Opportunity Knocks!

At Vertical Leap, we like helping to make opportunities: millions of them just like these!

2,134,368 visits via natural search (computer games site)

1,320,000 visits from natural search engines (specialist tour operator)

1,440,000 visits from natural search engines (residential lettings)
These totals show how many successful searches have been made to find three Vertical Leap clients’ websites chosen at random over the last twelve months from the natural, unpaid for search results in Google, MSN and Yahoo.

These companies are not yet household names and they haven’t spent fortunes on conventional brand building; they are not all ‘pure-play’ and solely web based; what they do have in common though, is that all are well managed, savvy, and know a good deal when they see one.

As communication becomes ever more fragmented, it is no surprise that every part of the online buying cycle, from initial research to the point of actual purchase is storming ahead at an unprecedented rate.

For proof of this trend, you only have to look at the Granddaddy of traditional, off-line search, Yellow Pages. The comparisons with web-based search are obvious and to many it is no surprise that reinvestment in Yellow Pages is at best stalling as on-line search becomes the norm. A recent study in the USA showed that since 2003, on-line search has steadily grown in popularity and is set to trounce Yellow Pages and local newspapers as the first point of call for local research later this year.

Natural search engines such as Google and the re-launched MSN are the lifeblood of this boom, providing as they do, the means to fully explore the web, and for motivated buyers to connect with a supplier.

At the other end of the scale is the Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising model. Pioneered by Google as Adwords, with Overture and E-Spotting making it the centre of their business, PPC is a crucial source of revenue, and accounts for billions of advertising dollars every year for the search engines – no wonder Mr Gates is ploughing millions into MSN in the hope of making headway against Google.

As search in general has become more mainstream, PPC has effectively become the new darling of many a marketing manager. Simply by bidding the agreed rate, your ad can actually feature on Google’s hallowed first page results with no tweaking to your website and featuring just about any keyword or phrase you like.

But like many dalliances, PPC can turn from a short-term thrill into an expensive and ultimately unrewarding experience, when measured as a return on investment .

Expensive? Well, with clicks costing anything from 50p upwards, you could be faced with a bill for thousands of pounds to make an impact in a typical month.

Pricing up a selection of Adwords to promote our residential letting site, for instance shows that a range of average keywords such as “property to let”, “let property” “rent property in London” and “letting agent” would cost $2.25 per click and Google recommend a daily budget of $310 for these alone.

Look at the ultra competitive world of computer games and weep. “ps2” and “xbox” brings with it a recommended budget of $1,490 a day!

Now of course you can stipulate how your ads are served up according to how the keywords are typed in, and good search engine marketing sees the optimisation of a broad range of keywords and phrases, some competitive and some niche, to give a wide spectrum of possibilities, but you get the drift.

Yes, it is possible to cap expenditure, but that means jeopardising your ad’s popularity and listing position and at worst results in your ad not showing at all for days or perhaps weeks at a time.

Surely the situation can only get increasingly competitive. The mainstream nature of search mean that Paid Per Click has caught the eye of the big boys to whom the kind of on-line budgets that would make many small to medium company’s eyes water are akin to raiding the petty cash tin. Result? An increasing number of multinationals who can afford to dominate prime first and second page positions to the detriment of smaller companies who perhaps saw the Internet as more of a level playing field.

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the shocking amounts some businesses have been gradually sucked into paying to stay in the game.

Compare the thousands of pounds companies are paying in Pay Per Click advertising with the big number opportunities that excite us so much at the start of this article which Vertical Leap’s clients are benefiting from 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through efficient natural search engine marketing – in the case of the computer games site 2,134,368 visits from listings in search engines works out at less than a tenth of a penny per click.

In truth, the ideal solution is a well-managed mixture of both. Used tactically PPC makes sense for instant, short-term results. Natural search engine marketing is a long-term measure, but it is definitely worth the wait.

Opportunity knocks…naturally. And the case for natural search engine marketing has never been stronger!