As I said in the past two NetProfit's, if you're looking at marketing through search engines, you will now have to budget for it. Almost every major search portal has some type of paid inclusion, submission or placement program. In fact, since I wrote the first part of this series, the one hold out in search engines who went on record as saying they had no plans to introduce a paid inclusion program has since been discovered to be experimenting with such a scheme. Google has let some significant hints drop that paid inclusion is not too far off for them either. The search portals desperate need for revenue has dictated that the old days of free listings are dead and gone.
With this accepted as fact, the next question is, why do you need the services of a search engine optimization company? This is a question we deal with every day.

A GOOD (emphasis on GOOD) SEO firm is still the best investment you can make of your online advertising budget. In this NetProfit, I'll give you the top 10 reasons why SEO is more important than ever

1. You need Keyword Analysis

Now that it costs money to be included in many engines and directories, a webmaster has to be more sure than ever that they have a clearly defined keyword strategy. An extensive and exhaustive keyword phrase analysis is essential.

You need to know exactly the right word combinations that will bring qualified visitors to your site. Even with Goto, the one place where you can buy your rankings, knowing the right keywords can end up saving hundreds or thousands of dollars in unqualified click through charges.

In many cases, paid submission and inclusions charges dictate that you can no longer position for hundreds of keywords unless you have an extensive budget. An effective keyword analysis makes sure you're spending your budget and effort on the right word combinations.

2. Paid Inclusion does not guarantee Placement

With paid inclusion, the cost of entry does not guarantee that you'll appear at the top of the search results. The same holds true for Yahoo and LookSmart's Express Submission. In the case of Inktomi and AltaVista's paid inclusion charges, they simply ensure that the spiders will visit your site and the designated URL's on a regular basis to refresh their entries in your index. With Yahoo and LookSmart, it just means that an editor will come and review your site for inclusion. While both Yahoo and LookSmart stress that paying the Express Submission Fee does not mean you'll be included in the index, our past experience has shown that very few sites get rejected.

For this reason, you still need to make sure that your site is well optimized and the keywords appear in the right places to bring you those top rankings. In fact, if your hard earned marketing budget is on the line, having top ten rankings is more important than ever.

3. Paid Submissions Can Get Expensive if Not Done Properly

At $199 a crack, you don't want to learn how to do a LookSmart or Yahoo submission by trial and error. While the chances are very good that you'll get in, it's essential that you get in with the right keywords in your title, description or category title. It's a delicate balancing act to make sure your primary keywords appear in the right place without the use of obvious keyword stuffing that would throw up a red flag for an editor.

A good SEO consultant will have had a lot of experience dealing with directory submissions and will be able to first determine your primary keywords that have to be included, and secondly, they'll make sure those words appear in the right places without looking too obvious.

Another reason you want to make sure this is done correctly the first time is that once your in the directory, it's very difficult to request changes. In LookSmart's case, the addition of an express change option opens the door to future revisions, but at $149 a change, you don't want to rely on this option too often. With Yahoo, changes don't cost you anything, but are almost impossible to achieve.

4. You Need to Know the Engines and Directories

Like most things on the Internet, the search engine portal industry changes quickly. New revenue plans, mergers and strategic partnerships are announced almost daily. Each of these changes will affect your overall search engine strategies and visibility. A good SEO firm can help you plan and incorporate these changes into your search engine marketing plan. At Searchengineposition, we're constantly working to assess how the engines work together as a whole. We can advise you which directories partner with which engines. We can guide you to make sure your budget in placed in the most effective manner (see point 5).

5. We Can Guide You in Placement of Your Budget

Search engine marketing has changed a lot in the past few years. It used to be that you could pay a search engine optimization firm that would work with you to achieve higher rankings on the engines and that would be your only charge. Today, that's not the case. Almost every major search portal has some type of pay to play program, whether its paid inclusion, paid submission or paid placement. Also, there's no real rational behind the amounts charged. You can't evaluate search engines on a cost per thousand basis like you can traditional media, because everything is based on the keywords. For someone unfamiliar with the industry, it can be very confusing to know which fees represent a good investment of your online marketing budget. A good SEO firm should act like a media buying agent, guiding your budget to where it can do the most good. If you have to pay, you should get the most bang for your buck.

6. Knowing the Engines Saves Time

Each search engine and portal has it's own timeline. Spidering cycles, submission times, index refreshing intervals all play a part in how long it will take to get into the index. Also, if you're submitting to one of the many engines that doesn't guarantee placement, it will take some trial and error to lift your site from an also ran position buried on page 89 of search results to one of those essential top 10 or 20 spots. It may take you months, even years, before you achieve a position that generates any traffic. When you use a good SEO firm, this timeline is cut dramatically.

