By Chris Lee

Investment in search marketing continues to rise in the UK, with more than half of companies planning to raise their pay-per-click (PPC) budgets alone during the next year as well as investing heavily in organic search. With this increased spend comes even more intense competition on keyword terms and pressure on marketing heads at a time when budgets are being closely scrutinised.

When IT forensics firm Cy4or wanted to improve its search marketing, it turned to a search specialists Return on Digital to help out and within a year an initial investment of £20,000 on organic and PPC search had paid back several times over, with £120,000-worth of new business enquiries coming to Cy4or.

Mixing it up

The company split its organic search and PPC budget down the middle, Return on Digital CEO Guy Levine explained. The organic SEO focus was on the main keywords for which Cy4or needed to rank highly while PPC was used to cover a wider range of services and to launch new products.

“Most B2B (business-to-business) websites have a similar challenge in that there is never enough content, which means if a large portfolio of keywords is selected sometimes over half of them don’t have any corresponding content,” Levine told NMK. “This is overcome by increasing information on the site, but also using blogs to add more content which might not be suitable from product pages, but will still be indexed by the search engines, and internally linked back to the main page. With new content added, it was essential to create a new sitemap in both HTML and XML to ensure Google would crawl the new pages.”

Levine said that once the content had been added and tweaked, the basics of SEO such as title tags and internal links were fixed, and a major drive on external link building took place to ensure that the site had relevant incoming links. The speed of loading of the site was also tested and improved by tweaking the code, as load speed became a highlighted ranking factor by Google.

Creating a conversion

While being to be found on search engines is one challenge overcome, organisations then need to focus on converting traffic into sales. According to Levine, to convert visitors into buyers there are several key fundamentals and lots of testing is required.

“The first absolute must is to have clearly-displayed contact details. In the B2B space most business will start with either a phone call or an email, so make it easy for visitors to contact you,” Levine said. “The second and most overlooked point of leverage is to understand the visitor who will be looking at the site. Are they looking for lots of information or are they looking for a quick overview? Also decide on whom the target market is and use strategically placed testimonials with reputations in the market to add third party credibility to the website. Adding key testimonials to the site saw a bump in the conversion rate and there is now an internal action point to collect more. We are currently looking at using video testimonials to further boost credibility.”

Levine’s team used split testing tools which allowed strategies to be tested as opposed to guesses being made, which has shown in bottom line results and not just increased visitors.

Looking forward

Now that learning on Cy4or’s SEO has increased during the campaign the company has been able to reduce its search marketing spend.

“As with all digital marketing projects the emphasis is on return on investment, not just visibility on the key search engines. By trimming the budget and doing more research into the keywords which converted into leads, Cy4or were able to adjust budgets without eroding any results,” Levine concluded. “This has allowed a more joined up approach with the rest of the marketing. The budget for next year will be set around the same figures, with adjustments being made if needed due to increase in click costs of the introduction of new services.”