Sunday, July 17, 2005
Selling Search Engine Optimization
Mike Minor admits his company's first Web site was a flop. "No one saw it," except friends and regular customers, said Minor, president of Vivian International, a distributor of ice machines based in Chesterfield, Mo. Then a friend referred him to Mark Forst and Bill Brasser, founders of Captiva Marketing in the St. Louis-suburb of Clayton. Captiva specializes in search engine optimization -- the art of getting a Web site to rank high on search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. After Captiva remade his Web site, Minor started getting lots of new leads. Soon, e-mail inquiries outpaced phone calls.
Life Imitating Online Art In fact, remaking the Web site remade the company. Minor shut down his warehouse and started selling machines on a drop-ship basis. Vivian International now sells a wider variety of machines to customers ranging from wine aficionados to poultry processors.
"They changed my business dramatically," Minor said. Search engine marketing has come into its own over the last decade, as more consumers and businesses turn to the Internet when they're looking for products and services to buy, said Kevin Lee, chairman of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, a 350-member trade group based in New York.
And businesses large and small are recognizing the potential.
Lee estimates that companies spent US$4 billion last year on pay-per-click advertising and an undetermined amount on designing Web sites so they will rank higher in Internet searches.
Brown Shoe Co. uses paid and organic searches to drive customers to its Famous Footwear and Shoes.com Web sites as well as to build awareness of its brands, said Bill Bledsoe, manager of e-commerce for the company, which is based in Clayton. "You're trying to make yourself known and make yourself easy for customers to find," Bledsoe said. "It's a very customer-focused strategy." Search engine marketing can eliminate a lot of waste that occurs in mass advertising, said Todd Abrams, an adjunct professor of marketing at Washington University. It's particularly useful for selling products that customers want to research carefully, such as the purchase of a car or business-to-business sales.
The beauty of search engine marketing is that people who look at a Web site after doing a search are more interested in buying a particular product or service than people who might see a commercial while watching television or an ad as they flip through a magazine, Lee said.
"You're not bugging people," said Captiva's Forst. "You know that your target is interested."
Forst, 34, said he began investigating how search engines work about five years ago. Back then, he was sales and marketing director for Sinclair & Rush, a plastics molding company in Arnold, Mo. He started to build a new Web site for one of the company's divisions. But he didn't understand how to get it near the top of the list when customers searched online for the kinds of products the company makes. He figured someone had to rank No. 1 -- so why not Sinclair & Rush? "I spent every night learning how the rankings work," Forst said. He learned that most major search engines use a mathematical formula to rank Web pages, based partly on whether the page title or content matches search terms.
Some search engines look at the number of other sites that link to a particular Web page.
The other way to get to the top is with what's known as a paid search, which brings up sponsored links on the right side of the results screen, Forst said. In some cases he recommends that customers subscribe to paid searches, but he also works on ways to make customers' Web sites more search-friendly. "Every page has to be designed so you can get to the item you're trying to sell," Forst said. In many cases, he sets up pages for each product or division, so the search comes directly to the product rather than to the company's home page. Captiva was "really interested in what I did, how I did it and where I wanted to go," said Minor with Vivian International. "I was thrilled from the get-go, because they were asking the right questions."
Search engine optimization might not always produce the dramatic results that Vivian International experienced. But several clients said Captiva helped them find more leads and convert those leads into sales. Chris Weis, marketing director for the Nu-Era Group of St. Louis, said Captiva helped revamp the store-supply firm's Web site to produce more sales. "We had some very specific sales goals that we needed to meet," Weis said. "We not only met those goals, but we exceeded them drastically." Captiva currently has three people working directly with clients -- Forst, Brasser and Forst's sister, Beth McLaughlin. Two other employees design and program Web sites. The company works directly with clients as well as in partnership with advertising agencies. Captiva is managing more than 60 sites and monitoring them for performance every month. Forst said he has to keep up with search engines' algorithms and the best key words for each site, because they keep changing. "A lot of this business is testing," Forst said. "We have to be experts at every aspect of search engine marketing."
Brought to you by Guardian eCommerce.
Life Imitating Online Art In fact, remaking the Web site remade the company. Minor shut down his warehouse and started selling machines on a drop-ship basis. Vivian International now sells a wider variety of machines to customers ranging from wine aficionados to poultry processors.
"They changed my business dramatically," Minor said. Search engine marketing has come into its own over the last decade, as more consumers and businesses turn to the Internet when they're looking for products and services to buy, said Kevin Lee, chairman of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, a 350-member trade group based in New York.
And businesses large and small are recognizing the potential.
Lee estimates that companies spent US$4 billion last year on pay-per-click advertising and an undetermined amount on designing Web sites so they will rank higher in Internet searches.
Brown Shoe Co. uses paid and organic searches to drive customers to its Famous Footwear and Shoes.com Web sites as well as to build awareness of its brands, said Bill Bledsoe, manager of e-commerce for the company, which is based in Clayton. "You're trying to make yourself known and make yourself easy for customers to find," Bledsoe said. "It's a very customer-focused strategy." Search engine marketing can eliminate a lot of waste that occurs in mass advertising, said Todd Abrams, an adjunct professor of marketing at Washington University. It's particularly useful for selling products that customers want to research carefully, such as the purchase of a car or business-to-business sales.
The beauty of search engine marketing is that people who look at a Web site after doing a search are more interested in buying a particular product or service than people who might see a commercial while watching television or an ad as they flip through a magazine, Lee said.
"You're not bugging people," said Captiva's Forst. "You know that your target is interested."
Forst, 34, said he began investigating how search engines work about five years ago. Back then, he was sales and marketing director for Sinclair & Rush, a plastics molding company in Arnold, Mo. He started to build a new Web site for one of the company's divisions. But he didn't understand how to get it near the top of the list when customers searched online for the kinds of products the company makes. He figured someone had to rank No. 1 -- so why not Sinclair & Rush? "I spent every night learning how the rankings work," Forst said. He learned that most major search engines use a mathematical formula to rank Web pages, based partly on whether the page title or content matches search terms.
Some search engines look at the number of other sites that link to a particular Web page.
The other way to get to the top is with what's known as a paid search, which brings up sponsored links on the right side of the results screen, Forst said. In some cases he recommends that customers subscribe to paid searches, but he also works on ways to make customers' Web sites more search-friendly. "Every page has to be designed so you can get to the item you're trying to sell," Forst said. In many cases, he sets up pages for each product or division, so the search comes directly to the product rather than to the company's home page. Captiva was "really interested in what I did, how I did it and where I wanted to go," said Minor with Vivian International. "I was thrilled from the get-go, because they were asking the right questions."
Search engine optimization might not always produce the dramatic results that Vivian International experienced. But several clients said Captiva helped them find more leads and convert those leads into sales. Chris Weis, marketing director for the Nu-Era Group of St. Louis, said Captiva helped revamp the store-supply firm's Web site to produce more sales. "We had some very specific sales goals that we needed to meet," Weis said. "We not only met those goals, but we exceeded them drastically." Captiva currently has three people working directly with clients -- Forst, Brasser and Forst's sister, Beth McLaughlin. Two other employees design and program Web sites. The company works directly with clients as well as in partnership with advertising agencies. Captiva is managing more than 60 sites and monitoring them for performance every month. Forst said he has to keep up with search engines' algorithms and the best key words for each site, because they keep changing. "A lot of this business is testing," Forst said. "We have to be experts at every aspect of search engine marketing."
Brought to you by Guardian eCommerce.
