ROI key not ranking
How the Search Marketing Industry Shot Itself in the Foot: "the search marketing industry finds itself facing a challenge. They need to educate businesses to help them toss out the old 'top ten rankings' philosophy in exchange for the more realistic and sustainable 'positive return on investment' philosophy. Otherwise, the entire industry runs the risk of imploding sometime in the next several years.This isn't a new idea, many within the industry have been championing it for quite some time. Nonetheless, it still falls far behind 'I want top rankings' as the reason companies want to hire search marketing firms. In fact, the biggest challenge many search marketers face these days is not talking clients into hiring them, but explaining that the true value of search marketing lies in customer acquisition, not ranking and traffic acquisition...
Concepts like the power of the keyword long tail are helping businesses realize that some of the best customers often come from phrases that they never even dreamed of optimizing for. The time is coming where the inability to gain top ten rankings for a keyword phrase won't be associated with a lack of search marketing skill. Search marketers and the companies that hire them will start focusing on the number of customers that a campaign produces. Ranking reports will be but a distant memory.
That's why the industry as a whole needs to start working on their presentation of search marketing. We need to go into client meetings talking about overall strategies that will help drive quality traffic from links on both search engine results and on other web sites. We need to talk about achieving a positive return on investment. We need to talk about the skill required to create sites that are both search engine friendly and customer friendly. We need to stop talking about rankings.
The companies that are already embracing these changes are finding it much easier to sell and to sustain accounts with happy clients. The companies that are still focusing on rankings are going to find their customer bases slowly shifting over to those living by the new SEM philosophy. The industry did shoot itself in the collective foot by setting up expectations based on rankings, but a positive ROI can act as a powerful remedy to help get things moving again."
posted by Jen @ 8:33 AM
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