SEO Europe, SEO Canada, SEO Ireland, SEO Australia
None of us are eCommerce Consultants because we love articles, or back links or shuffling through a mountain of data from some random analytics software, we’re here for the results. The work we do, over time, can make a real difference to your business. It can open up whole new markets that you’d never been able to reach before, or locations that you had never approached.
Now I constantly go on about how SEO takes time, it cannot and does not happen overnight. That we cannot guarantee you front page of google results, no-one can; and if they claim they can then you should run a mile. However, despite this wave of realism we still somehow manage to win new business and attract new clients, maybe the truthful approach works after all? Our clients range from large multinationals to a bloke in a van who goes out to fix roofs. Just for a change, and because we’ve just done his yearly analysis, I want to speak about one of our smaller clients, whose name I’m unfortunately not going to be able to reveal for fear of random companies bothering him.
Anyway, a year ago this aforementioned roofing company pops into our office for a chat. They have no website, all their business is coming from paid traditional advertising and recommendations. They’d happily followed this path to relative fortune for the past twenty years, however over recent times they’s noticed rival companies had started display web addresses, and that new companies who primarily advertised online had started to spring up. Spurred into action they met us and asked us to build them a site, design them a brand and then promote it. We were happy to do this and gave them a rough estimate of the prices involved, which to be fair to them was not an unsubstantial amount of money; though less than half what they were spending with Yellow Pages on an annual basis. They had a lot of questions, a lot of doubts, were worried that this money would be flushed away, never to be seen again. However, they decided to plough ahead and in January 2010 we set out to build them a brand, a website and a new client basis from scratch.
They loved the branding, loved the logo, loved the site and for the first couple of months were happy to sit back waiting for the enquiries to start flooding in. Six months passed and the level of business wasn’t what they had hoped for, they were edgey, when will they see some action, if they carried on with their SEO campaign were they simply throwing good money after bad? We got them into the office, sat them down and showed them the figures. The number of people visiting their site, how many pages they looked at, where abouts they came from. They were appeased and said they’d give it another three months. Nine months in and they were a little more relaxed, they’d started to turn those few enquiries into orders, they were now starting to make money from the web.
As we do with all our clients we get them into our office, or visit them, every three months or so for a formal update. They all have account managers who they’ll speak to regularly, but it’s sometimes good for us all to get a different perspective on things. We’d seen their results and the stats look good, their account manager had reported back that orders were building so we thought everything should be positive. Anyway, meeting starts and we ask them how their business is. We love making a difference to peoples lives so were thrilled with their response. The website, which at the time was eleven months old had already paid for itself. In fact, they had a 160% return on their investment within a year and they were asking us what else they could do to get even better results next year. We spoke about the six month meeting and I told them that a huge percentage of customers go through exactly what they had. However, they came out the other side and were happy that the few months of relative pain and nervousness had all been worth it.
The message of this blog is that you’re never to small to benefit from a website, you’re never in the wrong industry. Once your website is built then that’s it, no nasty surprises, no new bills, you own it, it’s yours. Sales on the internet are growing at 21% a year, in four years time the level of online business will have doubled from today. Directories are getting thinner and thinner, newspaper readership is plummeting.
We’ve seen the future and it’s web shaped.
