Changes in the technology and in the marketplace yield opportunities. The only question is whether you will seize those opportunities to transform the way you do business and in so doing, move your business forward toward growth.
I just came from a meeting with a friend who confided that last year his business took a major hit. It was a bit surprising as the legal business doesn’t usually seem susceptible to economic downturns. Another client, in retail, has confided her business is down 25-30% from its peak. Partly due to the economy, and partly due to changes in her industry.
My client has decided to seize upon the changing times as an opportunity. She never even had a website before and now within a few weeks, she is already averaging 5 new customers a week calling to order because they found her online. How much is each new customer or client worth to you? Don’t forget to compute the lifetime value of each customer, not just the profits from their first order.
My friend, on the other hand, is stuck in his old way of doing business. He knows the Yellow Pages don’t pull like they used to, and he knows that most people use Google and other search engines to find local goods and services (Google says one-third of searches are for local goods or services), but he recently blew his ad budget on another one year contract with the Yellow Pages. He wasn’t willing to give them up until they were dead and buried. This will be his last year.
But what is the value of a year? What is the value of seizing opportunity before your competition? What opportunities are there now that you need to be taking advantage of?
Two trends are converging to provide your business with tremendous opportunity no matter what your industry. The death of the yellow Pages and the rise of Google local.
The Yellow Pages aren’t quite dead yet, but like most old media, it is on its last legs. You might able to squeeze out another year’s worth of customers from it, but those numbers will be way lower than they used to be.Even people who can’t afford luxuries own a computer and are now using it when they have a need. And that was the beauty of the Yellow Pages. People only picked them up when they were ready to buy. They were your hottest prospects.
Now your hottest prospects search Google (70% of them do, whole the other 30% use Yahoo or Bing). And if you are not on the map, literally and figuratively, they aren’t going to find you. I put one client on the map last week and they received 500 click-throughs to their website and a substantial number of calls and visitors to their location. They are a membership organization, so “sales” take a bit longer, but I have no doubt membership is about to boom. In just one week.
Are you ready to seize your opportunity or are you stuck in the old thinking? In business, someone usually does seize the opportunity when market changes present those opportunities. Will it be you or your competition?
New research by Chitka, a web advertising company, shows the value of search marketing and top search engine results for your keywords.
How much is the top spot on Google actually worth? According to data from the Chitika network, it’s worth a ton – double the traffic of the #2 spot, to be precise.
In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement. The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.
“Obviously, everyone knows that the #1 spot on Google is where you want to be,” says Chitika research director Daniel Ruby. “It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1.”
The biggest jump, percentage-wise, is from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1. Going from the 11th spot to 10th sees a 143% jump in traffic. However, the base number is very low – that 143% jump is from 1.11% of all Google traffic to 2.71%. As you go up the top page, the raw jumps get bigger and bigger, culminating in that desired top position.
Here is the graphic:
Check out the following chart of search results and click through rate:
| Google Result | Impressions | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,834,806 | 34.35% |
| 2 | 1,399,502 | 16.96% |
| 3 | 942,706 | 11.42% |
| 4 | 638,106 | 7.73% |
| 5 | 510,721 | 6.19% |
| 6 | 416,887 | 5.05% |
| 7 | 331,500 | 4.02% |
| 8 | 286,118 | 3.47% |
| 9 | 235,197 | 2.85% |
| 10 | 223,320 | 2.71% |
| 11 | 91,978 | 1.11% |
| 12 | 69,778 | 0.85% |
| 13 | 57,952 | 0.70% |
| 14 | 46,822 | 0.57% |
| 15 | 39,635 | 0.48% |
| 16 | 32,168 | 0.39% |
| 17 | 26,933 | 0.33% |
| 18 | 23,131 | 0.28% |
| 19 | 22,027 | 0.27% |
| 20 | 23,953 | 0.29% |
Of course this data does not take into account the importance of showing up on the map for Google’s local search results. It will be a few months before we see that data, I suspect, and it will show a dramatic shift in how people use Google and what they click on.
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, and SEM, Search Engine Marketing, are excellent ways to get your business seen in the internet search engines. I say search engines, but of course I really mean Google. Latest statistics show that Google has 72.5% of all search in the U.S. That means that any strategy aimed at search starts with Google and picks up the crumbs from Bing, Yahoo and others, later.
But Google has been dominating for years, so that is not what has transformed the search market in 2010. For that, we have to look to consumer use of search, where the big story is local search. Stats show that 70 percent of Internet users search for local businesses online and 60% visit or recommend a business after using search.
So, the first key to transforming your online strategy, is to make sure that you target your local market. Google Maps is your first priority. Given the short amount of time it takes to establish profiles for the other local search engines, you need to establish profiles on Yahoo and Bing’s Maps, as well.
Any SEO consultant worth his salt knows this. If you are not showing up on Google Maps for your top keywords in your local market, and you are paying someone to do SEO, you need to look for someone new. Sounds obvious, but I recently found a business with close to 50 search results on page one of Google, many of which were ranked #1 in the organic search results. That business wasn’t showing up on the Google map at all! He clearly is paying someone to do SEO, yet they were not keeping up with the field and he is losing a substantial amount of business.
Search Results Domination takes search marketing to the next level. We start by ensuring that you are prominently featured in the local map results. Sometimes that is easier than others, and often achieving those results includes a social media strategy. Next we get your site to page one of Google. Finally, we aim to control your market.
To take control your market we start with a simple question that you probably have not been asked by any SEO or SEM consultant: How many of the 10 organic search results on page one of Google do you want to be for your business? That’s right, how many of those 10? Are you ready to dominate your market?
