Directories, Search Engines & Links

I’ve known hundreds of companies with upper management who do not see the correlation between online advertising and online success, many of them IT people, but also marketing, sales and top management people as well. There’s little surprise that IT should avidly avoid more responsibility, but, for the life of me, I’ve never been able to reconcile the lack of interest and appreciation of the facts as shown by top marketing people at large companies, not just mom and pop outfits.

It is a undisputed fact that 85% of all online purchases originate with an online search through Google or Yahoo, who have 90+% of the search market, or one of the others such as MSN, AOL, Alta Vista, Lycos, Ask Jeeves or Alltheweb (two years ago there were 20 such search engines). The other 15% is from those who already know about the site in the first place, i.e. Sears, Target, Barnes and Nobles, etc.

These facts have been widely reported in both the trade press and mass media. How could marketing and sales professionals at corporate vice presidency levels either miss this vitally important information or ignore it even if they’ve seen it? It’s beyond comprehension, and they ignore these facts at their peril and at the peril of their companies.

Let’s take this business opportunity from the top, keeping it simple and thinking it through logically.

If you are reading this article, the chances are very good that you have either spent good money on a web site, or you are about to contract for an original site or a re-work of one done some time ago.  You know or should know by now that content is king. A content rich site will beat one that just looks good, but doesn’t provide much in the way of pertinent information - every day of the week. Indefinite words have been or will be eschewed in favor of meaningful words that say precisely what is being offered on the site. A site must offer something of value to some portion of the Internet audience or there’s really no reason to launch it in the first place. But, again, you must know this already.

Next, you should be convinced of the need for a good header to be placed in the html code which lies behind each important page on your site. It’s not good enough to have a good site. You want to be found; to reach that goal, the next step is to insure, to the extent possible, that your site is found in the natural results (unpaid) of searches at Google and Yahoo, among others. What your site needs is a good title – Welcome to Tommy’s web site doesn’t cut it – a good description that will appear in the search results, written to entice searchers to click through to your site, and a pertinent group of the words searchers will use to find your products and services. With these elements in place you can expect to be found in the top ten results if you are lucky. Without these elements, your site will not see the light of day, regardless of the state of your luck. (Whoever gave you this to peruse can go into more detail.)

Now we come to the primary reason for this article, why you should seriously consider a PPC ad campaign with Google and/or Yahoo – PPC stands for Pay Per Click through to a particular web site. There are some ten billion web sites extant on the Internet. Depending on your business niche, your site may have several hundred thousand or even millions of competitive sites vying for searcher attention. That amounts to some very tough odds indeed. 550 million searches per week at Google alone suffices to somewhat cut through this pile of confusion, but Google indexes only five million of the ten million web sites wandering around out there in the virtual ether. It’s awfully tough for any web site to be found without the owner anteing up for an ad campaign.

Before you mentally shut down, because you are fearful of spending too much money on PPC ad campaigns, let’s go over the salient factors here. You do have a worthwhile product or service which you want to augment sales via the Internet – do you not? Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone to the trouble and cost of having a web site in the first place – again, you would not have, right?

PPC campaigns can cost whatever you want them to. Normally, 3% of forecasted sales sets a good benchmark for what should be spent on advertising a brick and mortar store or service center. Why should Internet advertising be any different? It shouldn’t, but again, you can set any level of cost to begin a campaign and ante up as you achieve your level of comfort. Your costs can be refined to set limits on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. There are no contracts covering any period of time at all. You can shut down a campaign anytime after going live with it. (You know, of course, that you do not have such control over radio, TV or print advertising.)

There are ins and outs promoting both Google and Yahoo. Such refinements are not germane to the point of this article, which is simply to lay out the Internet terrain in a way that is logical, so you, as the owner of your web site destiny, can reach logical decisions about what you need to do to maximize your chances for success with your online venture.

I can not know what questions you may have at this point, but if you send me your question I’ll jump send you an answer quicker than you can imagine.

A final thought: Any marketing plan that doesn't take search engines into consideration is like opening up a retail store in the middle of a deep forest without any roads close by and without a listed telephone number. You wouldn’t do that would you?

Bill Orr
bill@williamorr.com
March 2004