Are You Making Too Much of Your Money From Search Engines?

[thejenn]

Authored by: Jennifer Laycock

Full Text: http://www.searchengineguide.com/laycock/006517.html

A Snippet:

There are two problems that tend to happen when companies first start exploring search engine marketing. The first is that they get caught up in pay-per-click adversities and ignore organic search. The second is that they start relying on free search engine traffic and use that as an excuse to cut their budget for other forms of marketing.

[bmccormick]

A very good article and I just wanted to see if I can reinforce what I think is an important point.

People shouldn't be concerned necessarily about ranking. The should get their feet wet with targeted marketing and start getting some clicks flowing to their site. Put in a minimum bid and just get a baseline of clicks flowing to your site. Once you've got a small stream the most important thing you can do is to analyze that traffic, find out why people came, why they stayed, why they left. Once you've got some data you need to start working on your conversion rate. This is actually easier to do with less traffic flowing than it is later on with a firehose of traffic coming in.

Once you feel that you've done everything you can to optimize conversion, then it's time to start looking at increasing the flow of clicks to the site. However, if you carry out this process in reverse order, you're just throwing money away. You're paying to bring people to your site that you can't possibly convert.

Everone needs to get away from the thinking that the rank matters, what matters is the sale. Sales are a combination of conversions and total traffic and you can make a much larger impact with a little tweaking on conversion than you can with big ad buys to increase total traffic. It's just easier to plunk down the credit card and increase the ad bid though, where conversion research actually takes some work.

[thejenn]

Excellent input! Haven't seen you around before, so let me say welcome!

One of the biggest battles we're facing in the search industry is that we've spent so much time selling our services based on "we can get you to rank well for your phrases" that we're now having a hard time educating people to realize that what's really important is the targeted traffic that we can send...

...and oh, that just gave me a great idea for an article.

Be back in a bit to post it.

[bmccormick]

Thanks,

I've been following your 30 Days articles and I just want to congratulate you on a job very well done. Looking forward to whatever else you're able to contribute to the series, but I understand the amount of work required.

I've found the series interesting from both the business aspect, but also from the Milk Bank aspect. I hadn't even realized that a friend of mine was involved with a local Milk Bank here in the Bay Area after she had had a 4 month old premature baby this summer until I became more aware of the topic through your series.

Bryan

[thejenn]

Thanks! and that's so cool to hear that you've got a friend involved out there. Send her to my site!

Assuming that you're in CA, that's where much of this all started. San Jose has the oldest continually operating milk bank in the country...they've doled out millions of ounces of milk since the mid 70's.

I've actually donated to that bank as well as to Columbus. I was in San Jose last summer for the Search Engine Strategies conference and couldn't transport a week's worth of milk back to Ohio. At the same time, I hated to dump it down the drain as it was going to be several hundred ounces. The ladies here locally told me that there was a bank out there and faxed out all my medical records. The hotel that I stayed at stored all of the milk for me and then I took a cab out to drop it off at the end of the week.

Kinda cool.