THS Articles

A Web Host's One-Two Punch: Search Engine Marketing & ROI Tracking

By Shari Thurow and Grant Crowell

Superior technical support, pricing, first-rate customer service, server performance, search engine submission - these services are ways that Web hosting companies differentiate themselves from their competition. Need to have a Web site on a tight budget? Low-cost Web hosting is available for as little as $7.99 per month. Need a more robust solution? Dedicated hosting packages with customized technical support are also available.

As Web hosting companies battle out the pricing vs. quality debate, they often ignore two of the hottest online marketing strategies: search engine marketing and Web analytics, also known as return-on-investment (ROI) tracking.

The best way to submit a site to the spider-based search engines is to submit a home page and a site map (as a back up) to the free URL submission form, and let the search engine find pages on its own.

Benefits of search engine marketing and ROI tracking
Second only to e-mail, the most popular activity on the Web is information search. In January 2004, Nielsen/NetRatings reported that 114.5 million people in the United States used a search engine in the month of January, representing 39
percent of the population.

Since millions of people use both the spider-based search engines (Google, MSN Search, Teoma, and Yahoo!) and human-based search engines (Yahoo! Directory and Business.com) to discover Web sites, helping your clients maximize their sites' search engine visibility can be a powerful part of a Web hosting company's online marketing plan.

However, search engine marketing is useless without being able to determine what visitors are doing after they arrive at a site. Do visitors enter a site and only view one page? Which pages on a site generate the most sales leads? How many unique visitors does a site receive on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis? How many visitors are new visitors, and how many are repeat visitors? Web analytics software can help Web hosts' clients understand how visitors use their sites.

"People naturally associate receiving Web reporting/analytics from their Web host," says John Marshall, CEO of ClickTracks. "And Web hosts can do it cheaper than an individual company can because they can have a large amount of clients on the same server space. Hosting companies are already telling us they're receiving more and more requests for improved Web analytics capabilities."

A human-based search engine is commonly known as a directory. For a Web site to be included in a directory, the Web site owner must select the most appropriate directory categories for a Web site. To view an example of how B2B (business-to-business) companies are categorized, visit Business.com.

Perhaps the biggest mistake Web hosting companies make is to not include ROI tracking in their hosting packages.

Next, Web site owners must write a site description that concisely and accurately explains the content of the site. Since it is quite difficult to modify a directory listing after the initial submission, the Web hosting company should emphasize the importance of doing it right the first time.

Web hosts who do not specialize in directory submission should either undergo training from a professional search engine marketing firm or outsource this service.

Another common mistake is to offer search engine submission to thousands or millions of search engines at a low price. Realistically speaking, most sites report over 90 percent of their search engine referrals come from Google, Yahoo!, AOL and MSN Search. Focusing on thousands of rarely used search engines is a waste of time and money.