Online Visibility vs. Obscurity

July 25, 2008 - by Rick Ireland, SEO Consultant, TrafficMeansBusiness.com

Since 80%-90% of traffic generated to your site is from search engines, according to Market Research, you cannot ignore the revenue your business can generate from this source of traffic.

In particular, small businesses must think carefully about their marketing ROI and how this is affected by profitable online visibility vs. obscurity.

Many businesses and companies still remember the lessons learned from online marketing at the dawn of this new advertising medium in late 1990s. The memories are often painful for marketing directors that generated revenue of 60 cents for every advertising Dollar spent online.

Search engines can be much more cost effective than advertising and hence should be an integral part of your online marketing strategy. A high page rank listing in prominent search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, at the least) can bring more visitors to your doorstep that online banners, email marketing, or the traditional routes of radio, television ads, print, or even infomercials. There is no dispute among marketing professionals that a good positioning in search results is more cost effective than all others methods mentioned.

There are 4 concepts that all business owners and professional must consider as integral part of their online marketing strategy:

1) Search engine optimization should be part of your website design, and if it has not been before, it should be now. May be even you should consider a re-design of your website if your existing site is simply too problematic to convert to a search engine optimized site incorporating search term positioning strategy.

2) Maximum visibility should be your goal since without cost-effective traffic generation to your site you cannot improve sales conversions and hence ROI. Identify the search terms and phrases that bring most amount of relative traffic to your site then you can modify and enhance sales conversion techniques to convert the online visitors to customers. Sales and promotional offers cannot prove their effectiveness if your audience is a very narrow sample of your testing domain. Large traffic of visitors is required to establish what works and what does not work in the realm of promotions.

3) Target, target, target. Go after the online visitors that need your products and services and can benefit from the conveniences offered by your business. Sometimes this translates into location-specific conveniences. For instance, a book is a book and whether it is purchased from a book store or shipped to the door, the buyer does not often care as long as they get the book. So promote your location as part of your search engine optimization and positioning and suggest how much people would save in time and fuel, if they just order online rather than drive to the nearest book store. Make sure you also offer overnight delivery for customers that need expedited service.

4) Complement your search engine ranking by utilizing other marketing techniques. For instance, you can spend a little bit on PPC (pay-per-click) advertising for search terms and phrases that you are targeting. Let’s accept that 1st position in MSN, or Google, or Yahoo will generate thousands of visitors to your site per month but research has proven this “natural” search engine results directed to you website is about 4 times more effective in produce an actual sale than PPC. But if you bring in some traffic from PPC, you can directly improve your page rank, as long as you do not over do it.

With more than 600 million searches performed online by Internet users, you cannot avoid this online traffic that could bring sales to your doorstep. Afterall that is why Internet have become this vast medium open 24 hours, 7 days a week, with potentiallly 246 million customers in US/Canada (according to US Census Bureau) and 1.4 billion worldwide (according to Nielsen/NetRatings).

Almost every Fortune 5000 company and most other 8 million online businesses with web presence have a search engine optimization strategy. You cannot ignore this important tool for your business or you risk complete obscurity.