Wouldn’t it be great to have a secret way of finding prospects exactly when they have a need for your product or service? Even better, how about before they realize they have a need, just some problem without a known solution.
Search Engine Marketing Strategy -- Play to Win
If you haven’t guessed, I am about to plug Internet marketing. But if it is so obvious that people use search engines to research problems and find solutions; why don’t more companies get in the game? Why isn’t everyone actively trying to get ranked? Finally, is ranking on the first page good enough?
Let’s take a look.
To support my position, I’m going to cite information from Enquiro Research. These guys do really great work and their data is fantastic! Specifically, the below data comes from Enquiro Search Solutions’ white paper “Marketing to a B2B Technical Buyer – Business to Business Survey 2007.”
Everyone knows Google is the most popular search engine, and it’s no surprise that in the B2B world Google is the most used search engine. Enquiro confirmed this finding that 77% of B2B search engine users, used Google.
Figure 1: B2B Search Engine Usage (source: www.enquiroresearch.com).
Digging a little deeper and referring to Table 1 below. You’ll notice that if you eliminate the “missing” group, 80% of the users clicked on an organic result and 20% click on a pay per click (PPC) ad. Further, within the organic results, you’ll notice that the most coveted position is the number 1 listing capturing 27% of all traffic. Again, no surprise here right!
Table 1: Organic and Pay Per Click (PPC) Traffic (source: www.enquiroresearch.com).
Let’s pretend that you get it and have done the hard work and positioned yourself on the first page of Google in the number one organic position for your most valuable keyword phrase. What do you do next? Do you:
1. Relax and go on vacation, or
2. Roll up your sleeves and try to get more of this extremely valuable traffic?
I’m going with two! The reason? Even if you are number one, you are missing about 73% of all traffic for this really important keyword phrase. Is this traffic not also valuable? Here’s what I would do:
1. Get ranked number two organically as well (one of those indented Google listings),
2. Get links from some of the other sites ranking of the first page, and
3. Expand my pay per click program to include this phrase.
Note — I’m assuming that I can generate a positive ROI with my PPC campaign. which by the way is generally not a problem assuming you are working on your website’s conversion rate — a post for another day perhaps…
I plotted Enquiro’s data (from Table 1) in Figure 2 to make the point that while there is nothing like ranking number one organically, a good PPC program can generate a very significant amount of traffic. Enquiro found that the number one top PPC ad generated more traffic than the number four through ten organic results.
Figure 2: B2B Search Engine Traffic Vs. Position (source: www.enquiroresearch.com).
My conclusions?
1. When it comes to positioning your website within a search engine results page, it is important to:
a. understand how prospects use the search engines, and
b. position yourself to get as much of this traffic as possible.
2. Don’t overlook PPC traffic. Many people have an irrational aversion to PPC traffic. Yet 20% of all B2B users click on PPC ads.
3. A first page Google listing is not good enough unless of course you don’t care that the majority of your prospects are visiting your competitors website.
