Many Companies Are Leaving Money On The Table

According to Nielsen/Net Ratings, the total number of searches in August on all the major search engines exceeded 5 billion! These monthly figures keep climbing at a torrid pace. Getting a high ranking on popular search engines can translate into a great deal of additional visits to your Web site, and this can ultimately have a big effect on sales.

Another iProspect study also indicates the importance of ranking high in search engine placement. It demonstrates how quickly people drop out of the search process beyond the first few pages. Based on the study results, here are the cumulative totals regarding the average search depth by a person using a major search engine:

• Searcher only viewed the first few entries: 22.6%
• Searcher stopped after the first page: 41.2%
• Searcher stopped after the first two pages: 67.0%
• Searcher stopped after the first three pages: 81.7%

If a company doesn’t show up on the first two pages of a search, only 1/3 of the people who are looking for information will find them via the search engine. Other studies have shown that appearing on the first three search pages of Google alone can increase unique visitors to a company’s Web site 10-fold and result in double the sales!

You would think the above figures would prompt more companies to seek guidance in optimizing their search engine performance, but a series of reports by OneUpWeb reveal some surprising facts regarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Only 12 percent of the Top 100 Internet Retailers are doing optimization well.

Only 13 percent of the top Fortune 100 sites were well optimized.

Only 19 percent of the top 100 B2B sites were well optimized.

This represents huge potential for many companies that could benefit greatly by better optimizing their Web sites for search exposure. Based on the importance of search engine placement to site visits and overall sales, there is real opportunity for many companies to see a substantial return on investment in this area.