Internet Marketing Clinic

I have often noted in our clinic that small businesses can compete very effectively against larger businesses with large marketing budgets by learning how to market their businesses over the web. A study by Conductor, Inc. documents the failure by Fortune 500 companies to make effective use of search engine optimization to promote their businesses. The study is available from their website by signing in to download.

The study opens with a list of what they consider to ge its “key takeaways”:

• The Fortune 500 as a group spent approximately $3.4 million per day on 97,559 keywords – yet only 25% of these keywords rank in the top 50 natural search results.
• Only 2% of the domains (not companies) surveyed showed a significant number of their terms in the top results. All of these positive domain scores were offset by other owned domains with significant visibility issues.
• 15% of Fortune 500 companies studied showed mid to strong presence for their most advertised keywords.
• 32% of Fortune 500 companies have low to mid presence.
• 53% of Fortune 500 companies have no natural search visibility for their most advertised keywords.
• Fortune 500 natural search visibility decreased with longer search queries.
• 68% of keywords were found on a landing page (e.g. www.amazon.com/cellphone) versus a top level domain page (e.g. www.amazon.com).

I have not yet absorbed the full report, but will be posting more interesting observations from there as I go through the report.

The key message here is quite clear, and that is that small businesses can compete against bigger marketing budgets by learning what works on the web and applying what they learn to their own websites!