SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

The majority of web traffic is driven by four major search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AskJeeves. Not being found or not being indexed by these search engines puts your business at an incredible disadvantage. People all around the world, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, are searching for information, shopping, and buying. Search is the preferred method of navigating the Internet for many users.

According to an iProspect Study, 35% of search marketers who participate in paid search advertising and outsourced their SEO to an search engine marketing firm recognized higher ROI than from paid search advertising.

Getting to the top of the search engines AND staying there can be quite a challenge and requires real work. There’s no magic pill or program out there that will do it for you overnight.

Sure, there will be some get-rich-quick software that might do it for you but you’ll soon find that it’s a lot more trouble than it’s worth. Do it right the first time and the rest will be so much easier.

Think of a website as a brick-and-mortar store located on a quiet street. If you don’t market it aggressively, few will get to know your about your site and therefore no one will purchase anything meaning no profits. Like any business, a website requires investment of time, money, and effort to make it work.

The reality is, the hard part is not to get into the top 10 results; it’s to stay there. Competition is fierce at the top for some industries like web hosting, travel and loans.

SEO gives you SEVEN distinct advantages:

1. Lower cost of generating and capturing qualified leads.

These are qualified leads visiting your site because they have consciously searched for information using relevant keywords. This is especially true if they used specific search terms like “buy used chevy truck” instead of “chevy truck”. The first search term is very specific and indicates a ready-to-buy prospect and the latter being more generic and someone who’s likely still shopping around.

2. Cheaper “advertising” cost than traditional mediums as well as Paid Search.

SEO allows you to create a brand very cheaply (in most cases) for a significantly lower investment than traditional advertising like radio, TV, billboards, and yellow pages, ever will. In Doubleclick’s Performics 50 Search Trend Report, average PPC costs have increased 37% from Q1 2005 to Q1 2006.

3. Increases credibility and visibility of your business.

While a large physical presence can be prohibitively expensive and not necessary for a small business, a listing in the top 10 search results increases the perception of credibility to a prospect seeking products and services you provide. It is just like having the biggest ads in the yellow pages helps you get more business as opposed to small line listings.
Online, you can be as small as a one-person business running everything from home doing business with a large fortune 100 corporation. Offline, having a professional office or large office with many employees may increase your credibility and ability to close a sale with a big client.
Anyone can throw up a website in a few hours and pay for clicks. Organic search results tend to be more credible and have higher click through rates than their pay-per-click counterparts.

4. No danger of pay-per-click fraud.

Because you aren’t paying for clicks to visit your site, there’ll never be any issues with an ad publisher using Adsense or something similar, artificially clicking to increase ad profits.
Unscrupulous competitors will also not be able to artificially inflate your advertising cost by clicking on your site to run up your ad budget.

5. Incredible rate of return for initial optimization work, especially in niche markets.

For niche markets, you’ll only have to do the work once and your site will stay in the top results for a very long time. And as the site ages, the value of that site increases and solidifies your value to visitors.
Even in competitive markets, a listing in the top 3 pages of SERPs garners more than 90% of the search traffic, revenue, and profits. If you are in competitive markets, larger companies will likely win the PPC listing wars. The top PPC advertising companies include eBay, NextTag, Orbitz, Target, and Yahoo. With their financial might, they would use PPC as an branding medium in addition to generating sales leaving smaller advertisers in the dust. In time, PPC bid prices will significantly increase as the pattern in Fact #2 indicates.

6. Consider the eyetracking research done by MarketingSherpa, where

people’s eyes are skimming results so quickly that if they don’t see your one listing, you won’t get a second chance. Plus, not everyone reads and clicks on search results in the same way.

People skim the page using one of 5 ways depending on their education or where they are in the sales cycle: Quick Click, Linear Scan, Golden Triangle Scan, Deliberate Scan, or Pickup Search. Having multiple listings (paid and organic search listings) or main page organic search listing + indented organic search listing adds to your ability to achieve a higher clickthrough rate (CTR).

7. In the other aspect of MarketingSherpa’s eyetracking research, they found searchers less likely to look at right column results compared to the left column. Their study indicates that up to 85% of searchers “tend to ignore the paid listings”. This finding is backed up by JupiterResearch’s 2005 Study which revealed that 87% of commercial clicks occur “on the natural (not sponsored) search results.” Not surprising, considering 66% of consumers “distrust” paid search ads (JupiterResearch 2003 Study).

The revealing study showed up in the eyetracking heatmap from a Google search.

The brightest areas were the hottest parts of page looked at. This weighs heavily in favor of achieving maximum visibility for your most important key phrases.

This research translated to what percentage of searchers looked at results in the top ten search engine results pages (SERPs).

Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%

Google publishes U.S. patent application 20060004627

The application covers a method of serving up ads based on the limitations of a mobile device, ad relevance, user preference, CPM and CPC price, and other performance factors. The scoring system determines which ads to serve. Depending on the score, it may even connect the user by calling an advertiser directly when web page results are clicked.

While Google has not rolled out this service to mobile phones and is only testing it on their site, the mobile search market is certainly heating up. Both Google and Yahoo announced a few days ago initiatives that pushes their content more into the mobile market. Although they have yet to include ads which is their main income generator, they have not ruled out the possibility. In an attempt to gain wider application acceptance and distribution, Yahoo teamed up with AT&T & Cingular in the US, and Nokia & Motorola internationally while Google already has mobile search, local search and mapping offerings together with a deal with Motorola to further increase adoption and awareness. AOL entered mobile search when they adopted technology that enables mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs to search the web, comparison shop, and display Yellow Pages listings. AOL already has pay-per-call in place.

The pay-per-call market has been growing steadily, with providers like eStara and Ingenio . In June, Kelsey Group estimated the size of the market between $1.4 billion to $4 billion.

After speaking with many website owners, I find many still believe that having a link in someone’s little-known directory is going to bring valuable traffic.

What matters is not the number of hits or unique visits alone. Rather, the quality of the traffic. If your visitors are stopping by randomly and have no real interest in your site or the contents, you’re unlikely to close a sale or generate a lead which is what really matters. You want targeted traffic. Most targeted traffic come from search engine results not from directory listings unless your searcher is looking in the online yellow pages.

The purpose of text links is to increase your search engine rankings. Sure, on occasion a visitor might stop by because of a listing your site has on another site and end up purchasing something from you. Consider that a bonus. This may be traffic but in most cases, it’s unqualified, random traffic.

The real value is when a person enters their key phrase(s) in the search engine search box and your site is listed among the top 10 search engine results in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

If you selected targeted keywords to optimize for, you stand a very good chance of getting that visitor to buy something or do something you want (like opt-in to your newsletter or bookmark your site for a revisit later). They clearly showed interest by performing a conscious, deliberate search for information.