Poor marketing has been the downfall of many an online venture. If it's sales you're after, you'd be better spending that ad budget on upping your search engine ranking, says bigmouthmedia. Louise jenkins spoke to the firm making a big noise in the field of search engine optimisation.Steve Leach is a man in an enviable position. "Last year we could only take on a tenth of the clients that we had enquiries from at the peak. Things have quietened down but we still don't take on everyone. We now have an eight week waiting list to see potential clients."
Steve, together with partner Heather Luscombe, runs Bigmouthmedia, a search engine optimisation company. Originally part of web developer Vertigo's service, the pair decided that there was enough of a market to set up the company in its own right, and Bigmouthmedia (BMM) was spun out earlier this year.
At a basic level, search engine optimisation is the registration of keywords with the major search engines in order to gain a ranking. Which begs the question, why would you need a specialist company to do that?
"First of all, there is a very complex infrastructure behind this industry," says Leach. "For example, if you can get top listings in Looksmart, that will give you top listings in MSN. Netscape is fed by DMOS, and most people have never heard of DMOS before. And Yahoo only returns about 20% of its enquiries from its own database. The majority are actually forwarded by Google.
"The second thing is to know how they all work. It's all very well knowing who's talking to who, but you also need to know how you get a top listing on Looksmart, Yahoo and DMOS. We've now formed quite a few affiliations with major search engines and we have access to fairly restricted information. It's no longer a case of guessing what people are looking for online. We know exactly what they're looking for."
Add to these reasons the facts that there are now more than two billion web pages on the internet vying for attention, 89% of new traffic is driven to a website via a search engine, and most search engine users search no further than the first three pages of listings.
BMM claims it can achieve top ten listings on all the major search engines. According to Leach, the firm's uniqueness lies in its approach. "Part of our success is down to being absolutely realistic with the client in the first place. We know which words are achievable and which aren't because we pay for the privilege of knowing these things. We do an awful lot of in-depth study before we start on any project at all. We look at the current exposure of the site - where it features on search engines, in what position, under what keywords. We look at their main competitors. Then we'll look at the website itself and the technology behind it because that might affect the search engines. We can advise on content because there are certain rules that are used to classify the site. Yahoo has a rule for portals, for instance, that there has to be 40% unique content. You also can't have Flash on your site or require any form of plug-in to operate it because these search engines rely on the masses and don't want sites that exclude them.
"We do keyword analysis as well. For instance, if a client says they want to be found under 'mp3', we can tell them exactly how much traffic there is out there looking for 'mp3' but also how much competition there is for that word - how many sites are already on the search engines. This is where we get realistic with them because we have, and we do, get top listings for single keywords like 'mp3', 'music' and so on but we don't get them right across the board. We know where we can probably achieve it, but there are other areas where we know it's not realistic and we understate rather than overstate. In a circumstance like that we'll say to a client 'you're looking for 'mp3' which is going to return 30,000 results a month on a particular search engine where it's been searched for 30,000 times. A top ten listing is not achievable, but 'mp3 download' 'mp3 music' 'mp3 music chart' - these are achievable and together equate to 46,000 searches. So you'll actually get more traffic'"
Once the analysis has been completed and a plan of action agreed, BMM does all the submissions manually. It chooses to do it this way for a simple reason, says Leach. Automated submissions don't work.
It must be doing something right. Its clients include Interflora, Miller Beer, Comic Relief, MTV, Future Publishing, Fox Films, BT, Persil, and any number of dot coms including Clickmusic.co.uk and Webswappers. Leach puts the firm's recent success and the growing profile of search engine optimisation, down to the current gloom in the marketplace. "I think what has done it is the downturn in the economy to be honest with you. The marketing budgets have been halved, then halved a few more times. Everything comes down to cost-per-click - how much you've spent to get one user to your website. A typical banner ad campaign would come in around 45 pence. We get, on average, a rate of under ten pence."
For Bigmouthmedia however, there is no gloom. It's currently growing at a rate of 240% a year, taking on two new staff and one blue chip client each month. Its services are diversifying - it has recently teamed up with law firm Tods Murray to identify and act upon infringement of its client's trademarks and copyright, as well as added viral marketing, strategic linking and bid listings affiliations to its portfolio. It is also making waves in the Spanish-speaking market - the fastest growing on the internet - which will lead to a partnership in Madrid and the establishment of an office there.
For a big mouth, there's more than just talk to this firm.
This article appeared in NB.
