Turning Google Searches into Paid Invoices

This article serves to show the often unseen connection between a search conducted on Google and that person paying the invoice you issued to them.

A person or company that has a requirement for a product or service will be placing that order with someone but there are some milestones to reach before that happens.

The Internet is nothing new really. When you boil it down, it’s just old concepts on a new medium.

So it is with generating business through the web. This short article aims to help you see the similarities between making a sale before the Internet and making a sale now that we have it.

As a guide we’ll be referring to the following document which you can download and make use of later if you like:

Download Internet Sales Funnel Diagram

You might recognise this as a traditional sales funnel. In the old days the top of the funnel would be the number of cold calls made.

The next stage down in the funnel in the old days would have been number of brochures sent out perhaps.

The next stage in the funnel in the old days would have been number of appointments made or number of quotes sent out and eventually the numbers of sales made.

Then at the end of the sales process you can work out average sale value, total value of sales brought in and then how much gross profit was made.

This is very similar to the new age, except instead of cold calls and paper brochures etc we automate the time consuming part of the process using Internet marketing and our websites.

Take a phrase like ‘internet marketing specialists’ which is one of our most important keywords, which we’re optimising our own website for.

We know this is searched around 4,000 a month overall and about 800 times a month in the UK.
So say we’re optimising our website for 9 other similar keywords with a combined total of 8,000 searches each month.

The more exposure our website has for these 10 keywords the greater share of those 8,000 searches we are going to get as visitors to our website.

If we were in the top 3 on Google for all these keywords (at time of writing we’ve moved up to 12th on Google for ‘internet marketing specialists’), then I would expect our site to attract about 20% of the searches. 20% of 8,000 is 1,600 website visitors per month.

Now we’ve filled in the top two portions of the funnel diagram, the next thing we track is how many of those 1,600 visitors will make an enquiry to us.

Now even though those people came looking for us, they’ll all be at different stages of their decision making process. Some are conducting initial research on one end and people are ready to sign a deal on the other.

Our website is pretty good and converts an average of 4% of its search engine traffic into enquiries, which would mean 64 enquiries a month through the web using the above figures.

As it shows on the diagram, the better your website is the more visitors will convert into enquiries. Contact us for help on improving this.

So now we have 64 enquiries and say only 50% of them are serious, meaning we produce 32 proposals / quotes.

That’s the third stage dealt with.

Finally let’s say our proposals were not particularly persuasive so only 20% of the potential customers decided to go ahead with us. 20% of 32 is 6, so 6 new customers.

So there we have it. We’ve gone right through the process from someone conducting a Google search through to issuing an invoice to a new customer.

The results of this kind of process have many variables. If you are better or worse at any particular stage then that will obviously affect the amount of business that comes out of the bottom of the funnel.

Having tons of searches for your product or services is no good if your Internet marketing is poor because no one will ever find your company.

If your website is poor then the people who do find you won’t bother getting in touch.

And if you don’t present the value of your product or service properly the people that do make the enquiry won’t end up giving you an order.

Imagine what difference it makes when you improve all of these elements at the same time?

I guarantee the result would definitely be ‘Profit Up’.

For more information on anything discussed in this article please contact us directly and we’ll be glad to help.

Until next time keep that Profit Up.

Creating niche social networking sites

Has it occured to anyone else the trend that is emerging in social media?

While mashup sites are typically meant to bring things together, there seems to be another trend.

There seems to be a lot of attention on their idea of 'status' messages like you write on Facebook or myspace.

This is exactly where the idea for Twitter came from. They took the 'status' feature that has been in Facebook for a long time and created a site focusing on just that.

Then FriendFeed is back in the news because Facebook has acquired an interest in the company.
I dont know how much valuable technology is in FriendFeed but I'd expect to see Facebook slowly but surely merging the features of FriendFeed into Facebook as time goes on.

FriendFeed again latched on to the idea of 'status', only instead of Twitter's angle (forcing you to post very short messages), FriendFeed encourages status messages based on what web content you are looking at.

The idea then is for your friends to comment on it, recommend it others etc

I think the web really is coming into it's own with this kind of social media and it's revolutionary.

FriendFeed which is dubbed 'real time search' is a system for filtering out junk web content by democracy.

The amount of revenue we generate for clients from social media marketing doesn't mean that their search marketing results have been affected, it means that social networking sites are helping to fuel the adoption of the Internet amoung the population.

Suddenly instead of being all alone in front of a Google search screen, you can come to the Internet browse it based on recommendations from friends who have been there for years and can point you in the right places.

There's just so many new and innovative concepts and because technology is now so cheap, the cost of testing these ideas out is relatively small.

Which kind of brings us back to the importance of social networking because your peers will help you filter out the junk and point out the pearls.