I am doing a series of short articles providing advice on how to cost effectively market your local services business online with a focus on getting qualified leads.

In this post, I will define some of the various elements or “channels” of online marketing.  In subsequent posts, I’ll describe my recommended approach to marketing your business using each of these channels.

To begin with, what is conversion rate?
To achieve the best Return on Investment (ROI) in the online channels, your first step should really be to have a targeted website, or at least, a web page.  The various online channels will bring visitors to your website, but it will be up to your website to convince the visitor to take that next step.  This desired next step for the visitors may be to:

• Fill out a form
• Email you
• Call you

The number of visitors who take this “desired action” as a percentage of visitors who visit your website is called the conversion rate.

For instance, if you get 200 visitors to your website, and 20 of them fill out a form, then the conversion rate for filling out that form is 20/200 = 10%.

Once you have a website and are getting visitors, you should continuously be working on increasing its conversion rate because a higher conversion rate is the best way to increase your return on any investment.

The great thing about the Internet is that everything is measurable.  This means that you can even try variations on specific aspects of your website (e.g. you can test mentioning your price point versus not mentioning it) to see which variation gets you the highest conversion rate.  (I’ll get into more detail on this kind of testing in a later article).

Attracting visitors through Search Engine Marketing
Even before you can increase conversion rates on your website, you need to attract visitors to your website.  There are various ways to attract visitors to your website, and the most widely used one is Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

SEM itself can be further sub divided into two main channels.  If you do a search on Google, you’ll notice two things:

1. A set of links at the right and towards the top of the page (with a light brownish background) where it says Sponsored Links.  This is Paid Search Advertising (PSA).  These Sponsored Links are really advertisements that have been bought by a company (advertiser) from Google.  When a user who is searching on Google sees such a sponsored link (or ad) and clicks on it, the user then “lands on” a page within the advertiser’s website.  The advertiser pays Google NOT when the user sees the ad, but only when the user clicks on it.  Thus the advertiser only pays Google for actual visitors delivered to the advertiser’s website.
2. A set of links below the top Sponsored Links on the left side.  These are “organic” or “natural” search listings.These links are free in the sense that when the user sees such a link and even clicks on it, the website that he/she lands on does not pay Google any money.  Of course, to get to these coveted spots, on the first page of Google (for a specific user search) can take a lot of time and effort.  (We’ll describe this in a lot more detail in a subsequent article).

In my next post, I’ll provide advice on successfully launching Paid Search Advertising campaigns.

About Nadir Hussain, COO, Media Flint, Inc.
Nadir Hussain is an Internet Advertisement and Search Engine Marketing expert. He is both Google and Yahoo certified for their Internet Advertisement programs.  He teaches an Internet based Advertising class both at UC/Berkeley Extension and the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford University.  His education comprises of a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Mathematics from UC/Santa Cruz, a MSEE from Stanford University and an MBA from UC/Berkeley.

Tags: google sem, natural search results, online conversion rate, online marketing channels, organic search results, paid search advertising, PSA, Search Engine Marketing, SEM, small business marketing, small business SEM, sponsored links