Pay Per Click Search Engine Reviews :: Increase your ROI!

In this article I show you how to justify a search engine optimization budget to your VP of Marketing, CFO, President, or CEO.

If you’re a marketing manager, I’m sure you use all the weapons at your disposal to achieve your sales and profit targets.Every banner advertising, direct email advertising, lead

generation, magazine advertising campaign requires a proposal

to justify the investment.

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?

Well, first take a look at these statistics.

Jul 05 2000: Forrester Research reported that over 80

percent of Internet users reach sites through search

engines.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Well, let me speak from my own experience.

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.

The result was that in total I obtained over 2,000 top 30

rankings in the major search engines and web directories.

This helped grow the site traffic by 33%, which translated

to an extra 400,000 visitors and 8 million page views a

month.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How To Calculate What Your Visitors Are

Worth

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.

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.

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.

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.

So for example, let’s say you get 20 top 30 positions, and

they bring in an average of 200 visitors a month.

Now if you set a budget to acquire 20 extra top 30

positions, you would increase your search engine traffic by

48,000 visitors.

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.

$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.

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.

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.

As you can see, search engine optimization clearly produces

an excellent return-on-investment.

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.

Search Engine Optimization Is A

Science

Just like other forms of marketing and advertising, search

engine optimization requires persistence and a lot of

testing.

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.

But the fact remains, search engine optimization is cost

effective, and should not be ignored.

Now go convince your VP of Marketing, CFO, President, and

CEO of this fact! ;o)