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 Technology News | February 2005 
Googling the Bottom Line
 Adam L. Penenberg - Wired.com
 Conventional wisdom says 97 percent of Google searchers don't click past the first three pages (or 30 results). With about three-quarters of the active online population in America using search engines, according to Nielsen/NetRatings and 40 percent of shoppers choosing Google to locate stores and comparison shop, the difference between a high and low ranking can literally be the difference between a thriving online business and Chapter 11.
This got me wondering: How much is it worth to a company's bottom line to place near the top of Google's search rankings?
To find out, I contacted Oneupweb, a search engine optimization, or SEO, firm based on the shores of Lake Michigan. Unfortunately, no one there knew the answer either, so Lisa Wehr, the founder and CEO, offered to conduct a study of 30 clients for me.
Although my hunch was that the results would show benefit to cracking Google's top 30, I didn't realize just by how much. In fact, it is extraordinary. Oneupweb found that the first month a site appeared on the second or third page of Google results, traffic increased five times from the previous month, and in the second month, traffic was nine times greater. The number of unique visitors tripled when a company moved up from page two to page one, and in the second month doubled again to more than six times the traffic it received before it broke the top 10. More importantly, Oneupweb discovered a correlating impact on sales: 42 percent more the first month, and nearly double the second month.
Case in point: Eastwood is a niche seller of automotive refurbishing tools and a Oneupweb client. In the five years since the company revamped its website to become more friendly to search engines, it has seen online sales climb to 44 percent of total sales, which have also increased 40 percent. With 267 words or phrases related to auto refurbishing in Google's top 10 (It's No. 1 for "auto tools" and "auto powder coating," for example), and 421 related keywords in the top 30 of all search engines, the site attracts about 1 million unique visitors a month -- most of them hard-core, web-savvy hobbyists.
The company estimates about 13 percent of its traffic comes from search engines and another 12 percent from pay-per-click advertising, much of it on Google, Yahoo, etc. Peter Kosciewicz, director of e-commerce at Eastwood, says the company's success with optimizing its search engine results enabled him to home in on the most effective keywords in its pay-per-click program, which between 2003 and 2004 grew by 95 percent.
With search engines, Eastwood concentrates on broad terms, but with pay-per-click searches, it goes for terms that are more specific.
"I'm willing to pay to attract a more qualified customer," Kosciewicz said. "It costs me 15 cents in advertising for every buck I get back in sales. That's a great margin in any business."
No wonder there has been tremendous growth in the SEO industry. Google the term and you'll get more than 7 million results. One, Submit Express, guarantees a "top 10 placement based on your keywords."
Another, Search Engine Optimization, claims you will experience an increase in traffic of up to 6,000 percent, while Patrick Gavin promises to "market your website as if it is our own" with a "combination of both on-page optimization and a very well-implemented link-popularity campaign."
Of course, where there is money to be made, there is also the potential for the search engine equivalent of vote rigging. One company you won't encounter on Google is Traffic-Power.com (also known as First Place), which was banned, along with its clients, for various shady practices, like allegedly creating "link farms," networks of sites that link to one another to increase popularity; concealing keywords in backgrounds; and leaving out search engine bait -- long lists of keywords and links that are added to a site for the express purpose of attracting search engine spiders. Some dissatisfied customers mulled a class-action suit, which has been dropped.
Oneupweb's Wehr says she has helped two former Traffic-Power clients, which she declined to name, who were banned from Google. "You have to be forensic detectives to clean up the mess Traffic-Power made," she said.
That required about 80 hours of work to track down all of the link farms, phony domain names, search engine spider "attraction pages" and other nefarious tactics she says the company used to cheat the system. At about $300 an hour, it was an expensive lesson for her clients, and in the end, it took six months before Google agreed to reinstate them.
"It's harder to do it our way," she said, "but the results last much longer." |
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