How well is your Internet marketing working for your business?
-
Not asking about specifics of money, but this is just a general question to see what kind of return people get for their Internet marketing time investment..
I would say I'm getting over 40,000 hits per year for one business which is holiday cottages but I only own one cottage and act as an agent for three other clients. Because the campaign is working well for me at the moment I get probably 95% occupancy throughout the year, which you would have no chance of accomplishing without SEO intensive input.
If I had to pay £0.50 a click approximately obviously it wouldn't be worthwhile, especially when you realise that a percentage of the traffic and not related to your product. I also have a second business which is installing wireless security alarms over the Internet and once again approximate traffic at the moment is almost approaching 40,000 again per year.
Now I'm sure there are some big hitters out but my general question is how productive, is you're organic results and Internet marketing for your personal business in comparison to what it would cost you if you had to pay per click?
I'm kind of wondering how well the Internet is working people on this forum for their particular businesses?
Good, Bad ? whats your story ?
Cheers alan
-
Hello Thomas
I understand your point that if usually an financial investment gets a good enough return in an ideal situation with unlimited funds you just go for it, but in the real world unlimited funds don't exist usually.
The 95% occupancy throughout the year is only because I've worked at getting every aspect of the business correct the facilities of the cottage after this spot on with the films tour etc. the other properties I represent on the same website and not quite as good and do not get the same occupancy rates so you've just got to get everything correct it appears.
I can see the you probably would get diminishing returns at some point on search engine results in comparison to time input but I've never got their because I've probably managed at this moment in time to get around 60% of the high traffic keywords working for me above the fold on page 1 of Google but there's still room for improvement. Only limited by time and money
But like you I love SEO it's become a way of life which is enjoyable on many levels.
-
Interesting, thanks a lot for your detailed response. It seems like you've worked out very clearly the customer returns in comparison to the money spent well done.
I find Google Adword does work, but I found it to be generally too expensive. I would think if my business for holiday letting was larger with more properties it would then be worthwhile, but at the moment with my own doing fine and only representing three other properties if I said that the campaign could easily run through £25 a day and I suspect wouldn't get enough bookings back to warrant it. We don't seem to get many people signing up for e-mail news from the website either so to be perfectly honest most of the businesses coming directly from the website only.
I tried Facebook advertising and found it to be very ineffective for both the holiday cottage and installation of wireless alarms, virtually nobody showed an interest it just costs money.
And I've not tried any of the online or off-line paid for directory advertising although it might be worthwhile I'll look into it.
-
Hi, apart from owning iPositions I have shares in a cleaning business and certain other businesses in the wedding industry. Like Thomas said internet directories like the yellow pages still bring a return and we do in fact use them. We also advertise with Google Adwords and even though we are also ranked highly for our local keywords I would never stop using Adwords.
For the cleaning business Facebook advertising was useless but for the wedding ones it works great, so again it's all about trial and error.
We do a lot of email marketing and it has a very very high return simply because our followers are people that would have already bought from us before and are keeping an eye out for more of our email-only offers.
In total our internet generated sales can be divided into the following demographic:
Organic positions on SE: 20%
Paid listings like Google: 25%
Paid listings like Yellow pages (and some other niche directories for the areas): 30%
Facebook: 5%
Email marketing: 20%
Most of our traffic comes from organic positions but we seem to get better conversions from our paid efforts.
Hope this helps
-
Well Alan, that is fairly specific numbers on your sites, and if you are hitting 95% occupancy then it sounds like a success, albeit I don't know your time/value on the online marketing.
You will find at some point, diminishing returns on your marketing efforts. How much time and how successful you can be with internet marketing depends entirely on your business model and the industry you are promoting.
As for me, a pest control guy, I've found that I only have so much money with which I can invest, i.e. market. Yellowpages still have a return, if that return fits your model then it could still be a good form of advertising. While the phonebook may have good returns, online marketing has better returns. If I have limited money and can buy a customer for $1 then why would I pay $10 for the same customer? If I had unlimited money, then I would buy all of the $1 and $10 customers that I could. (theoretical figures)
Sorry that's a long answer... in short, I believe that most marketing attempts have some return, its a matter of figuring out what the return is and how much it's worth to you. I personally love SEO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
On page Grader is not working on specific site
Hello.
