Search Engine Strategies NY 2010

For the past few days I’ve been among an enthusiastic crowd at the Search Engine Strategies NY trade show. The show is overflowing with geeks, gurus and folks like myself  (struggling to catch up with the technology).

I’m blogging about it here because so many in our landscape landscape lighting industry are limping along with mediocre websites and worse-than-mediocre online marketing plans. Here are a few salient points coming from the web wizards themselves.

1. Having an excellent website (both in design and content) is so obvious that even the experts don’t  mention it anymore. If your business still puts forth an ugly online face, quick, hire a good web design company and stop losing money! Also read “What Google Loves to See in an Outdoor Lighting Website.
2. For the first time in history, Google reports that decision makers are basing their decisions primarily on web research (about 75%), more than from personal referrals (about 65%).
3. Since the recession, more and more potential customers are starting their search for services on the web. They usually do this in stages, over several days or weeks. They’ll do an initial search and visit the sites of a number of competitors. Then, they’ll return to the company’s site they prefer and dig around a little; they’re looking for prices (or at least some comments on price); and they’re looking for information that might inspire trust.
4. About 80% of these potential customers don’t go past the first page of search results.
5. Men tend to quickly click on the top sponsored (pay-per-click) links; women tend to read through many of the links before clicking on one.
6. Companies that show up in the sponsored link areas get far more hits than the ones appearing in the body (organic area) of the links.
7. Experts say that if your company wants to capture a good proportion of the leads, you need to invest money in SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing). SEO helps you get to page one of the organic (non-paid) links; SEM gets you into the paid links. They recommend you invest about 30% for SEO and 70% for SEM.
8. We all balk at having to pay for search listings but such is the new reality of business. The good thing about pay-per-click links is that you can easily measure the results. With Google Adwords, they provide you with the exact number of views, clicks, and something called ‘conversions’.
9. A conversion is when someone clicks into a certain page on your website and fills out a form or gets your contact info or downloads something. You make a calculation and decide how much this contact is worth. Then you attach that number to the conversion. Google keeps track of this value and let’s you know whether or not your pay-per-click program is making money (positive return on investment (ROI)). You can change your listing (ad), try different keywords, target locations, times of day, and many other variables to tweak the results. Google guides you through this process, so it’s not as hard as it sounds (but you still might want professional help).
10. I resisted this kind of investment (time, energy, money) for a long time, so I understand if you’re reluctant to dive in. If you’re like most successful companies, you will cut back on print marketing and invest in this new online world.

More on this later. Feel free to contact me for advice. Steve Parrott, CAST Lighting.