Why Are Your Organic Search Services Harder To Sell Than Pay Per Click Services?

Why do people find it hard to sell Organic Search Services as compared to Pay Per Click? Is one marketing and the other advertising?

Organic Search is a growing business and has now become more mainstream. Website owners are more knowledgeable about the different strategies used to promote their website and are asking more about the ‘free’ listings and how to get into them. There is a perception, or maybe a lack of understanding, about the effort and cost involved in getting websites in this ‘free’ area on the search engines results page.

Just how fast is the search business growing?

The Search market is growing from just under $10bn in 2006 to over $25bn in 2011. This is explosive growth, even in these recessionary times.

The question is, are you seeing any of this growth in your business? Are you tapping into the need of website owners who are looking to get into the organic search results?

These figures are from SEMPO and they show a very interesting breakdown of where the money is going?

In 2008, 88.4% of this ad spend went on Paid Placement, with Organic Search accounting for 10.6%, with the rest going on technology spend.

For smaller firms, the goal of online promotion was to see increase sales, for bigger companies the goal was about increasing brand awareness.

The main growth drivers given by the report are:

• Increasing advertiser focus on accountability and ROI
• Increase in small-to-mid size businesses using SEM
• Greater consumer usage of search utilities
• Better targeting and niche offerings
• Long-term inventory growth

Consider the bullet points above and ask yourself the question, ‘ Does Organic Search deliver these drivers?

Look at the first point about the focus on accountability and ROI – which method of promotion best delivers on this – an organic search campaign or a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign? With PPC it’s so easy to measure the ROI, you only spend money when you get clicks or traffic and that traffic is targeted for specific keywords.

It’s probably better for the service provider also as they spend a minimal amount of time setting up the ad campaign and landings pages and then run split testing to get the best ad and best landing page.

Is it possible to really measure the ROI on a search campaign?

The client only pays when they get organic traffic from certain agreed on keywords? I think this is possible, but only in very limited circumstances, i.e. when you have a very good SEO and the relationship between the SEO and the client company is very good, i.e. they trust each other.

But in most cases, the service provider  (understandably) does not want to take the risk, after all it can  take weeks or even months for very competitive keywords to start driving relevant traffic.

So, the question is;

Is there some other way of measuring ROI on a search campaign?

Another method that can take into account the traffic that eventually comes from a well implemented search campaign, but reduces the risk for both the website owner and the service provider?

Before we answer that question, let me ask you another -

What is the really big flaw with PPC?

You stop paying, you stop displaying, i.e. when you end a campaign, your ads stop displaying and all your work on split testing is gone. (OK, so maybe you can implement organic focused web pages based learnings from the PPC campaign, but there is not long term value to PPC landings pages in themselves, when the PPC campaign ends).

There is also the argument that PPC does not convert as well as organic traffic. I’m not sure about this one, if you put enough effort into split testing I’m sure the conversion rates for PPC can be higher than organic listings.

No , the real flaw is the lack of long term visibility for your website. Plus, when you start optimising for organic results you benefit from the long tail effect. i.e. you optimise for the keyword metal spikes, next thing you’re getting organic traffic for ’sharp metal spikes’, ‘golf metal spikes’ (depending on your copy of course)! When this long tail effect starts to happen, the ROI of organic search starts to catch up with the PPC.  So, putting in the effort to optimise web pages, as opposed to just building landing pages, will result in most of your traffic coming from organic clicks.

Developing an Organic Search Sales methodology

The big challenge  is to deliver an organic service that website owners can understand. Many of the changes you make during an organic search campaign are small and behind the scenes.  Clients often are not patient to enough to wait for the organic traffic to start flowing. How do you show progress to the client when their traffic is not increasing or the rankings are not increasing? How do you show them an holistic view of how well optimised their website is?

The start of the sales process should the client where they are staring from and what the end goal is, not in terms of traffic or ranking, but in terms of how well optimised their website is. Afterall, this is the only variable that you control in an organic search campaign.

How do web professionals sell their search services? The answer is naturally very subjective. Web professionals have their own internal processes and sales methodology. Many will use individual tools or excel sheets to show the client what’s going on.

The key point here is, if you can deliver, a repeatable, measurable process, which can be built into your sales and post sales processes and then used to report to new and existing clients – how useful would this be? How useful would it be to automate this process!

How many more organic search campaigns could you manage, and manage successfully?

I’d like to get your feedback on what type of process you use for selling organic search?

How do you engage new prospects? Are you good at selling your services, or are you good at website design/development, SEO,PPC?

Would it help to have a defined sales methodology for organic search services?

Let me know your thoughts.

You may want to give Interleado’s Service a trial to see how it can help your organic search business.

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