Published Articles

Search Marketing Delivers Results in a Struggling Economy

Maine Biz
November, 2008
by: Elizabeth Harvey

Dow Jones down 777 points in one day. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers close their doors. Washington D.C. passes the mother of all bailouts. If the news this month hasn’t left your head spinning and dreaming about cashing in your remaining chips and heading to the Bahamas to go bone fishing, stick around, I have some good news about where to spend your company’s critical marketing dollars.

According to an article in the September 4 Wall Street Journal, “Spending on Internet advertising is climbing at a healthy clip -- rising 20% in the U.S. in the second quarter -- and growth forecasts are strong despite the weak economy.” Advertisers find that the safest way to reach online customers is directly through the power of search. Why? Because with search marketing you can reach your customers directly and measure results quickly and accurately.

For example, Idexx found significant improvement in visitor traffic, bounce rates, and time on site since working with HMG on a search engine optimization review for dogsandticks.com earlier this year. Since implementing the changes, the visitor bounce rate is about 30%, down from 55% (the B-to-B average is 50%), the page views have gone up from 2.34 pages to 3.52, and time on-site has increased from 1.33 minutes to 2.54 minutes.

Another search engine technique is to get listed in vertical portals, also called vortals. Vortals are search engines that are categorized by topic. These portals can be a valuable way to market directly to people looking for your product or service. As an added benefit, you can work with strategic partners within your niche to share reciprocal links. This allows you to develop online strategic marketing relationships. Seek out companies who compliment, but who do not compete, with your services. Contact them and ask if they would be willing to exchange links with you. Be sure to add tracking codes to the urls, so you can determine how many visitors you are sending and receiving to your partner sites to determine whether the link exchange is equitable.

So how do you improve your searchability on a tight budget?

There are two primary ways to reach your customers through search marketing. One is through search engine optimization, in which you adjust your website so it ranks near or at the top of the list from a search on sites like Google or Yahoo. The other is pay-per-click advertising, in which companies pay the search engine every time someone clicks on their ads. Both search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising are now well documented as being tremendously successful in reaching new clients and generating leads and sales.

Many agencies offer a do-it-yourself program whereby you combine the expertise from an agency with the cost savings of managing the work in-house. This scenario is the best of both worlds for companies on a tight marketing budget. The initial reports are run and analyzed by experts and then your staff is trained to implement recommendations and manage campaigns in-house. The benefit of having an agency do the set-up work is that, among other things, there is considerable expertise involved in understanding how search engines work, how they rank websites and which keywords will have the greatest impact on increasing your site traffic and generating leads. Additional value is gained in that you don’t have to invest in software analytics tools.

To kick off the process on the search engine optimization, or SEO, side, it makes sense to hire an agency to do a full keyword analysis, a web ranking report, a link building report and a best practices report that will provide the understanding necessary to implement the changes. A keyword analysis shows you which keywords people are typing into search engines to find your products or services, as well as their search volumes, meaning how many times those keywords are searched on each month. A web ranking report shows where your site is currently ranking for each of these keywords. A link building report is a list of web sites that are recommended to get inbound links from. (Search engines place significant importance on the number and quality of inbound links to a web site.) These sites are typically top websites and directories related to your industry.

A solid linking strategy is critical to achieving high search engine rankings. And the best practices report details how to take the knowledge from these reports and put it to use. These reports combined with a review call with the agency to answer any questions and some basic training in Google Analytics will get you off and running. The data in the reports give you the substance needed and you are on your way to a completing an SEO Do-It-Yourself Plan

On the pay-per-click, or PPC, side, the agency can provide you with a report that outlines which keywords to buy, suggested ad copy and landing page recommendations, as well as a best practices report for how much budget to spend. Finally, with some Google AdWords campaign management training, your staff can manage the PPC campaign in-house, cutting down on monthly management costs of an agency.

It is also wise to do a quarterly review with your agency to make sure you’re on the right track and that your SEO changes have been implemented properly and the PPC campaign is being managed correctly.

The Do-It-Yourself Plan is a way to make sure you don’t table your search efforts completely in a downward economy. A good agency will work with you, and within your budget, to assure you have a successful search engine marketing strategy in place.