With search engine marketing, it's a little more difficult to calculate. If you're purchasing keywords on Goto, you can see how much each click is going to cost you. But with a service like ours, you pay a monthly fee and we build visibility on all engines. As Paid placement programs such as Goto's become more popular, many website owners are questioning the value of a program like ours. If you can buy number one on Goto, why worry about positioning at all?

The answer is that Goto can only deliver a small fraction of search engine traffic. According to our customer's visitor numbers, less than 8% of search engine traffic comes from GoTo. Yahoo, on the other hand, accounts for more than one third of all search engine traffic. 

For search portals such as Yahoo, Google, Excite, AltaVista and many others, there may be a paid submission charge, but this does not guarantee positioning. In fact, proper positioning and optimization becomes more important than ever to ensure that your investment in paid submission charges pays off with increased traffic.

So, what is the true cost of a positioning program like ours? To find out, we took a sample of our client base and examined their visitor logs (of course, number of visitors varies with popularity of the keywords used). We eliminated any traffic coming from GoTo or other paid placement sources . We then took the average amount they paid us for their positioning service and added a yearly budget of $650 to cover things like paid submission charges to Yahoo, Inktomi, AltaVista and others. We calculated their monthly costs of positioning and divided it by the average number of search engine visitors to arrive at a per visitor cost. In the chart below, we compare that with average keyword bid costs for their keywords on GoTo, as well as what their cost per click through would be for banner and pop up window advertising, based on current industry rates.

a  -  Includes cost of positioning program and recommended paid submissions, divided by average number of search engine visitors, excluding those from GoTo.
b  -  Costs based on average bids for keywords used by clients
c  -  These are based on average industry banner ad impression costs.
d -  Click through rates are based on current industry research
e -  These rates are based on average pop up window impression costs.

The Quality of Search Engine Visitors

So, even if we were just looking at raw numbers, our search engine positioning program would be the cheapest way to deliver visitors to your site. The cost would be less that one tenth of what you would pay per visitor for GoTo, and less that one hundredth of banner advertising.

Now, let's look at the quality of those visitors. Independent studies have shown that search engine traffic is of a much higher quality than that generated by banner advertising. NPD, an Internet Research group, showed that visitors from search engines are 6 times more likely to buy than visitors from banner ads or tile ads. 

Where Do Online Purchases Originate?

(Click here for the rest of the findings)

It's a marketer's dream. Search Engine Position's program is the most cost effective way to drive the highest quality traffic, resulting on a return on investment that other forms of online advertising can't come close to.