Next Frontier In Search Marketing

Hi all,
If you are a big fan of search marketing, you will be surprised to know that newspaper advertising amounted to $35 billion and TV advertising was a whopping $70 billion in the US in 2008. To a search marketer, this is pure anathema in that the advertising mediums are diverse and the campaigns cannot be measured accurately. Is the huge spend really worth it, you may ask. This post is based on an article by Sramana Mita at Forbes.com

The online advertising spend was $23.4 billion in 2008. The spike in online advertising is due to increasing awareness in the business community of the effective measurement of customer engagement. Google Adwords spearheads the pay per click (ppc) marketing medium of paid search. PPC is an attractive proposition to a business owner for it offers accurate measurement and pay for performance aspect.

Businesses are also finding out that organic search is a much bigger driver of traffic than paid search. Organic search is a listing of results on the search engine results pages (SERPs) purely on merit based on  the relevancy of the site for a particular search. The search engines have devised a set of algorithms to achieve this.

Leading internet tracker Hitwise claims that “the share of search traffic to Web sites generated from paid listings has dropped to about 7.25% over the last four weeks, down from 9.8% during the same period a year ago. And Hitwise noted that paid clicks from searches for brand name terms–such as Home Depot and Orbitz - saw especially sharp drops.”  This comes in the wake of Google recently liberalising its Adwords trademark policy.

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim says that most of the major advertisers have been using organic search as major part of their internet marketing strategy to dominate the search results. Organic search marketing is undertaken through SEO or search engine optimisation whereby a strategy is put in place by a search marketing firm to optimise the site wih respect to on page factors (title, h# tags , keyword rich copy etc) and off page factors (external linking profile, domain diversity of links coming in, Google link counts etc).

This is a long term strategy and overnight gains are well nigh impossible. The job at hand is considerable and major companies are wary of paying seo consultants and/or search marketing firms a monthly retainer not really sure of what they are getting in return, for a fixed period of time subject to the contract being renewable based on the outcome of the initial engagement.

Enquisite is a search engine marketing (sem) company that has come out with an innovative solution to address the gap in driving the right kind of organic traffic and more importantly a clear cut way of measuring it. Enquisite’s range includes the Enquisite Campaign, Enquisite Optimizer and Enquisite Auditor. Using these tools, businesses can maximise their organic traffic and search marketing agencies can be transparent in their approach to seo whereby proportionate progress in their results achieved to date can be displayed.

This can give rise to a pay for performance effect whereby the Finance Department can allocate advertising dollars effectively  even for organic search engine optimisation campaigns. Organic seo is an attractive proposition in the new scheme of things.

Enquisite was founded by Richard Zwicky’s prior venture Metamend, a SEO consulting boutique. There are other companies like Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics and Marin Software but none of these are focused on organic search. A whopping 88% of search traffic stems from organic search making it a medium of incredible untapped opportunity.

This is where Enquisite makes an impact by providing the technology to measure, report, demonstrate and audit the results with no lag time. According to Mitra,
“customers are assured of predictable results since the profitable business model mitigates client risk and maximizes performance. This way, both the agency and advertiser are highly motivated.”

Enquisite is ideal for sites that depend on huge volumes of traffic especially in areas like online retail, insurance and travel.  Its customers include viator.com Viator has seen a 300% increase in organic traffic since it started using Enquisite.

Enquisite uses major search marketing agencies as a channel to provide services to their existing customer base.
Netconcepts is proudly associated with Enquisite and it has acquired a global licence to help its clients all over the world. It is the author’s prediction that it will be common to see ads in mainstream media within the next 12 months targeting businesses that want to ramp up their natural traffic from the search engines.

Here at Netconcepts, we are at the right place and time to help any business tap into  the 88% rich lucrative organic search market with the help of a powerful solution such as Enquisite.

The importance of organic search as the next frontier is summed up in the words of veteran entrepreneur Mark Hoffman - “If a $100 billion market-cap company [Google] can be built on the shoulders of just 12% of the world’s search traffic, what kind of value creation opportunity remains locked in the other 88%?”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 11:24 am and is filed under Blogging, Natural Search, Ravi Venkatesan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.