This past week I had an eye-opening conversation with a manufacturing company that contacted WebMetro for search engine optimization services. With the help of another search engine marketing agency this manufacturing company had redesigned their website and implemented an SEO campaign almost a year ago and the results were mixed.
After performing an SEO audit I discovered many opportunities to improve the return on investment from the SEO campaign. Collectively my audit reported 15 specific areas for improvement. Here is a sample of the largest opportunities for improvement:
1. A site architecture problem caused the site to have a 72% difference in page indexing count between Google and Yahoo.
2. A ranking analysis found the site had a couple first page rankings but most of the keywords for this manufacturing company were not in the top ten.
3. A keyword analysis found the SEO campaign was not targeting high volume keywords.
4. A page construction analysis found the average webpage weighed 400k and took almost 9.86 seconds to load on a T1 indicating a serious web hosting problem.
While these opportunities will increase revenue, the eye-opening opportunity was in market analysis. [more]
Market Analysis
My market analysis found that 79.6% of the search volume for his manufacturing companies originated from Google. Of course this was not unusual as Google often represents the largest search volume for many WebMetro clients. However, as I drilled down into this data I also discovered that organic search represented only 55% of the search volume for this market – leaving 45% for paid search.
Missing 45% of Marketing Opportunities
For the past year this manufacturing company had been ignoring 45% of their market because their search engine marketing agency never did the proper market research and did not inform the client they should be implementing a paid search campaign. Worse yet, Google represented 86.67% of the paid search volume so it was not necessary to launch campaigns on Yahoo or MSN for some time.
Imagine investing a whole year in a search engine marketing campaign only to find out your company is missing 45% of the revenue opportunities and your market share is eroding as your competitors employ paid search. Yikes!
Paid Search Helps Maximize SEO Traffic
Not only was this manufacturing company missing out on 45% of their market, chances are they were also missing out on some of their organic traffic as well. For some time, WebMetro has been tracking the campaign assist value between SEO and paid search, as we have with keyword assist. It turns out that in many markets a paid search campaign helps provide a 5-20% “lift” in organic traffic due to factors such as increased brand awareness, keyword assist, and “buy funnel” keyword capitalization. Therefore even if all your rankings are on the first page, the organic traffic may not be maximized unless a paid search campaign complements the organic rankings.
As I wrote in my Top 10 Tips for B2B Search Engine Marketing post, an integrated search campaign is must today for most businesses. Today marketers can no longer afford the opportunity costs associated with not showing up in the search engines. When a prospect (business or consumer) searches for your product or service and your company is nowhere to be found, how does this impact your bottom line revenue?