Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Is Your Business Leaving Money On The Table?

Don't Forget Search Engine Marketing and Optimization!

Many marketers and business owners think they're doing everything they can to get the word out about their company. They allocate their marketing dollars to direct mail, e-mail, banner ads, print ads, and pay-per-click (PPC). They spend much of their time, effort, and money on getting those methods to produce a positive ROI (return on investment). But they're ignoring a major source of potential traffic... which means they are losing loads of potential new customers ... and to me that's leaving money on the table: A HUGE mistake.

I'm talking about organic (natural) search engine marketing and optimization (SEM/SEO). Organic search results are those listings you see on the left side of Google after you type in your search term. You know, those little blurbs with links to someone's website. It's not to get confused with "paid" search, which are the small text ads that typically appear on the right side of the Google search results page. There's usually a subtle line separating these ads from the organic results and have a "sponsored links" headline at the top.

Many marketers think focusing on organic search is "a waste of time." Some think there's no way to monitor, measure, and monetize the results. But they're confused. According to a survey by Jupiter Research, 80% of Web users get information from organic search results. And measuring sources of traffic and visitors is easy with the free Web tool Google Analytics.
Search engines like variety in relevant back links to your website. And one of the best ways to get tons of relevant back links is with a systematic method I develop regarding the synchronized distribution of your content (read http://www.precisionmarketingmedia.com/sonar.html for more info.).

So in addition to having optimized website pages -- having a variety of news aggregators (i.e. Google News, Yahoo News), social networks, blogs, and directories linking to your site helps give you a heavier weight in organic listing results. Your company will appear more often and higher in the organic search results ... eventually dominating the critical first three results listings. This helps build your organic market presence for little or no cost. And, let's face it, low cost is a good thing.

Using organic search strategies helped increase traffic rank and visits to a health website I launched by 3,160% and 81.5%, respectively, in only three months. In that same time this websitehad a 62.01% rate of converting that organic search traffic into subscribers. In other words, the traffic was turned into sales (or monetized)! That's about 16,000 organic names in three months at virtually no cost.

So search engine naysayers...do you still think SEM and SEO is a waste of time?
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