Why - The case for search engine optimisation

Why search engine users convert to £'s

The statistics vary according to who you speak to, but everybody agrees that at least 71% of internet users find sites through search engines. In fact, one in every 28 pages served on the internet is a search engine’s result page (source: Alexa Insider).

No doubt your own experience of using the Internet will back up any stats about search engine users, but how does this traffic actually help you make sales?

Sales models typically divide the sales process into four stages – Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Users demonstrate their immediate interest as soon as they type a query into a search engine. Clearly somebody who types “luxury perfume” is likely to have already reached the “Desire” stage and may even be in “Action” mode. If you sell perfume, wouldn’t you want to be in those search results?

The economics are simply in a different league to that of conventional marketing. A recent advert run in a national newspaper resulted in three phone calls. This worked out at a cost of £35 per phone call . In comparison, a current campaign we are running for a client is working out at less than £0.05 per visitor. (see our case studies section for more details of this campaign)

Leave it to chance?

Research shows that search engine users will virtually never look any further than the first 30 results. 65% of click-thrus from search results are in the top 10 results. In other words if you are not featured in the top 30, you will not get any traffic but where you really want to be is in the top 10.

Having taken those facts on board, now go and do a search at a major search engine such as Google. The chances are that there will be hundreds of thousands of results returned. Take for example these three terms: fabric, fabric wholesale, fabric wholesale uk.

The number of results for these terms are 3.7 million, 126,000 and 29,000 respectively…..and you want to be in the top 30 or preferably in the top 10?…..are you going to leave that to chance?

Next: How we drive paying customers to your site