Search Engine News :: Optimise Web Sites for Organic Search: MediaDailyNews 08-09-04

Monday, August 09, 2004

MediaDailyNews 08-09-04

MediaDailyNews 08-09-04: "According to MarketingSherpa's 2004 Search Marketing Survey, on average, neither marketers or their agencies feel their search marketing efforts are 'very effective.' However, as MarketingSherpa Publisher and Editor Anne Holland says, it's their own fault...

"For one, most marketers don't send their click-throughs to specialized landing pages. Holland said this means they're losing out on a lot of conversions. Results from a 2003 MarketingSherpa survey of Google AdWords customers pointed out that 75 percent of those using specialized landing pages reported significantly higher conversion rates than those who sent traffic to a regular site page. Sixty-three percent of that survey's respondents said they sent click-throughs to specialized landing pages...

He noted that effective search marketers aren't buying 10 or 20 keywords--they're buying 5,000 keywords and monitoring their progress constantly.

"Often, we need to tell clients why they should be tracking," Middleton said. The MarketingSherpa report also revealed that search optimization boosts traffic considerably, despite search marketers' lukewarm response to it. According to the data, marketers said organic clicks increased an average of 73 percent in the six months after optimization; organic click-throughs convert 6.7 percent for business-to-business marketers and 6.5 percent for business-to-consumer marketers.

Despite this, marketers will only spend $238.5 million on search engine optimization (SEO) services, while paid search spending will be $3.3 billion. "Optimization is very mysterious," said MarketingSherpa's Holland. She said that companies are overly wary about SEO because they know so little about it.

Overall, Holland said that hiring outside help improves search performance. SEM agencies get significantly higher average click rates (3.4 percent versus 2.8 percent), and higher conversion rates for paid search (6.1 percent versus 5.8 percent)--and they also bid nine cents higher on average than most in-house SEM operations, which results in more leads.

Holland said a good agency is largely determined by the number of man hours it can devote per page, per site. By man hours, she means technicians, not salespeople. "