IT consulting::Internet::SEO::E-business::Interim management::Webservice

The business about search engine positioning and e-commerce marketing.

Business on the Internet is and will be driven by more than 85% of users searching for results to cater for their wishes, desires and questions using search engines. But of these, 90% will only ever check the first two pages or 20 results. If you there, they may click, but will they stay? SEO the sheer positioning on unpaid (natural) search results, in my opinion, can't be viewed and used on its own.

Search Engine Marketing & Management  includes SEO but focuses on return on investment (ROI) management instead of just relevant traffic building. Attention is placed on the web page layout design and how content and when, what information is displayed to the website visitor.

The average search phrase is two to three words, whereas the third word is mostly of geographic or value reference (cheap, affordable, US, UK, Europe, etc.). Search engines address and index more and more pages, this results in relatively less and less pages being on top for a not so endless combination of search phrases. Search engines will tighten the screws even further by ongoing development of their search algorithms and the more aggressive stamping out of spam. Frequently you are invited to comment on search results and notify the SE about suspected spammers and do use these functions.

Although SE's don't like it and try their best to hide the facts, users have learned to ignore the top sponsored results and are weary of bid for position specifically when the bid price is shown (Who wants to contact a life insurance offer that can afford £4.50 per click? If I'm the customer I pay for it one way or another!).

The "old" easy positioning of pages is long gone and "hitting the soft spot" is seriously important. It is NOT black magic. Positioning and marketing on the Internet is very competitive, time consuming and thus can be expensive, but the rewards (increased profit) should more than cover this.

It is therefore important to measure, get feed back, make it easy for, and engage with, visitors.

More and more people are using the Internet for more and more day to day tasks and searches, leaving advertising and print media far behind. These are interesting and challenging times and only established companies with a long research and success record will give their clients results in this "mad market".

Please don't forget the site is for your customers not for your company! Your customers MUST find the answer preferably without further clicks into the site and need to feel comfortable as well as secure. In short the site needs to make them want to come back and back and back......... (and tell their friends! and bookmark!). Just have a look yourself - it is surprising how many sites don't even have a bookmark and/or recommend button. How the poor user is expected to find them again is beyond me.

Here is some math: On average, each two word search phrase returns 4.250.000 results. Even when most of the spammers are eliminated (which is already starting to happen) one still needs to be in the top 0.002% of search results to be seen by the user of a search engine, meta crawler or directory, who may become your next client or customer.

So searching for "Life insurance" now returning about 160.000.000 results.
Now what are the chances your page is amongst the top 20? So targeting the top 0.00002% of results is what is the aim!

This is flanked by the pay per click positioning which is becoming expensive and competitive that the placements have hit maximum bids.

Imagine bidding £4.50 for a click when your conversion factor is 25:1. Thus to make one deal you have to spend a staggering £112.50 just to attracting one buying customer. This is before all other costs of fulfillment etc.
(Yes there are products where this is not unusual, Life Insurance springs to mind)

Therefore finding and using the best source to get your business to the top will become even more of a challenge and a simple must.

This comes down to math again. If half your customers are from search engines and half your customers are from pay per click the above quoted (direct) costs per deal come down to £56.25. If the site is "smoothed" to generate a conversion factor of 12:1 this comes down to £28.12. If the search engine and recommendation percentage is moved up the scale (75/25) one can still bid £4.50 and the costs is down to £14.06.

This is by no means a high target. Some of our customers business model allows to run at 6:1 conversion factor and a mix of 75% search engine results and 25% bought in "pay per click" so each highly targeted visitor / customer costs £0.02 (tupence), which includes yearly costs of subscriptions to some directories and search engines. So it is 12 pence per deal. Thus they can afford to pay me / my company and still make money....

Our commitment to our clients:

We deliver no nonsense advice and from long experience we simply make business on the Internet happen. If you are interested to explore this further , want to know how we approach this and the potential costs, simply contact us.

Martin Goetz-Jablonowski

MD
MBGJ.ORG Limited