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So, your web-site is on-line and you are satisfied
with its professional look and functioning. But, are you satisfied
with its contribution towards your business ? How many new customers
has it turned in ? What is the return on this investment ? is the
web-site successful ?
Success of a web-site depends on three factors
- No of Relevant Visitors it can attract
- No of visitors who actually pay and become customer (conversion
ratio)
- Average spend per customer
Content and negotiation skill play a crucial role in achieving higher
conversion ratio and average spend. Fortunately, these factors,
to a great extent, are within your control. However, attracting
quality traffic is an entirely different ball game that requires
special skill and expertise. Web-sites are unlikely to attract quality
traffic on their own unless someone consciously work for it.
Search Engine marketing is a great tool for attracting quality customers.
However, extent of success here depends a great deal on how well
one executes a search engine marketing plan. Which Search Engine ?
Traffic to a web-site from a search engine depends
on two factors:
- The engine's raw traffic
- Interests of visitors for using a certain kind of engine
Though there are thousands of search engines, only about half-a-dozen
account for over 90% of search engine traffic. So, from quantity
point of view, one should focus on these search engines only.
However, there are some special kind of vertical engines or portals
that have the capacity to send very high quality potential customers.
Traffic from such engines and portals could be much less in number
compared to Google or Yahoo! - but the conversion ratio could be
much higher. Ignoring such quality traffic sources could prove to
be fatal error in a search engine marketing program.
Your search engine marketing program should consider both the approaches
and draw a balanced view Top Search Engines Based on Raw Traffic
Search
Engine Watch the highly respected name in search engine
marketing recently published latest A C Nielsen Netrating survey.
The Nielsen/NetRatings MegaView Search reporting service measures
the search behavior of more than a million people worldwide. These
web surfers have real-time meters on their computers which monitor
the sites they visit. This metered information is compiled to produce
NetRatings results. Below are statistics about searching from NetRatings
provided to Search Engine Watch:
The chart below shows the percentage of online searches done by
US home and work web surfers in November 2005 that were performed
at a particular search engine. Internal site searches, such as those
to find material within a particular web site, are not counted in
these totals. The activity at more than 60 search sites makes up
the total search volume upon which percentages are based - 5.1 billion
searches in this month.
| Search Engine |
Percentage of On-line Search |
| Google |
46.3% |
| Yahoo! |
23.4% |
| MSN |
11.4% |
| AOL |
6.9% |
| My Way |
2.5% |
| Ask |
2.3% |
| Earthlink |
0.6% |
| Dogpile |
0.6% |
| Netscape |
0.6% |
| iwon |
0.5% |
| Others |
4.7% |
Source:
Search Engine Watch
Top Search Engines and Portals - based on
quality of Traffic
There are some directories and portals that
have the ability to send potential visitors to your web-site. Some
of these are general purpose while others are subject specific.
Unlike spider-based search engines, Directories list only a few
hand-picked web-sites under every category. They employ human editors
and every web-site is included purely on merit. There is no scope
for keyword distribution or content manipulation or some such trick
to fool the spider.
There are many visitors who prefer such highly selected list of
web-sites rather than a huge list. Such visitors, typically, are
very specific about what they want and tend to act rather fast.
Examples of general purpose directories are Yahoo!, DMOZ etc.
There are many vertical directories that focus on a specific product
or topic. Serious visitors find out about these subject specific
directories from general search engines and then use it to contact
suppliers, buyers, agents, distributors etc. Examples of such vertical
directories are Vanik ,
The Great Indian
Bazaar etc.
Imagine the effort a web-surfer has spent for finding a directory
of his/her choice and then surf to your web-site from that directory
- and you will begin to see the seriousness involved.
Your search engine marketing program should consider high volume
horizontal search engines such as Yahoo! and Google as well as popular
vertical directories in your product areas. Conclusion
At the end of above processes - you should be
able to draw a list of few selected search engines and portals that
are capable of sending quality traffic to your web-site. In next
articles, we shall examine how to actually use these search engines.
Happy and Productive Surfing
Dr. Amit K Chatterjee
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