Search Engine Optimization – A Good Marketing Investment
Customers today research their purchases using the internet search engines to find answers and recommendations. A website link that appears as the result of a user search on Google or Yahoo can present a unique sales opportunity to the website owner. Users typically seek information using the internet prior to making a purchase – especially big ticket purchases. The bigger the purchase, typically, the more research a prospective buyer engages in.
The practice of organizing and presenting a web page so that it will be easily found by the search engines is termed \”Search Engine Optimization\” or SEO. When a user searches for information related to a particular product or service, the optimal result would be that your organization\’s website will appear and the user will click on it to get the information needed to make an informed purchase decision. So, positioning the web page to be easily found or highly ranked on the search results is very important.
Multi-national corporations invest huge sums of money in optimizing their pages so that internet users will be more likely to see their web pages. If this process didn\’t result in additional sales or improved cost savings, these organizations would have abandoned the effort and saved the expense long ago. Instead, companies continue to increase their investment in web page optimization simply because a well-optimized web page attracts new business.
Large organizations certainly use SEO to win new business, but is the same technology useful for smaller enterprises? The internet allows all organizations to compete for revenue, so even smaller companies can successfully battle major competitors for sales and traffic. An understanding of local user behavior or buying habits can be used to attract local traffic and to earn sales from local customers.
National organizations generally compete based on product performance and price considerations. However local businesses can also compete based on location and local services provided. Differentiating between the two types of organizations and the differences between product and service offerings offers an opportunity to position the small business website to compete where larger companies aren\’t strong. In this fashion, the smaller organization can compete for and win new customers.
The major consideration for smaller and medium enterprises is cost. SEO can actually be very \’cost effective,\’ over time. Average costs for acquiring new customers (based on the product of course) according to Google ranges from $70 and up for direct mail, $60 and up for email campaigns and over $8 for paid search (the links you see on search results where organizations have paid for their links to be displayed).
Even if the average product might not fit an organizations\’ business model, the proportions still hold value. Direct mail costs a great deal to identify a new customer, while an email campaign is somewhat less. The Google paid link program is quite a bit cheaper still. SEO however, if properly orchestrated, can be even less expensive and more efficient – especially over the long term.
An optimization campaign to attract new business using the company web page can take a few months with an investment between several hundred to a few thousands of dollars. Google\’s pay per click program can cost as much as several dollars per user visit. These costs add up quickly!
Search engine results though, are favored by users as internet viewers fully understand that the paid links are in fact advertisements. Search engine results – made possible by SEO – are more likely to be clicked upon than the paid links offered by the various search providers and users trust the results pages to be more informative.
By positioning a web page to attract viewer traffic, the business can present the product or service message and achieve credibility over the paid-link programs. In terms of efficiency and cost effectiveness, an investment in an SEO program can win new customers by presenting a credible company message via the internet. As users are more likely to click on \”organic\” search engine results as opposed to paid advertising links, the investment in SEO can in many cases be more cost effective and deliver a greater return on investment than any other form of internet commerce.
Need more sales? SEO Consultants in Denver help enterprises of all sizes compete for sales utilizing the internet search engines. Visit our home page for more information or check out our SEO Denver Blog for the latest in SEO news and information. Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory
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