The Holy Grail of most online marketers is to achieve 1st page ranking on Google for keyword searches related to their business. Once this has been achieved, traffic is basically free, aside from the ongoing time and/or fees paid to an SEO company.
If you are not currently taking full advantage of the possibility of ranking on the 1st page of Google for your primary keywords, you are missing out on a potentially huge amount of traffic. Once you start receiving organic traffic, you can consider whether you still need to pay for some of the other traffic from advertising sources e.g. if you are also running pay-per-click campaigns, once you are ranking well for some of your major keyword combinations, you could consider scaling back on your advertising spend.
An Actual Example of the Financial Benefit of Good SEO
To give you an example of what sort of effect this could have on a typical business, I refer to one of the companies with which we have been working. This company uses PPC extensively in a very competitive environment. The cost/click to achieve #1 ranking for the best keywords in this market are in the range of $20-$40 per click! So, organic search results on the first page are definitely worth the time and effort it takes to achieve.
With a concerted effort on search engine optimization, both onpage and offpage techniques, this company received 439 visitors from organic searches during a recent month. This would have cost this company around $10,050 in PPC costs, based on their typical cost/click.
These visits translated to around $14,000 in sales for the company – in one month! The SEO costs to keep their website on the first page of the major search engines are a small fraction of this, so the return on investment is phenomenal.
Why do So Many Websites Not Rank Well on the Search Engines?
Many of the companies we have worked with are nowhere to be found on the search engines, except for searches on their company name or website URL. The reasons for this lack of performance on the search engines is usually due to a combination of the following factors:
- Website is full of flash animation and difficult to Google to navigate
- Inadequate inclusion of correct titles, descriptions or keywords in site pages
- Poor selection of the optimum keywords to optimize for: e.g. a pizza company would usually want to target a specific geographical area, so it is pointless to try to rank well for ‘pizza delivery’, but instead should focus on ‘pizza delivery 77479’ or ‘pizza delivery Houston’
- Lack of good quality relevant links pointing to the website.
Most of the above factors are very simple to fix and not at all a ‘black art’ as some SEO companies would have you believe. It can be time consuming, however, particularly building good quality links back to your website. However, once you have the foundation of good SEO built up for your site, it should only require regular maintenance and tweaking.
Further Information/Resources on Search Engine Optimization
If you are interested in finding out specifically what you need to do to help your website rank well on the search engines, we are offering a thorough audit of your website, with a full 30-40 page report on how your site ranks compared with the top 10 Google websites for your chosen keyword. This report will give you detailed step-by-step information on what you can do to your website to lift its ranking.
We can also perform full service SEO for you.
Details of these services can be found by CLICKING HERE.
Check out our free video which gives the #1 secret to marketing your small business online – Small Business Internet Marketing Secrets
So, you can see by improving each part of the system, we ended up with 8x the sales – it is not difficult to make these improvements to most businesses online marketing systems. By following the steps outlined in our FREE CD and our Small Business Internet Marketing Course, you should be able to see exponential improvements to your bottom line.