7. We Can React More Quickly

Things are in a constant state of flux when it comes to search portals. Almost every day one of the major search services makes a major announcement. Often, these changes can dramatically affect your search engine marketing program, wiping out rankings that were major sources of traffic. Case in point, the day Go.com pulled the plug on their own search service and went with Goto's paid placement listings. Unless you work with the engines all the time, these developments may take weeks or months to trickle down to you. In the meantime, you'll be scratching your head as you pore over your visitor log reports, wondering where your traffic went. SEO firms work with engines every day. If an announcement comes out, we know about it the same day. That way, we can quickly draft a plan to minimize negative impacts or take advantage of new opportunities.

8. Descriptions Have to Be Well Written

Study after study has shown that once you're on that top ten page, how well your description and title is written matters far more than whether you're number one or number 4. Descriptions should be written to be interesting, give a clear concise overview of your site and to stress anything that makes your site unique, i.e. interactive tools, relevant information, online ordering, etc.

Writing these descriptions requires the ability to think from the perspective of the searcher, to avoid clich? and hyperbole, to quickly summarize a site and to generate compelling, concise copy. It's not easy to do, and a SEO firm should have a writer or writers on staff that can do it well.

9. GoTo by itself is not enough

If GoTo could deliver 100% of all search engine traffic, than search engine marketing would be easy. You pay to get into the top 3 in GoTo and you'd be covered. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Despite GoTo's best efforts in lining up an impressive list of partners, it still can only generate a fraction of the search engine traffic (between 8 and 14%). For that reason, you can't buy your keywords on GoTo and consider yourself covered on the search engines. Let's say you miss coverage in Google and Yahoo. Those two search portals together account for over half of all search engine traffic. And for reasons I'll outline below, search engines are by far your most effective online marketing option.

10. Search Engine Optimization is still your Most Cost Effective Marketing

Okay, I've saved the best til last. When you stack up the actual return on investment you'll receive from a good search engine marketing campaign, it outperforms all other forms of online marketing, even with the additional charges being introduced by the search portals.

For every other type of online advertising, you can look at a rate card and see how much you're spending, either based on number of click throughs or impressions. With search engine marketing, it's a little more difficult to calculate. If you're purchasing keywords on Goto, you can see how much each click is going to cost you. But with a service like SEP's, you pay a monthly fee and we build visibility on all engines.

So, what is the true cost of a positioning program? To find out, I took a sample of our client base and examined their visitor logs (of course, number of visitors varies with popularity of the keywords used). I eliminated any traffic coming from GoTo or other paid placement sources . I then took the average amount they paid us for their positioning service and added a yearly budget of $650 to cover things like paid submission charges to Yahoo, Inktomi, AltaVista and others. We calculated their monthly costs of positioning and divided it by the average number of search engine visitors to arrive at a per visitor cost. In the chart below, we compare that with average keyword bid costs for their keywords on GoTo, as well as what their cost per click through would be for banner and pop up window advertising, based on current industry rates.

Average Cost of SEP's Programs vs Goto and Online Advertising

 

	SEP Program	GoTo Bids	Banner Advertising	Pop Up Windows
Cost per Impression	na	na	$0.034c	$0.082e
Cost per Visitor	$0.052a	$0.732b	$6.80d	$11.42d

a - Includes cost of positioning program and recommended paid submissions, divided by average number of search engine visitors, excluding those from GoTo.
b - Costs based on average bids for keywords used by clients
c - These are based on average industry banner ad impression costs.
d - Click through rates are based on current industry research
e - These rates are based on average pop up window impression costs.

So, even if we were just looking at raw numbers, our search engine positioning program would be the cheapest way to deliver visitors to your site. The cost would be less that one tenth of what you would pay per visitor for GoTo, and less that one hundredth of banner advertising.

Now, let's look at the quality of those visitors. Independent studies have shown that search engine traffic is of a much higher quality than that generated by banner advertising. NPD, an Internet Research group, showed that visitors from search engines are 6 times more likely to buy than visitors from banner ads or tile ads.


Where Do Online Purchases Originate?
 

	Search Listings	Banner Ads	Tile Ads	Other Sources
Aided Awareness	55%	9%	7%	30%

(Click here for the rest of the findings)

The SEO Industry

I firmly believe that has more website owners explore their options for attracting first time visitors, more and more will recognize the benefits of search engine marketing. After making that decision, they'll have to decide whether to co-ordinate this themselves, or hire a SEO firm as a partner in the process. For the 10 reasons I've outlined above, an investment in a good SEO firm will pay you back many times over.