SEO Outperforms Overture
Betty Noble was unhappy with Overture.
When Noble, owner of micro-precision machining firm Norman Noble Inc., realized that her Web site resembled an empty parking lot rather than a destination teeming with traffic, she ventured into buying keywords on search engines. About a year ago, Noble enrolled in the Overture pay-per-click program in which marketers bid for the best placement on keywords. Traffic increased.
“But Overture gets to be a real chess game,” Noble complains. “Say we want to be No. 1 with the word ‘laser machining.’ We go to Overture and pay to be No. 1. Then our competition pays to be No. 1 with the same keyword.”
The highest she ever paid for a keyword was $13. [The minimum bid on Overture now is 10 cents a keyword.] “I’m at the mercy of the whole machining industry and Overture, and I pay out the ying-yang to keep my placement,” Noble says.
When Noble told her story to iCrossing, the Scottsdale, AZ search agency recommended natural search optimization (revamping the Web site to make the keywords rank high in algorithmic rankings of search results.)
Beginning last summer, Noble focused the optimization on one part of the business — the electrical discharge machining (EDM) area. Like any good direct marketer, she wanted to test the program. “We have 20 EDM machines, but we only had four working, and the inquiries we were getting were not quality inquiries,” Noble says.
By the end of 2002, the Cleveland-based business-to-business manufacturer had all the EDM machines working at full capacity. And Noble had won three new contracts as a result of the search engine optimization (SEO) program. At $1 million a contract, it proved that SEO was a solid strategy for the firm.
A full SEO program was rolled out across the Web site.
An iCrossing-led redesign of the site made it as attractive as possible to search engine “spiders,” which then rank the Web pages in search engine results. This doubled customer requests from about 10 to 20 a day. The visitor hits spiked from about 50 a day to 200.
“For every 10 leads, we used to convert one,” Noble says. “Now we convert five to seven out of every 10.” (Because the firm is such a finely targeted niche marketer, she doesn’t need hundreds of qualified leads, Noble explains.)
Noble is so happy with results that she’s added a sister company site, The Electrolizing Corp., to optimize.
One of iCrossing’s goals was to re-think some of the keywords used on Overture. “Electrical discharge machining” and “computer controlled machining” are both very competitive terms — and are very important to driving customers to Noble’s site, points out Lance Faulkner, director of natural search optimization at iCrossing. So to get the words to appear through natural SEO methods will take awhile. “If you absolutely have to get there overnight, so to speak, use Overture,” Faulkner says.
Noble will pay for these expensive keywords on Overture while backing them up with optimization and then gradually phase them out. The firm spends about $5,000 a month on Overture.
The SEO elements included researching what keywords potential customers used most often to get to www.nnoble.com.
The Noble site uses only 300 keywords, compared with the thousands most sites use because of its narrow appeal.
The pages were rewritten to be as relevant to the search engines as they are to the visitor. Certain words and phrases are repeated, while others are used less frequently than they were. “Internet copy and soft copy are vastly different,” Faulkner says. “We try to target how people think and actually speak. You would not conduct a search the way you actually speak.”
Page titles also are crucial. On www.nnoble.com, the home page’s title doesn’t even include the company name. Instead, it reads “Contract Manufacturing Precision Machining Services,” because that’s what potential customers will search for. And it’s what the page is actually about.
“Unless you’re Microsoft, people are not going to search for your company name,” Faulkner says.
The site features a lot of text, and descriptions get right to the point. It isn’t heavy with images or Java script, which search engines don’t read. Photos that portray workers and machinery for each area of the Noble plant have text behind each that describe the picture for the benefit of the search engines.
The firm’s tagline is “Cutting-edge micro-precision machining from the leader in contract manufacturing, Norman Noble Inc.” These words appear frequently throughout the copy. “The company is known for each of these phrases,” Faulkner explains. So the words stand out to the visitor to the home page and to the search engine trying to locate what a potential customer is looking for.
The meat of the Web page is on the first third of the page because the crawling engines place a lot of emphasis on what they first read on the Web page.
The cost? $79,000 for both sites.
“They had to pick me up off the floor when I heard the figure,” Noble said. “But when I realized if this works for 10 years, then the price is amortized over all those years and it’s not so bad.”
