Pitching the Value of Organic Search

Search Engine Marketing · By On · 18 Comments

It’s a sad real­ity that many well-known orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing many For­tune 500 com­pa­nies, still don’t under­stand the value of organic search.  Even some busi­nesses with multi-million dol­lar paid search bud­gets have focused lit­tle effort in opti­miz­ing their sites for organic search.  The fact is these orga­ni­za­tions are fail­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on a major acqui­si­tion chan­nel, and while they have yet to adopt search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) as a legit­i­mate and stan­dard mar­ket­ing prac­tice, their com­peti­tors are reap­ing the benefits.

Accord­ing to com­Score, in August 2007, over 61 bil­lion search engine queries were con­ducted world­wide from over 750 mil­lion searchers.  These stag­ger­ing search user trends have shown con­tin­ued growth year after year.  Many stud­ies have also con­cluded that the major­ity of searchers will choose an organic search list­ing over a paid list­ing.  This data demon­strates the huge poten­tial that organic search offers and rein­forces the fact that any orga­ni­za­tion not focused on SEO is miss­ing out on a tremen­dous opportunity.

What impact can SEO have on your business?

Let’s be hon­est, it’s very dif­fi­cult to get the bud­get and resources to move for­ward with SEO if senior man­age­ment can’t see the big pic­ture.  You must be able to clearly demon­strate the finan­cial impact that invest­ing in SEO will have on your busi­ness. You need to know how much money you’re cur­rently leav­ing on the table by ignor­ing SEO.  The best way to under­stand this involves a two step process:

1) Turn to Your Web Ana­lyt­ics
2) Con­duct an SEO Site Audit

Step 1: Turn to Your Web Analytics

Using web ana­lyt­ics will allow you to accu­rately mea­sure the per­for­mance of your organic search chan­nel and make informed deci­sions about what and how to optimize.

Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst (sam­ple data)

Use your web ana­lyt­ics to answer these key busi­ness questions

  • What per­cent­age of your traf­fic comes from organic search?
  • What are your top per­form­ing organic search keywords?
  • Is the major­ity of your key­word traf­fic com­ing from brand spe­cific keywords?
  • What is the cur­rent search traf­fic and rev­enue con­tri­bu­tion from organic search?

By answer­ing these sim­ple ques­tions you can begin to gather crit­i­cal data to help pre­pare a reli­able SEO value pitch.

Step 2: Con­duct an SEO Site Audit

Con­duct­ing a sim­ple site audit will give you insight into the SEO health of your web­site and help you iden­tify any obvi­ous per­for­mance gaps.  The audit should eval­u­ate both on-page opti­miza­tion (title tags, key­word usage, site struc­ture, etc…) and off-page opti­miza­tion efforts (link pop­u­lar­ity, social media, etc…).  This SEO score­card will not only assist with the devel­op­ment of an SEO value pitch, but it will pro­vide a valu­able blue­print for your future SEO program.

By com­bin­ing the dis­cov­ery data you’ve gather from your web ana­lyt­ics, along with SEO score­card con­clu­sions from the site audit, you can gain a holis­tic view of your exist­ing SEO strat­egy and help you for­mu­late a trusted esti­mate regard­ing the organic search growth oppor­tu­nity for your site.  Listed below is a basic exam­ple of how to use the dis­cov­ery data to for­mu­late a high-level esti­mate to demon­strate the impact of SEO to senior management.

Exam­ple Organic Search Traffic/Revenue Estimate:

It’s essen­tial to under­stand the impact organic search can have on your busi­ness.  Early adop­tion of SEO will have long-term ben­e­fits for your busi­ness and allow you to stay ahead of the curve and your competition.

If you can demon­strate a solid esti­mate of rev­enue impact for SEO to senior man­age­ment or the HiPPO, you should be well on your way to get­ting the approval for bud­get and resources to begin invest­ing in SEO.

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  • http://systemdotsplat.com Chris

    Inter­est­ing arti­cle. You men­tion that “Many stud­ies have also con­cluded that the major­ity of searchers will choose an organic search list­ing over a paid list­ing.” Do you know where I can go to find reli­able num­bers on what that split usu­ally is?

    Although I under­stand this depends on my unique sit­u­a­tion, what are the first steps I can take to esti­mate how much time, man-power, and $ I need from senior man­age­ment to begin mak­ing a sub­stan­tial impact on the company’s bot­tom line?

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/jlebaron Jor­dan LeBaron

    @chris — Here is a link to a recent release by com­Score: http://​www​.com​score​.com/​p​r​e​s​s​/​r​e​l​e​a​s​e​.​a​s​p​?​p​r​e​s​s​=​2​294; the study is focused pri­mar­ily on iPhone related queries dur­ing the month of April 2008 — the data demon­strated that the vast major­ity (~93%) of searchers clicked through on organic search results over the paid results.

    Also, regard­ing esti­mat­ing bud­gets. Run­ning through the exer­cise I’ve explained above will help you gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of “the road ahead” and allow you to bud­get accord­ingly. How­ever, a typ­i­cal SEO pro­gram will include needed resources from your in-house team (IT, mar­ket­ing, etc…) as well as help from an SEO consultant.

