Now that you’ve attended a conference on search engine marketing and picked up techniques and information, how do you turn that into something marketable for yourself, your clients, or your business?
An attendee of the Search Engine Strategies Conference held in February in New York city is asking, How Can Seo Benefit my Company and my Clients?. She wonders what to present. What data does she need and where does it come from? Why? What matters to clients? Her company? What does she need to convince anyone to invest in SEO?
I feel like I’m missing something somewhere though because I still don’t have numbers. I have the “if we do this and this we can increase our profits/leads/viewers” but not the “by 67%” or whatever. I don’t have pie charts and graphs and I’m not sure how to find or even go about creating that information.
The responses are thoughtful and often detailed.
This is one of my favorite threads in a long, long time. Stellar.
Comment by AbleReach — May 30, 2007 @ 9:04 am
Just getting clients to track their results should give a measure of credibility. Surely if you weren’t fairly confident in yourself, you wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing. I encourage clients to use Google Analytics, as it doesn’t cost them anything. They can move on to something else if they want to once they get the tracking bug!
Comment by Patricia Skinner — June 11, 2007 @ 10:53 pm
In business simple is most always better. What I mean is you don’t need to be a statistician to create your charts; what you need is a little common sense.
First, you question is how do you translate hits into sales projections. I will assume that your client is a brick and mortar company which is used to calculating floor traffic into sales for if they were an online company they would already know how to do these calculations for themselves and as I am sure if it were the latter you would just use their own figures.
Start by determining an average hit per sale ratio for their industry. Online searches can help a lot here, don’t just Google the industry but target their largest competition and do some leg-work. Contact brokers for information of publicly traded companies and search their corporate prospectuses for the figures they share with their share holders. If these figures are not available call the companies and explain that you are a prospective share holder and would like this information. Often they will give you their in house numbers. Some companies will only give this to actual share holders and I have bought one share of many companies so that I could request these records be forwarded to me; they always are.
In truth, you could most likely fudge this info if you know their numbers for floor traffic by assuming 80% of that number. Online sales often have much better numbers than floor traffic but you will play hell convincing all but the most computer savvy clients of this anyway.
I like the research, the numbers are often much more accurate and is gives me an in for future consulting sales the closer my projections are to their actual results.
Good luck -
Comment by S.E. Snider — August 25, 2008 @ 1:21 pm