Rank or Relinquish: Search Impacts Your Bottom Line

This article by Hollis originally appeared in Business Week’s October 2, 2005 issue.

For too long, many large corporations have ignored the role of Internet search in their marketing plans. Up to 85 percent of the active online population use search engines, and yet a recent study¹ revealed that only 13 percent of Fortune 100 companies have their web sites optimized for search engines. New data, advancements in measurement solutions and the seeming ever-presence of search engine news in the media, however, is capturing the attention of corporate leadership. Search has gained respect for its low-cost, high ROI impact on the bottom line and for transforming the game of corporate competition. No longer is search marketing solely driven by the marketing or IT team. These days, search directives often come handed down from the top.

Fifty percent of all site visits originate from search engines. Of all the search engines, two are the clear forerunners: Google, with 36.5 percent of all searches, and Yahoo, with 30.5 percent² . Google users are predominantly male (53.6 percent), Yahoo! female (50.2 percent), with Google attracting the most visitors with household incomes greater than $100,000. Ask Jeeves sent the greatest proportion of searchers (8.55 percent) to business-related sites³.

Organic Search

There are two primary forms of search marketing: “organic” and “paid.” Organic, or “natural” search, refers to the results generated by search engine algorithms from their vast databases of web pages, e.g. the left-hand side of Google. Natural search results are free. The process of affecting a site’s natural search engine results is called “search engine optimization” or SEO. SEO involves implementing keyword-driven changes to a web site to remove hindrances to search engine “spiders” that crawl the site. Hindrances to search engine spiders include aspects such as web site construction (framed vs. unframed sites; dynamic vs. static sites; Flash-based vs. non-Flash sites), navigation (image links instead of HTML text links), page content (image text vs. HTML text), and the best practices use of meta-tag data. The impact of SEO takes time (up to six months) and is not a certainty.

The crux of SEO rests on selecting the best keywords or keyword phrases for which to optimize the web site. Since a web site cannot singularly attract searchers for all terms for all pages of its site, keywords must be isolated and then SEO recommendations built around them, typically in a one-to-one ratio of keyword term to web page. All too often, companies’ initial choice of keywords is based on its own jargon or company vernacular which have no true correlation to the words its audience might actually be typing into search engines. For this reason, beginning SEO with keyword research is mission critical. Keyword research starts with a base of keyword terms, then identifies other related terms and compares those terms against one another on the merit of such factors as relevancy, volume of search, and competition within each term.

Once the best keywords for optimization are selected, securing re-SEO baseline rankings for those keywords will reveal the impact of SEO over time. Next an SEO-guided web site analysis reveals the site’s shortcomings for the chosen keywords and recommendations to correct these weaknesses are developed and implemented. SEO is not a one-time fix; it’s an ongoing process of making both large and small changes and seeing how those changes affect the site’s search engine rankings over time. Search engines themselves change how they present their results so the SEO process must be repeated.

Since search engines are ever-changing, keeping on top of SEO methodologies can be extremely time-consuming. Left in the hands of the company webmaster, expectations for SEO should be significantly reduced. SEO professionals can spend as much as a third of their time reading about, researching and discussing search engine changes and SEO tactics. The more complex a web site – image-laden pages with javascript-enabled mouse-over navigation or dynamically-generated sites rendering thousands of pages with long URL strings or password-protected web sites whose content search engine spiders cannot access – the more likely SEO will not truly be achieved by an internal person unless that person’s job is 100 percent dedicated to SEO. Hence, the growing reliance on outsourcing to professional SEO firms.

Paid Search

Paid search are advertisements (Google is now the biggest media company in the world). Paid search listings have certain advantages over organic listings: they can provide guaranteed and nearly instant search engine visibility; with paid ads, the advertising message can be controlled and tested; and paid ads can give a company with search-unfriendly web sites the ability to be found when search engine spiders would otherwise not. But there’s one huge pink elephant affecting paid search: up to 85% of searchers say they tend to ignore the paid listings⁴ . Care to validate this? Ask a room full of colleagues what search engine listings they’re more likely to click on the majority of the time, and the outcome will likely be the same.

There has also been some backlash about paid search from watchdog organizations. The FTC has pressed the search engines to do a better job delineating paid ads from natural listings, and studies have shown that many users do not know the difference between paid ads and natural listings⁵ , leading to confusion and mistrust when the consumer later learns the difference. So relying solely on paid search engine listings can have negative consequences.

Organic Search’s Impact on Site Traffic and Sales

Increasing a web site’s natural search engine rankings through SEO, on the other hand, has been found to have a direct and positive impact on the site’s traffic and ultimately the company’s sales. Studies have shown that second or third page rankings can increase web site traffic by up to nine times. Top 10 rankings can mean an additional six-fold increase in traffic. The correlating impact on sales is also astronomical: 42 percent more sales within the first month of Top 10 listings and nearly 100 percent more the second month⁶. Conversely, sites with search engine rankings below the third page typically do not convert because searchers have a tendency not to drill down past page three of search results.

Search and Your Competition

Search can also impact a company’s competitive advantage. Many companies realize too late that their competition in a search engine may be completely different than their real world competition, and it’s all a matter of who ranks higher. A relatively obscure company could see pronounced growth from top rankings while an industry leader, with a search engine unfriendly web site, doesn’t even appear. Similarly, if a real world competitor appears in organic search and you do not, that competitor is certainly deriving a lion’s share more business from the Internet. SEO can be used to offset negative search engine listings, i.e. listings for negative press coverage, lawsuits and resolved bankruptcies.

Monitoring search engine rankings can also reveal a great deal about a company’s competition. Whether or not a competitor appears in the search engine rankings, how it’s ranking for primary keyword terms over time, if its web site appears to have been optimized over time, exploring the competitor’s optimization tactics to counteract and/or incorporate them on one’s own site, and estimating the impact of the competitor’s rankings on its bottom line are all benefits of conducting Competitive Search IntelligenceSM.

The Domination Strategy

As mentioned earlier, top organic search engine results equates to stronger perceived company credibility and brand recognition. For this reason, company leaders should find it compulsory to achieve top organic search engine rankings. Nevertheless, it’s often vanity that first compels company brass to want top rankings. Seeing the company web site missing from the top of the rankings is often the tipping point that moves a company from considering search engine optimization to finally acting upon it.

Still, for some companies, top natural results are not enough. These companies want to improve their odds of web site visits and sales by completely dominating the top of the search engine results pages. To do so, the company undertakes a domination strategy, executing both SEO and purchasing paid keyword ads. Doing so not only improves their odds but also helps to diminish their competitors’.

The bottom line? Ignoring search can be detrimental to a company. Protect your bottom line assets by improving your search visibility.
1. Oneupweb, May 2005
2. comScore Media Metrix, August 2005
3. Hitwise, August 2005
4. Marketing Sherpa, May 2005
5. Consumer Reports, June 2003
6. Wired, February 2005

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