  • http://rockresorts.com Dan

    Do you have any rec­om­men­da­tions on prod­ucts that can do the site audit, either one-time or on a nor­mal basis?

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/jlebaron Jor­dan LeBaron

    @Dan — there are a few qual­ity tools and online resources to assist in the process (Xenu Link Sleuth, Google Web­mas­ter Tools, and Yahoo Site Explorer to name just a few), but I’d def­i­nitely look at hir­ing a pro­fes­sional SEO con­sul­tant to help you fill in the gaps.

  • http://www.tele2.no Kjar­tan Bjørkvold

    I really like your lit­tle cal­cu­la­tion at the end. For us SEO geeks the need to work on organic search rank­ings is obvi­ous, but a cal­cu­la­tion like that really speaks to man­age­ment in a lan­guage they can understand.

    A lit­tle risky how­ever to esti­mate a 10 % (or what­ever per­cent­age) increase in traf­fic though. Ath the end of the SEO audit, man­age­ment will expect you to deliver on that promise.

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/jlebaron Jor­dan LeBaron

    @Kjartan — Thanks for your com­ment! Great point about the traf­fic increase esti­mate in the equa­tion. My only advice would to be very thor­ough and care­ful as you choose this % estimate.

  • http://wikiworldbook.com ben

    Nice sum­mary of the impor­tance of Organic Search and SEO. We have just launched a Global Address Book / Peo­ple Search web­site and organic results will even­tu­ally be its engine. We were prob­a­bly a bit late on the Search Engine Opti­mi­sa­tion but its mostly in place now. Its amaz­ing that you have to still have to con­vince cor­po­rates of the neces­sity of this, given that the cap­i­tal expen­di­ture is going to be rel­a­tively mod­est com­pared to the long run returns.

  • http://www.netwidemedia.com/ Greg Par­sons

    Great arti­cle. I know it’s a bit old but I just found it through a search and you couldn’t be more right on tar­get here. How­ever, in the age of “instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion”, it’s get­ting much more dif­fi­cult to con­vince peo­ple of the long term ben­e­fits of organic SEO, even by pitch­ing them pro­jec­tions, etc. I’ve had my best luck over the past 6 months in pitch­ing a hybrid PPC/SEO pack­age which grad­u­ally steps down PPC as organic search picks up through our organic SEO efforts. So far, so good. This is a bat­tle that SEO experts have been fight­ing for years, and I have no doubt we’ll con­tinue to fight it in the future.

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/jlebaron Jor­dan LeBaron

    @Greg — I agree, a hybrid solu­tion is a great way to engage with clients — espe­cially those who are new to search.

  • http://www.opodo.fr machard

    Hi,
    just won­der­ing how you can mea­sure the SEO trafic per page within Omni­ture ?
    I know how to check the nat­ural trafic for the whole site but not for one par­tic­u­lar page…
    Any idea on how to deal with that ?
    Cheers,

  • http://www.rossmonaghan.com/ SEO Spe­cial­ist

    Jor­dan, this is always the tough­est part of being an SEO because most of the time, senior man­age­ment does not see the direct cor­re­la­tion between rank­ing, traf­fic and rev­enue. I have found that this is more of the case when weak con­ver­sion analy­sis is cur­rently in place.

  • http://www.misternmisses.com/ mus­lim matrimonials

    Inter­est­ing article.SEO experts have been fight­ing for years,

  • http://www.getitseo.com Jace­lyn Cecot

    Thanks for ones mar­velous post­ing! I cer­tainly enjoyed read­ing it, you might be a great author.I will remem­ber to book­mark your blog and will even­tu­ally come back some­time soon. I want to encour­age that you con­tinue your great writ­ing, have a nice morning!

  • http://www.bestburrgrinderreviews.com/ Burr Grinder Reviews

    Do you mind if I quote a cou­ple of your arti­cles as long as I pro­vide credit and sources back to your web­page? My web­site is in the very same niche as yours and my users would def­i­nitely ben­e­fit from some of the infor­ma­tion you pro­vide here. Please let me know if this ok with you. Cheers!

  • http://www.sandiegocarpetcleaningpro.com/ San Diego Car­pet Cleaning

    Howdy would you mind stat­ing which blog plat­form you’re work­ing with? I’m going to start my own blog soon but I’m hav­ing a tough time choos­ing between BlogEngine/Wordpress/B2evolution and Dru­pal. The rea­son I ask is because your lay­out seems dif­fer­ent then most blogs and I’m look­ing for some­thing com­pletely unique. P.S Apolo­gies for get­ting off-topic but I had to ask!

  • http://www.fiiasigurat.ro asig­u­rari

    I have a few sites of myself, and the income comes in 90% from organic searches. I have tried payed adver­tis­ing but i wasn’t to sat­is­fied. So all that money i invested it in a SEO campaign.

  • http://www.howmuchiscarinsurancex.com car insur­ance

    I whole­heart­edly agree with this. There is cer­tainly a need to sup­port organic research and we need to be more assertive in doing this because not a lot of peo­ple are interested.

  • http://resourceallocation.weebly.com/ Scot Wether­ing­ton

    Thanks a lot, it is really use­ful to me.