Literature

Search Engine Marketing ─ Better, Less Expensive Tools for Increasing Sales Leads

By Judy Key Johnson, president, Key Marketing Group

Imagine a billion people, which is about the number of Internet users in the world in 2007. You are looking for customers for your company, which offers surfing lessons in California and Costa Rica from among this billion. How do you find them or – perhaps a better question – how do they find you?

One option is traditional marketing, which involves advertising in publications, or distributing flyers for your service, and hoping to find people who want to attend your surf camp. While advertising and direct mail are often effective for branding, they are less effective for lead generation and the cost can be too expensive for companies with limited marketing dollars.

Another option, search engine marketing, in which people wanting to find a surf camp type “surf school,” or “surf lessons,” into Google, or any other search engine, and find your company, www.surfschool.net, on page one .They click on the link, like what they see, and register online or give your company a call.

1500 Percent Sales Increase in Three Years

Rick Walker, president of Corky Carroll’s Surf School, started using search engine optimization (SEO), a search engine marketing tool, in 2002. “Before using search engine optimization we were selling about 12 one-week learn-to-surf in Costa Rica packages per year. In the first year of implementing SEO, our Costa Rica business quadrupled, the second year it doubled again, and the third year it even doubled from that, for a three-year increase of more than 1500 percent.” The cost of Rick’s SEO service? About $500 a month.

Search Engine Marketing – Lowest Cost Per Sales Lead

Search Engine Marketing is much more cost-effective than traditional advertising in most circumstances. Piper Jaffray & Co., a leading market analyst firm, estimates that the cost per lead for traditional marketing channels is $9.94 for direct mail and $1.18 for Yellow Pages®, while for Internet advertising it is $2.00 for banner ads, $0.55 for email marketing, and $0.45 for search engine marketing.

More than 73 percent of all Web sites are found through search engines (Forrester Research). The number of searches is staggering; there were more than six billion searches in the U.S. in the month of December 2006. Google accounted for 67 percent of all queries worldwide in April, 2007 (Nielsen/NetRatings.com), up 20 points in the past two years, while Yahoo has tumbled to 19 percent and msn to eight percent.

The Difference Between SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Marketing Search engine optimization works because it is the result of someone taking the effort to type in a search term, such as “surf school,” which means that person is inherently interested in the topic. Therefore, the sales lead is much more qualified than one “touched” by direct mail, or even banner advertising or email marketing, where the person has not initiated a search for information. There are two forms of search engine marketing: pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and “natural” or “organic” search engine optimization.

PPC is paid advertising. Advertisers select specific keyword phrases, decide how much they want to bid for each keyword phrase on each search engine, and pay the search engine each time someone clicks on that word in the “Sponsored Link” section of Google and other search engines. The more clicks on an advertiser’s Web site link, the more the advertiser pays, which can lead to “click fraud” in which your competitors, or Web sites that are paid to host PPC ads, might be clicking on your links themselves and driving up your costs. Click fraud rates are estimated to be as high as 30 percent, a number strongly disputed by Google, which pegs the number at around 0.2 percent.

SEO is the science, and art, of getting a Web site ranked high in Google and other search engines by a combination of high technology and content techniques. Web sites listed in the regular pages of search engine results have a conversion rate about four times higher than in the sponsored (PPC) section, for the same reason that people view paid ads with more skepticism than personal referral. SEO firms tend to charge a fixed fee regardless of the number of hits on your Web site, which makes budgeting more predictable. Fees start as low as $500 a month and require no changes to the Web site, making SEO typically the best value of all Internet advertising options.

Each of these two search engine marketing techniques has advantages and disadvantages; companies often start with SEO for the biggest “bang for buck” and later add PPC to generate even more sales leads. While PPC generally has a higher cost per lead, and requires much more administration, those leads are generally still less expensive than traditional marketing programs such as direct mail and telemarketing.

75 Percent Close Rate

A safety and environmental consulting firm to auto dealerships recently started using SEO; within three months the company had gotten five times as many leads from its Web site as they had received in the preceding two years. Even better, the Web-generated leads have a 75 percent close rate, which is four times the rate of face-to-face selling. Why? Prospects have pre-qualified themselves in a very specific service area by the time they type “automobile dealer safety consulting” into the search engine. The company Web site is credible and complete enough to encourage prospects to call the company, where sales personnel quickly close the deals.

Beat your Competition to Search Engine Leads

While search engine marketing has been around for ten years (and Key Marketing Group has been involved with SEO since 1997), many of your competitors will not yet be using this lead generation tool, or they may not be using an effective SEO service.

Now is the time to explore the business return that you can get from a SEO program. You may well find it is the most cost-effective lead generation program you can use.

Success Story >> 
SEO Datasheet >>  

For more information, email jjohnson@keymarketinggroup.biz or call 949.218.0710

August 15, 2007 © 2007, Key Marketing Group, all rights reserved.