites, the majority of traffic comes via search engines. SEO (search engine optimization)
Thinkpad If you're a marketing manager, I'm sure you use all the weapons
at your disposal to achieve your sales and profit targets.
Tips on Search Engine Positioning (Part II) We continue with our series on Search Engines and this month, we focus on Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization, also known as search engine placement and positioning, is the process of improving and enhancing a website's internal elements (such as titles, meta tags, textual content) and external factors (such as link and click popularity) to achieve high search engine rankings.
Microsoft Every banner advertising, direct email
advertising, lead generation, magazine advertising campaign
requires a proposal to justify the investment.
Freelance search engine optimization is a growing market. As the internet continues to grow and expand, search engine optimization has become much more important. Site owners need individuals to visit their pages, and with the help of a freelance search engine optimization expert, they can get the hits they need to improve their conversion rates.
Laptop Computers But what about search engine optimization? How do you justify
the investment to your VP of Marketing, CFO, President, or CEO. And
how do you quantify the value of search engine traffic?
Search Engine Optimization The fact of the matter is, it pays you to optimize your web site for the search engines. This process is known as search engine optimization. It offers web traffic traffic and lots of it. And it's targeted traffic, people who have searched for exactly what you are selling. 1 Virginia SEO and Internet Marketing firm. Contact us today and find out why.
Laptop Computer Well, first take a look at these
statistics.
of search engine optimization (SEO) are, with good reason, going completely bonkers. As Google came on the scene in 1998 and quickly dominated the search business, website optimization became largely a game of shooting at a single target, namely, pleasing Google...for all intents and purposes, Google became the "800 pound gorilla" of the search engine business. Since the advent of search engines (particularly Google) spawned
Desktop Computer Jul 05 2000: Forrester Research reported that over 80 percent of
Internet users reach sites through search engines.
Notebooks This means if your Web site doesn't attract 80 percent of your
visitors from search engines, you're losing out on a lot of search
engine traffic.
Lenovo Feb 14 2001: A study from NPD Group found that search listings
are more effective than standard banner or button advertisements
when it comes to brand recall, favorable opinion rating and
inspiring purchases.
Hard Drive In unaided recall, search listings outperformed banners and
buttons by three to one, and more than twice as many people gave a
more favorable opinion of companies in the top three search
positions than those featured in ads.
Travelstar The study also found that 55 percent of online purchases were
made on sites found through search listings, while a mere 9 percent
were on sites found through banner ads.
Gateway Again, if your sales from search engine traffic accounts for
less than 55 percent of your total sales, you are missing out on a
lot of potential customers.
Laptop Parts So how do you justify the investment of either outsourcing your
search engine optimization campaigns or employing a search engine
optimization specialist to do it in-house?
Software Well, let me speak from my own experience.
Hard Drives I managed the search engine optimization for my old
company's Web site,
www.iBoost.com. I spent a month optimizing over a thousand web
pages.
Electronics The result was that in total I obtained over 2,000 top 30
rankings in the major search engines and web directories.
Canon This helped grow the site traffic by 33%, which translated to an
extra 400,000 visitors and 8 million page views a month.
Desktop Pc Based on those figures, one top 30 position generated on average
200 visitors a month, or 2,400 visitors over the course of a
year.
Desktop Computers The initial optimization campaign was actually carried out back
in October of 2000. But the web pages still command somewhere in
the region of 1,800 to 2,000 top 30 positions.
Think Pad So your rankings never really disappear from the index, once you
have established your positions. They may move up or down the
index, but they don't usually drop off the top rankings completely,
for no apparent reason.
Repair Before the online ad market softened, my old company could
command up to $25 per thousand banner impressions. So, the extra 8
million monthly page views could have generated as much as $200,000
in revenue, per month.
Data Recovery Since my company didn't sell any products or services on the web
site, I can only imagine how much revenue could have be generated
by the extra 400,000 monthly visitors.
Cisco How To Calculate What Your Visitors Are
Worth
Keyboard Some search engine optimization firms charge on a
pay-for-performance basis. For example, one search engine
optimization company used to charge $85 for a top 10 ranking. You
may have come across this company.
Monitor A top 10 ranking would almost definitely produce more click
throughs than a top 30 ranking. If we use the figure of 200 monthly
visitors for a top 10 ranking at a cost of $85, the cost of each
visitor would be 42 cents.
Desktop Not bad. But don't forget that once you achieve a top position,
little effort is required to maintain that position. So, in
reality, it could generate as many as 2,400 visitors in a year. At
$85 for a top ranking, this equates to just 3.5 cents for each
visitor coming from a top 10 listing.
Infosys Analyze your log files. How many visitors do your top 30 search
engine positions bring in each month? Now multiply the average of
number of monthly visitors these search terms bring in by 12. This
is your average return-on-investment of each top position for a
whole year.
Refurbished Laptops So for example, let's say you get 20 top 30 positions, and they
bring in an average of 200 visitors a month.
Wipro Top 30 Positions 20
X
Visitors 200
X
Months 12
---
Total Visitors 48,000
Lap Top Now if you set a budget to acquire 20 extra top 30 positions,
you would increase your search engine traffic by 48,000
visitors.
Refurbished If we take the rate of $85 for each top 10 position that Coastal
Site charges, 20 top positions would set you back $1,700.
Memory $1,700 / 48,000 visitors = 3.5 cents per visitor
How much does it cost you to acquire a visitor at present?
Probably somewhere in the 25-50 cent range.
Intel Top positions in pay-per-click search engines, such as Overture,
cost as much as $5 to $6 a visitor. According to Overture, the
average price its advertisers paid for a visitor was 30 cents,
during the second quarter of 2002.
As400 Based on our calculations above, the cost of acquiring a search
engine visitor is as low as 12% of what it costs to acquire a
visitor at Overture.
Averatec As you can see, search engine optimization clearly produces an
excellent return-on-investment.
Hardware Don't forget that search engine positioning is effective,
because the traffic is very targeted. Prospects who find your site
through search engines are actively looking for information on
products and services just like yours.
Dual Xeon Search Engine Optimization Is A Science
Storage Just like other forms of marketing and advertising, search
engine optimization requires persistence and a lot of testing.
Seagate The optimization process is complex and time-consuming. You're
trying to align your Web pages with the ranking algorithms of the
search engines, while at the same time trying to out-smart your
competitor's optimizers.
Computer Sales But the fact remains, search engine optimization is cost
effective, and should not be ignored.
Computer Hardware Now go convince your VP of Marketing, CFO, President, and CEO of
this fact! ;o)
Printers About The Author: Michael Wong is a respected
internet marketing expert , and the author of a
leading search engine optimization book , numerous
marketing articles , and reviews of
marketing software and
ecommerce software .
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