Moz Pro | | livedigm
When I try to use 'On Page Grader' on specific site, I get an error message. "
Page Optimization Error
There was a problem loading this page. Please make sure the page is loading properly and that our user-agent, rogerbot, is not blocked from accessing this page.
"
example : https://www.livedigm.com Site's robots.txt settings are good. and I think there's no blocking factor. But On Page Grader cannot crawl the sites.
But campaign crawler is working well on the site. only On Page Grader is not working.. What should I change my server's setting or site's setting for crawling site on my site?
I'm using wordpress on cloudways / Digitalocean(singapore) server. Thank you.0 -
Ranking issues with my local business website.
Hi, I have local business website "asapgaragedoorrepair.com" which im seeing weird ranking issues during last few months . i would like to share it with you guys and get help from you. first days i have indexed the website ,it was ranking good with google and then after 2-3 weeks i have noticed that none of the pages ranking anymore. i have looked for any issues in the optimization and i fixed them and indexed again. right now i have weird issues. 1- the website was ranking for another page in my website other that the one that i wanted for keyword" Garage Door Repair Pasadena " .(it was ranking with garage door installation page). i changed the content ,optimization on the other page and indexed. still the same issue. then i had no ways other that 301 to the right page . 2- when i check the rankings with "ahrefs" website or "Moz" or other tools that i have, it shows that im ranking for 16th position for " Garage door repair Pasadena ". but when i search it by myself im getting no results. (this is bothering) maybe i dont know something . pls help me 3- in Moz or ahref website shows the ranking like the image i have attached. 2 different results for each keywords. why is that? and why i can not see them when i search them by my self? htPQR
Moz Pro | | Mishel2980 -
Keyword Rankings Compare to X not working
Anyone else having trouble with the compare your keyword positions with competitors section of the analytics? The rankings for my site(s) are fine but whichever competitor I click on to compare rankings to just returns 'Not in Top 50' the competitor is ranking. I have just manually checked and they are very much listed in the engine. Is this tool broken?
Moz Pro | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Why doesn't the Historical PageRank tool work
example: http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/pagerank?wurl=www.google.com turns no results for me. what's up? thanks!
Moz Pro | | chiappa0 -
Rank tracker not working right
so i'm quite new at using seomoz so maybe this is a silly question. a couple of weeks ago i added 6 url to tack weekly and it's been working so far. since then i've been wanting to add several more but it seems that the list is limited to 6. at first i click the checkbox on track column but when that didn't work i updated each url then click "track this url" --> that didn't work either. can anyone help if maybe i'm doing something wrong? thx
Moz Pro | | BSutandio0 -
Open site explorer not working this morning, anyone else have that problem?
Open site explorer not working this morning, anyone else have that problem? i am new, and i signed up because of open site explorer, but... no results! just a ooops! anybody has that problem today?
Moz Pro | | PLuc1 -
I cant work it out!!
Hi Guys,If you can please help. I am trying to use OSE for the site www matesratesuk.com it tells me there is 177 link and it is showing 1-26 of these but I cannot seem to locate the others. Am I possibly doing something wrong oris it because all these links are internally linked. Im not sure. Thanks for Looking, Craig
Moz Pro | | fenwaymedia0 -
SEOmoz Keyword Ranking - Does it work for local search?
I was just wondering how SEOmoz calculates keyword rankings up and down every week. Shouldn't there be a way to have SEOmoz calculate rankings on a Local and Non-Local Basis? For example I have "Local Dentist" as a keyword in SEOmo for my dental client. SEOmoz shows that we are not in the Top 50. | Local dentist Keyword History Ranking Analysis | Not in Top 50 | Moved unknown 0 spaces | Not in Top 50 | Moved unknown 0 spaces | Not in Top 5 | If I change my location in Google browser to the zip of where the office is located, we
Moz Pro | | Czubmeister
show up in position 14(for the home page) & 15 (for an inside page) How can I show the keyword rankings to my client if the keyword ranking report doesn't reflect searches done in my clients local area?0