Perhaps you've experienced the following...your company has just launched a brand new corporate website which cost $50,000. It looks great, has some snappy flash animations and strong messaging. Your organization does $10 million in gross revenues per year, and your website is expected to generate at least 10% of that...or $1 million in sales. Piece of cake to meet quota, right? Many businesses fail to grasp that website development is only the first step to making online sales. Just because your developer created an excellent website according to your specifications does not mean that your site will rank in the top group of search results for any keywords relevant to your goods and services (other than perhaps your corporate name). Without search engine visibility, your prospects will have little chance of finding your website and your company will see, at best, a minimal boost in its Internet sales volume. Fortunately, your corporate website need not keep its anonymity. For minimal additional cost, your company can transform the site from online deadweight to search engine heavyweight. The following two-tiered approach will work wonders: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the science of naturally achieving top rankings in the search engines for revenue-generating keywords. "Organic" website creation rarely creates any of the components necessary for search engine success. So, to bring your website to the top of the engines, an SEO campaign would need to do the following: Provide optimum keyword density for your targeted keywords. Trade links with many other webmasters that run relevant websites (extremely important). Make sure that other aspects of SEO (i.e. page length, title tags) match up with accepted standards for search engine success. Note that search engine optimization success does not happen overnight...it might take 2-3 months before your company sees results from your SEO efforts. However, your business need not wait that long to generate online revenue...you can implement a Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign and make sales immediately. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the ability to bid your company to the top of the search engines for your targeted keywords. The two major vendors of Pay-Per-Click ads are Google AdWords and Overture. If you have accounts with both, you will be better positioned to reach potential customers in all the major search engines. When creating a PPC campaign, you need to address the following issues: Keyword selection. If you don't select keywords broadly enough, you won't reach all potential prospects. If you select keywords too broadly, you will be spending money without making sales. Keyword bidding. In every keyword list, some are overpriced and some are bargains. Also, it is a myth that you need to be the high bidder to generate the most revenue...frequently, ROI is better when you bid less. Ad Copy. Does your ad copy contain your targeted keyword? If not, you are probably not getting an optimum click-thru rate. Landing pages. If you are sending all your prospects to your website home page, you are not maximizing sales conversion. Top performing PPC campaigns create special landing pages that reflect the particular keywords selected. Without search engine marketing, a corporate website has minimal ability to generate revenue. Effective SEO and PPC campaigns not only allow companies to make sales quotas, but have tremendous ROI and the cost per lead for search engine marketing, according to a recent report by U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, is far lower than any other sales lead generation method. |
