Where does new internet business come from? How do prospective clients find you? Should you invest in advertising on internet directories?

To answer these questions, here at Planting Solutions Ltd. we thought we would present some findings from the statistical analysis of the internet-generated business of one of our clients' specialist product websites.

How Many Visitors?

To simplify things we will concentrate on the amount of unique visitors to the website, and not just page impressions, or 'hits'.

The client's new website was launched in November 2009. A content-managed system - meaning that the client can add new products and articles anytime they like - was implemented along with a catalogue of products.

The old website, established for 8 years, was left up and running in order to catch any historical links from the world wide web.

To promote the old site the client had added around 30 products, one or two of which were gaining high rankings in the search engines. The client was also spending around £10,000 per year between Yell.com, Kompass, Scoot and Applegate on directly advertising his website.

Links from Yell, Kompass and Applegate were all redirected to the new site from December 2009.

In December 2009 the old site received 160 unique visitors, whilst the new site received 469 unique visitors. Growing month on month, in March 2010 the new site achieved 1223 unique visitors.

As you can see from the pie chart the majority of visitors (65%) are finding the website through using search engines (such as Google, Yahoo and Bing etc) by typing in the name of the product or service they are looking for.

Direct traffic - ie. visitors who already know the website address, have bookmarked it, or have seen it in a print advertisement - accounts for 20% of visitors.

Referring sites - Yell.com, Kompass, Applegate plus any other websites that have a link to the new site, account for 14% of unique visitors.

 

By comparison the client's old website showed an average of between 200-300 unique visitors per month with 70% of traffic coming from the paid-for directories of Applegate, Yell.com and Kompass - and only 15% coming from organic search engine results.

UPDATE - October 2010 - over 2000 unique visitors!
UPDATE 2 - January 2011 - over 3000 unique visitors!

Search Engine Traffic

Let's look at the breakdown of the search engines to find out which search engines prospects are using to find the website.

• Google - 756
  Yahoo - 30
  AOL - 4
  Bing - 4
  Others - 3

This fits in broadly with general internet stats that Google accounts for 80% of all search traffic, Yahoo 8%, Bing/MSN 8% and others the remainder.

Our policy when performing search engine optimisation is to concentrate first and foremost on Google rankings. After all, there would be no point optimising a site for a search engine that is rarely used!

Referring Sites

Now we'll look at the breakdown of visits from other websites that have the new website linked or advertisied.

• The client's old website - 54
  Applegate - 33
  Yell.com - 32
  Kompass - 19

You can see that at a cost of around £300 per month each, the three paid for directories (Applegate, Yell, and Kompass) are only producing 84 unique visitors out of 1223 to the new website in March 2010.

Obviously this will differ depending on the industry and nature of the products and services being offered. Some companies have reported good results from advertising on directories, it's just that we haven't yet!

Admittedly some prospects may have found our client's telephone number on Applegate, Yell or Kompass and called direct rather than visiting the new website. Our client, however, does ask each new enquiry where they found them. Only 2 new enquiries in March said that they came from these directory sources.

For less than a quarter of this cost - by investing in quality SEO, organic Google enquiries are performing at a rate of around 10 times better.

So how do we do it?

It may seem like it, but it's not magic! It is also not 'underhand' or 'black-hat' (a term used to describe questionable search engine optimisation techniques).

It is all down to hard work and common sense. A bit of a boring answer, we know!

Firstly we evaluate the client's business and their industry in general, including their competition. This gives us a broad understanding of the products and services on offer along with any industry-specific terminology.

We use this information to discover exactly what potential customers are searching for on the internet, this is called 'Keyword Analytics'.

Existing Articles and Products on the new website are then optimised to organically include these popular keywords or search phrases. Plenty of new articles and products are created also. Within a few weeks, results have been proved to happen.

Our keyword research for this client uncovered several items that prospects were searching for that our client had access to but didn't stock. When we asked why we were told "well, no-one ever rings up and asks for them..." Well, we changed all that by adding these products onto the client's site and by creating quality articles about them. Within a couple of weeks enquiries were coming in and as a result a new revenue stream has been created and new customer accounts have been opened. Stupidly simple, isn't it?

Conclusions

For this client's website it is plainly obvious that organic Google searches are accounting for the vast majority of new business. The client is receiving new enquiries from all around the world on his key products, opening up new markets, and significantly increasing sales as a result.

We have recommended that this client cuts back his online directory advertising budget by 90% (saving £9000 per year) and pays us to double our efforts on organic search engine optimisation. This will amount to an annual saving of around £7000 with a projected increase in internet generated enquiries over 2009's results by up to ten-fold.

 

Call Planting Solutions on 01253 895476 for a free evaluation of your company's internet marketing potential or visit www.planting-solutions.com.