Search engine optimization or SEO is considered the holy grail of website marketing. It is one of the few ways to get traffic to your website for FREE. Compared to Pay Per Click or other types of paid advertising efforts, the top 10 links on the search results page are free every time someone clicks the link.
Some Numbers to Back this all up:
Statistics show that 92% of people who find your website get there from a search engine. Google controls roughly 70% of the search market with Bing and Yahoo fighting to get back in the game. The days of the Yellow Pages books are dead. If you’re website does not have high visibility with the search engines, you cannot compete.
As described on the SEO page of this site, the search engine results page contains both paid links (PPC) as well as the organic links on the left hand side of the page. Studies show that almost 80% of users click on the organic links compared to only 20% who click on the paid links. Keep in mind that you don’t pay each time someone clicks these SEO links.
The chart below shows what % of the clicks a website will receive based on what # its ranked. The website in the 1st position gets 42% of the clicks and 2nd position gets almost 12% of the clicks.
This results in the website in the #1 position receiving almost 4 times as many clicks as the guy in the 2nd position.. The website in the #10 spot gets 14 times fewer clicks than the #1 position.
*This statistic applies more to E-Commerce websites where products are standard.
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Now let’s apply these statistics to real world sales figures. In the chart below, there are 4 hypothetical companies who each sell promotional gifts. If each company is optimizing their website for the term ‘promotional gifts’ then let’s look at how their revenue differs based on how they rank for that phrase:
| Company Name |
Keyword Phrase | Number of Searches | Ranking Position | CTR (click thru rate) |
Total Revenue |
| Abc.com | “promotional gifts” | 678,000/month | 11 | .66% | $4,698 |
| hij.com | “promotional gifts” | 678,000/month | 6 | 3.99% | $28,405 |
| Lmn.com | “promotional gifts” | 678,000/month | 3 | 8.44% | $60,084 |
| Xyz.com | “promotional gifts” | 678,000/month | 1 | 42.3% | $301,133 |
| Average profit per sale: $35 Average conversion ratio: 3% | |||||
The reason why all of this is so important to your business is that according to Forrester Research, $155.2 Billion of sales were done on the web in 2009. That number is forecasted to grow to over $250 Billion by 2014. Getting ranked on the 1st page of Google is no something to brag about. It’s now the critical lifeline of your business. Your competitors are fighting tooth and nail to capture all those potential dollars. SEO is REQUIRED in order to compete in today’s online marketplace
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