Action Conference Call Raises its Sales 500% Solely Through Search Engine Optimization

CHALLENGE
Action Conference Call, a provider of conference calling services, was frustrated with its Web marketing results using standard banners. Bob Wise, Action's Director of Operations, believed in his Web site's ability to close sales, but he needed a more effective way to drive a heavy stream of qualified prospects to it.

CAMPAIGN
Wise decided to reallocate all online marketing resources to search engine optimization. He hired a specialist firm, Webster Group International (WGI), to handle the process for him.

Before plunging into submitting the site to search engines, WGI spent a few days researching and analyzing keywords and phrases that search engine users might try when seeking conference calling services. WGI's Jada King explains, "We had to find phrases people are actually typing in when they search -- which are not always what you'd expect. We also found out which terms the competition was using; and which phrases were so broad that it would be too hard to get top ranking for them."

In the end, WGI and Wise settled on 24 specific keywords or phrases including, "conference calling," "audio teleconference," and "audio seminars." King notes that not all companies require 24 keywords optimized, in fact many do well with just ten. It all depends on how many different ways people might commonly search for your services.

Next WGI copywrote new meta tags for Action Conference Call's site based on these keywords; and, created three new site pages to maximize the odds of a search engine picking up on a certain keyword. Some search engines decide your site's ranking depending on how many other sites link to yours. So WGI also raised Action's "link popularity" by getting a dozen (and later more than double that amount) related business sites to link to Action's homepage.

After all of this prep was completed, WGI began manually submitting the site and special pages to the leading dozen search engines.

RESULTS
Action Conference Call currently has 86 top 20 rankings in eleven search engines and major online directories. (Remember, a site may show up under a variety of keywords.)

This success has translated directly into cash. Wise says his Company's sales have grown by over 500% in the past 18 months, and he credits search engine optimization for 100% of that growth! In fact the Company has undertaken no other marketing campaigns whatsoever, except for keeping its Web site updated and purchasing occasional keywords at GoTo.com.

NEXT: How does Action Conference Call plan to keep growing? By launching more sites to place in search engines of course! King explains, "Some directories such as Yahoo will only list one page of your site -- usually your home page. If you have more than one product to sell, you might want to create multiple smaller sites for each product type rather than one single site that will only get listed once at Yahoo."

NOTE: King offered a useful warning to our readers, "A lot of search engine optimization services will host the special pages they create for clients on their own domain instead of on the client's domain. That means when the client stops paying, that company has the ability to take away all of the client's placement from engines. So make sure you host your pages on your own domain."

Want to find out which keywords are worth your effort before you put a lot of work into optimizing for them? A new free resource is at WordTracker.com.