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Evaluating the Opportunity
Not all organizations—or more accurately, business categories—can derive equal benefit from search engine marketing. In fact, some can derive very little benefit at all, while others can realize great value. For some companies, Internet search is their single most cost-effect marketing vehicle.
Fortunately, we can analyze, with a good deal of detail, a site’s potential success with search engine marketing. We are happy to do so for you, free of charge. Call (310-826-9591) or email us at info@sunhunter.com. If you email, please tell us the site URL, your name and title, and anything else you think may be helpful to us, such as your marketing goals for the site.
Two primary factors determine the potential effectiveness of search engine marketing for your site:
- Keywords—Are there enough relevant keyword phrases that people actually search on with acceptable frequency? The more specific a keyword the better, and the more times it is searched the better. The more keywords in general, the greater the opportunity. Our essay Keyword Strategy provides a good deal of detail about keywords.
- Competition—How tough is the competition for these keywords? In CPC keyword advertising this is measured by how much you must pay per clickthrough to get on the first page of search results in the sponsored listings. In search engine optimization (SEO), the primary competitive factor (from our perspective as professional optimizers) is link position. The most important ranking factor in SE’s algorithms, though one of many, is the quantity and quality of links to your site from other (ideally relevant) sites. We know we can optimize your site, but we may not be able to overcome a link situation that is so highly disadvantageous that it neutralizes or nullifies anything we do with your Web pages. So the question becomes: can you compete on links?
There is a third factor that pertains only to SEO:
- Site Architecture and Flexibility—Is your site designed/architected in such a way that search engines cannot index your content? Examples of barriers to search engines are the use of FLASH, framesets and images rather than plain text. Now there are ways to work around these problems, but these require more resources, i.e., they cost more. Flexibility refers to how willing you are to allow us to make copy and other changes to your pages.
Keywords and competition are critical factors because we have little to no control over them.
If people simply aren't making searches that are relevant or related to what you offer, there's nothing we can do about that. As to competition, we can work to generate more links to your site to improve your rankings, and indeed nearly always recommend link acquisition activities as part of a search engine optimization program. Typically, if there are plenty of good keywords, competition is less of an issue. In some business categories, however, especially the major ones where you’re competing with Fortune 100 companies that enjoy thousands of links, the competition can be too difficult to surmount. Another problem is when your keyword phrases are also highly relevant to a lot of non-profit organizations or media sites, which tend to enjoy thousands of links.
It's important to understand that a search engine marketing program will look different for different organizations; in other words, it needs to be customized to your individual situation. Some situations are straight forward and relatively simple: there's plenty of good keywords that will drive targeted traffic to your site that we can optimize your pages for with little difficulty because the competition are organizations similar to your own.
However, many situations are not as straight forward. Here's an example of a situation with seemingly limited potential to tap into search engine marketing, at least on the surface. At this writing we've not gotten approval to implement our recommendation, and perhaps never will, but present the situation because it well illustrates what certain types of products are up against and yet how a strategic approach can be developed to benefit from Internet search.
The company's product is pills that eliminate the craving for nicotine and thereby enable a smoker to quit in a matter of weeks.
There's no dearth of relevant keywords for this product, with well over 100,000 searches conducted each month on terms such as quit smoking, stop smoking, how to quit smoking, help quit smoking, etc.
Unfortunately, for a commercial site, it is very difficult if not impossible to generate high rankings in search engines for these terms through search engine optimization (SEO). That's because the competition for just about any keyword concerning smoking is formidable. Again, our primary criterion for competition is inbound links. The competition is numerous government Web pages, non-profit organizations and non-commercial smoking cession information sites that enjoy several hundred to thousands of links and therefore rank high in search results for most smoking-related keywords. In this situation, there may be no room on the first page of search results for even a well-optimized commercial site with sparse links, especially for the obvious keywords mentioned above. While we can probably obtain more inbound links, we cannot come anywhere close to what we need to be confident of competing for page-one rankings.
Cost-per-click keyword advertising provides no easy pathway to tapping into Internet search, either. The company had tried a program (very unsophisticated) on Overture and lost money. They spent an average of a $1.50 a clickthrough and attained a sales conversion rate of about two percent for a product they're selling for $70.
Clearly this is a difficult situation. Our counsel was to give keyword advertising one more chance and run a test program, only this time taking a more sophisticated approach.
The company's threshold of being able to spend $30 per sale meant that, with a conversion rate of two percent, they could afford to spend an average of no more than 45 cents per clickthrough. That meant that we had to either dramatically lower the average cost per click or dramatically increase the rate of sales conversion. Or a more moderate combination of both.
We can lower the average cost per click by:
- Advertising across a much broader range of keywords that carry lower CPCs. In the previous campaign they advertised only on the most targeted, expensive keywords on Overture. And yet many keywords are available (at the time of analysis) that are still relevant (though less so), but carry minimal CPCs on the Overture network. Some fairly strong keywords are also available that fall within the acceptable range of under 45 cents, such as stop smoking tips and quit smoking tips.
- Participating in CPC programs that offer lower CPCs than Overture and Google, such as Sprinks and FindWhat. These programs don't get near the volume of the major networks, but they do get volume. And the most expensive of our keywords on FindWhat, for example, was 68 cents per CPC.
The second point is kind of a no-brainer. If this company decided to do nothing else, there is little to no downside to advertising on the less-volume, less-expensive ad networks, assuming the two percent conversion rate holds.
Concerning the first point, while not necessary, it would be desirable to create some helpful non-commercial information content for the site, such as a separate Web page on Tips to Help Quit Smoking. In fact, we found more than 50 smoking-related keywords, most well under 45 cents per CPC, and were able to group them into about five broad categories that can be characterized as:
- quit smoking tips
- smoking and pregnancy
- smoking facts/statistics
- nicotine issues
- effects of smoking
Based on this we can create five pages of useful editorial content covering each of these broad areas of interest. This would support the ad campaign, giving users what they're looking for in searching for a broad range of smoking-related information. These pages could also be optimized to achieve rankings in regular search results. Finally, once enough good content is created, a separate information site might be spun off, which would lend itself to generating numerous links for being a non-commercial, information site. Such a site could feature and link to the commercial site.
Concerning improving the conversion rate, CPC keyword advertising is a great vehicle for testing copy and other presentation/navigation issues. We can create unique pages, or a separate directory, that only will be visited by clickthroughs from a specific CPC ad program. With this particular Web site, we feel there is a lot of room for improvement, and want to experiment with the home page and with the order form/shopping cart.
Another way to improve the conversion rate is to create more specific text ads for the CPC programs. For example, we could list the price of the product to eliminate people not interested in paying for a smoking cessation product. Getting this specific, however, might create problems with the ad networks, who want to see high clickthrough rates for their inventory.
In summary, not all products and services have a straight path to tapping into the value offered by Internet search. Some companies cannot benefit from search engine marketing at all. Between these two poles is a spectrum of potential that is challenging and requires an expert, strategic approach. In these situations you can begin to appreciate the value an experienced marketing professional can bring to the table. And that search engine marketing isn't something that should be turned over to the college intern at your Web development firm.
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