About Search Marketing Netting Market Share with Search Engine Marketing Prospective buyers are hungry for information, but they want it on their terms. This means they primarily use natural, or organic search results when looking for information. In fact, according to a survey by MarketingSherpa of business decision makers, only 5.7% of the clicks on Google’s search results pages go to PPC ads…94.3% are on local or natural search results. Traditional media usage is down, making marketing “suspects” (pre-consideration potential clients, customers, job searchers) harder to reach, leave alone motivate. It’s essential to be visible to these “empowered individualists,” to maintain market share and to fuel growth. Search engine marketing bypasses the expense of creating top-of-mind awareness via advertising, and gets you top-of-list consideration at the time of need. Search visibility is the way to reach 85% of the people who are currently considering purchase or selection of a product or service: you must be visible on their search terms. It’s not enough to have a dominant brand. It’s not enough to have a slick presence on the web. You have to wrap your site around the mind of the market to be effective. The Business Case for Search Marketing Being at the top of the search engine rankings means first-place visibility to new prospects actively looking for a solution. High rankings drive new business…up to 400% more visits from top-ranked listings convert to purchase. Typical results from RefreshWeb optimization programs are an increase in Web visibility in excess of 500%. While a poor site will naturally show off-the-charts improvement, typical results from optimization immediately drive over 50% more traffic from search engines to a site—even with pay-per-click advertising in place. The need for search engine marketing is widespread, as most sites are created by a design team, maintained by an internal technical team, and have never been marketed. “Marketing” a web site means ensuring that the site is visible to large numbers of prospects; this is done by 1) researching prospect search behavior, 2) optimizing the content of the pages to make these search terms have relatively high weight on the page, 3) managing the submission and inclusion of pages on the major search engines, 4) internal and external link development, and 5) adding and updating content. Both site performance and competitors’ positions need to be monitored for optimum results.

Pay per click can be a powerful tool to get immediate top-of-the-rankings presence. However, PPC requires you to continually pay for that placement, like any form of advertising. Strong organic rankings from search engine optimization (SEO) are more like owning that real estate at the top of the page, instead of renting. PPC is auction-based, so there is a tendency for costs to go up over time. Our solution? Integrated management of both organic SEO and paid search, with the goal of continually lowering cost/lead and increasing the number of leads. Internet marketing is now the most cost-effective way for a company to spend its marketing communications dollars. We believe RefreshWeb’s approach is the most cost-effective way to strategize and implement an Internet marketing program. The fact that we bring over 20 years’ experience in marketing to the equation is the reason we partner so effectively with our clients. The SEO Process RefreshWeb starts every engagement by running a free ranking report, to see how much of the Total Available Search Market™ (TASM™) you are currently reaching. Search terms themselves define the market which is available to you via search visibility. There are literally hundreds of search terms that might be relevant to your brand. We start by testing a few dozen terms for visibility on the major search engines, directories and pay-per-click advertising services. Strong rankings on your brand and trade names is a given -- but these are people who already know you are the answer to their question. These are prospects, not suspects. Suspects have to search by defining their problem using terms they know already…not on terms they’ll learn from reading your website or would know if they already had completed their research. Our next step is a prescriptive site performance audit. We look at your server logs, your web analytics, your paid search results, your site’s programming and your sales flow to evaluate how well the site is working with the traffic you have. We do a thorough analysis of competing sites to evaluate their effectiveness, probe their weaknesses, and scope out the program you need to surpass them. Finally, we do deep keyword research and make detailed recommendations via a site optimization plan. This audit is how we scope the recommendations to solve your search marketing problems so you know the costs, the timeframe and the benefits to expect before we start work. The actual on-page search engine optimization work takes about 60 days. The key to effective optimization for search is not just to place high-volume keywords on the pages, but to differentiate between information-based terms and transactional terms, and build in these terms throughout the site. Optimizing your site for search requires much more than inserting search terms into your HTML metatag code. It requires a complete overhaul of your site content to align it with the strategy in the site optimization plan, supported by an ongoing process of monitoring your rankings, measuring the performance of traffic generated by search, and tweaking the site content to improve your results.

Our on-page SEO includes rewriting your top-level pages, internal links, metatag content, and information architecture recommendations; implementing the top-level changes we recommend is normally very straightforward, typically requiring only a few hours’ work by your web team. Reworking other content and implementing best practices like landing pages and call tracking for your PPC campaign can be more time consuming, but we can handle implementation for you through our virtual webmaster services. Once the content is in place and we can see the results (our SEO management dashboard is a powerful way to share this information), we do a 60-day refresh to adjust to the realities of the search engine results. Some terms we tried for may need additional support, such as internal linking or additional content, to come up well in the ranking results. Other terms may show no movement, and so we may replace them in the optimization strategy and work with terms that have more promise. From there, the next step is link development. Link development is equally important to your rankings as the on-page optimization, because it’s the heart of the way Google measures the relevance of your site. We craft these links, both in style and in selecting sites to request links to you, according to constantly-evolving SEO best practices. Our SEO package includes a basic level of directory listings; depending on our competitive analysis, we may recommend a more aggressive campaign. On a regular basis, we monitor your rankings and show your site’s performance in our on-line dashboard. As marketing partners and coaches, we make recommendations for improving performance, by looking for terms with good search volume which need to be supported more aggressively to move up. We also help you interpret your site’s web analytics, typically using Google Analytics. We are happy to work with other tools you may be using, such as ClickTracks, Omniture, HitBox or WebTrends. For clients where we are managing the paid search marketing program, we provide a written monthly report.