Do you know how search engines can help your business?

Are you hearing new terms like “search engine marketing” and “online marketing,” and wondering if it’s even important? Or do you think that people in your industry aren’t using search engines to find your company, because most of your sales come from offline results?

If you think so, you’d be wrong. Just because you aren’t getting sales through your website doesn’t mean no one in your industry is getting sales that way. It just means you’re missing an important revenue stream.

How big is search engine marketing?

According to a February 2010 SearchEngineLand blog post, Google reports 34,000 searches per second. That works out to 2 million searches per minute, 121 million per hour, 3 billion per day, 88 billion per month.

So if you think that “no one searches for us,” or “our customers don’t Google us,” how do you know? What stats have you looked at to tell you that no one is Googling your site? And if they’re not Googling your site, is it because no one in your industry uses the Internet, or is it because your website lives on page 6 and no one goes that deep into the results? (Hint: It’s the latter.)

To paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuk,

“If you’re not using (Google) because you’re in the camp that thinks it’s stupid, you’re going to lose. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s stupid. It’s free communication, and there’s a crapload of users.”

While Gary was originally talking about Twitter, the idea is still the same. People use Google, and they’re looking for you. The problem is you’ll never know it, because they’re finding your competitors instead.

Want to see? Go to Compete.com and type in your URL and the URLs of your biggest competitors and see where you rank on web traffic. If you haven’t done much on search engines, you’ll see your competitors pulling down bigger traffic results than you.

Those traffic results equal sales. Even if your competition is only closing 1% of their web traffic, that’s a lot more than you’re closing.

But my site appears higher on Bing than it does Google. Shouldn’t I focus on Bing?

While Bing may be great in some things, and they have cool TV ads, Google is still by far the dominant search engine. They control 71.59% of the total search engine market. Yahoo and Bing own 14.28% and 9.87% respectively.

Bing is even starting to partner with Facebook, and will provide some of their search results over there. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to crush Google. It only means they’re going to eat away at some of their market share.

For marketers, this means you should focus most of your attention on Google right now, because that’s where most of your traffic is going to come from. If you can win some Yahoo/Bing searches, that’s great, but Google is where you should be focusing your attention at the moment. (And if Yahoo/Bing/Facebook ever gives Google a run for their money, you’ll be able to optimize for Bing as well, when the time comes.)

So what does improved SEO mean to me?

Here are a few reasons you need to focus on search engine marketing as part of your marketing efforts:

• Increased web traffic means increased sales. The more qualified traffic you bring in, the more money you can make.
• Search engine traffic is easier and more cost effective than traditional marketing. You don’t have to spend as much money on Internet marketing as you do on traditional marketing. The average month’s Internet marketing spend can be a fraction of your marketing spend on radio & TV spots, billboards, print advertising, or trade shows. A basic Internet marketing campaign can cost as little as $2,000 per month. (When I was in the poultry business, our minimum budget for a trade show was $2,000 for a 10×10 booth at a three day event in another state.)
• You can track Internet marketing through packages like Google Analytics. You can’t track the effectiveness of billboards, broadcast or print ads. Sure, you can count how many calls you get, but do you know how many people saw or heard those ads? What’s the actual percentage of people who called you? With Internet marketing, you can see the who, what, when, where, and how of each customer. You can see which strategies succeed, and focus more energy on those, while dumping those that don’t perform.

What is a search engine marketing campaign worth to you?

Let’s say your biggest competitor gets 5,000 leads per month on their website, and they do a rather poor job of search engine optimization themselves, which means they’re ripe for the picking.

And let’s say some basic SEO and blogging could siphon off just 10% of their traffic. That’s 500 more leads to your site per month.

And let’s say 10% of those leads — 50 people — are truly qualified. They’re not gawkers, not people out for a stroll, but are actual potential buyers and decision makers. You set up a process where people who match your ideal customer are funneled into your system, and the non-qualified customers are funneled out. So your web traffic is up, and you’re getting 50 new actual, solid leads per month.

You’re good at your job, so you close 10% — just 5 people — of those qualified leads. Remember, if they’re qualified, it means they’re very interested in what you sell. You don’t have to convince them to buy what you’ve got, you just have to show them you’re the best.

Let’s say you’ve got a high dollar item, and make $10,000 on a single sale. Closing five of those sales just added $50,000 to your bottom line.

A single sale would have paid for the $2,000 per month investment you just made, and netted you $8,000. But we now have an ROI of 2,500%, which not only paid for the $2,000 per month fee, but got you enough money to hire someone to handle the new workload (and you just earned it in a single month).

Admittedly, these are some hypothetical numbers, but you see my point. If you want to get an idea of what search engine marketing can do for you, do some basic research:

1. Find out who the leader in your industry is.
2. Use Compete.com to figure out your web traffic versus theirs.
3. Then figure out how it would improve your bottom line if you could take just 10% of their traffic, and close 10% of those new leads.

Once you know this, don’t worry about how much an Internet marketing program will cost. Worry about how much it’s costing you by not doing it. If you were our hypothetical business, the old school methods are costing you $50,000 per month.

And one day, they’re going to cost you a lot more, because one day, your competitor is going to figure out how to do this stuff for themselves.

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