What should a small company with a difficult SEO/SEM challenge do?

[CrashAlpha]

Everyone here knows that SEM and SEO "experts" are everywhere. But our company has a particular challenge - our Volusion-hosted e-store's product offering is so wide that it's a huge challenge to make a dent in our search engine placement. In our earliest days, one SEM "pioneer" company issued us a refund after realizing they couldn't do anything to affect our placement. The problem is that the revenue from any one particular keyword term doesn't return enough sales to make the effort worthwhile - sales are scattered allover the product spectrum.

Does anyone have any experience with this particular challenge? What would be considered a realistic monthly budget - given that the business itself is quite small? I don't know what the etiquette on Moz is but YES I am looking to engage a company to help us out.

[CrashAlpha]

Takeshi, you understood the problem very well, which tells me you understand both SEO and business. BTW - as I mentioned previously, the SEO company that failed was actually engaged earlier than 2000, I just fudged the date because it couldn't have been later than that date.

<< . It can take a long time to see results with SEO, so you may want to focus on other lead gen methods until you can build up your business and can afford to spend more time/resources on SEO.

I will pass the word, thanks very much.

[CrashAlpha]

<< That sounds very fair.  They didn't charge you for a market evaluation.>>

It wasn't an evaluation. They were actually in production and were astonished at how hard it was, with no results. They were confounded, as they were quite taken by their own success in other endeavors. (I am actually fudging the numbers - it was before 2000, I can't remember the exact year, but most likely around 1998).

<< You pay your money and take your chance.  If you are not busting with confidence that you can kickass here then maybe that is the sign that you should look at a different project.   If I am not feeling kickass about something , I don't invest.

I'm not sure if you are talking about me - my relationship to the company isn't like that as I am paid no matter what (I am actually a software developer). The problem is that the company is doing fine in terms of supporting the people involved - who spend all of their working hours massaging the huge catalog, manning the phones and sourcing inventory. But any real success will come from on-line growth, and in this regard, they are helpless.

In the past, they were paying Google $3K a month for AdWords, and the profits from the AdWords sales went straight to Google. They spent more, they spent less - there was still an incredible dollar-made-per-dollar-spent relationship. Loading their massive catalog onto Amazon provided much better results with no expenses, so the AdWords campaign was dropped.

So, if I understand correctly - is it fair to say that the message to them is, "with your challenge, expect to spend well over $5K a month on SEO/SEM"?

[TakeshiYoung]

I gotta say whatever company you were engaging with must have sucked, because you could get anything to rank back in 2000.

I've worked with a number of smallish businesses, and the SEO landscape has gotten tough in recent years, unless you're targeting local. Your competition is every other website in the world that sells the same thing that you do.

It's really difficult to rank a website with thousands and thousands of products without a very high domain authority. So you need to focus. Identify the keywords with the highest SEO potential for you. Here is a quick formula: go into Google Webmaster Tools, and identify all the keywords you rank between position 5-15 for, then sort those by search volume and/or your margin. Then evaluate the competitiveness for those keywords by looking at the sites that rank above you. Focus on the keywords that have the weakest competition, and you should see the greatest amount of return for the least amount of effort.

Product reviews are huge for ecommerce. It provides user generated unique content that helps you stand out from competitors selling the same product, and you can add semantic markup so that you get rich snippets showing in the search results (review stars), which increase CTR. Incentivise reviews by offering coupons to your customers for leaving reviews.

In the long term, think about what you can be the best in the world at, because that is what it will take to stand out in today's competitive landscape. That might be prices, that might be content, that might be customer service. Focus on that and start building a brand. It can take a long time to see results with SEO, so you may want to focus on other lead gen methods until you can build up your business and can afford to spend more time/resources on SEO.

[EGOL]

That wasn't it - they didn't even propose a new budget and there was no reason to think we couldn't afford it at the time. .. Gartner group came and did an analysis of the sector and also backed off - saying the market was too fragmented for them to determine if it was safe to recommend investment.

That sounds very fair.  They didn't charge you for a market evaluation.  There are a lot of companies who would have given you a monthly price without the evaluation and a couple years later you would have pulled the plug on them.  This analysis could be true (then or now).

... the problem is that we would have to pay the equivalent of one year's salary to find out if that is even possible.

You pay your money and take your chance.  If you are not busting with confidence that you can kickass here then maybe that is the sign that you should look at a different project.   If I am not feeling kickass about something , I don't invest.

[CrashAlpha]

Thanks very much for your reply, EGOL.

<< Maybe your budget was too low to be effective, so SEO said... just give them their money back, it ain't a lot.>>

That wasn't it - they didn't even propose a new budget and there was no reason to think we couldn't afford it at the time. This was around 2000 before the dot com bubble burst - there was investment interest in that particular version of the venture. As a result, Gartner group came and did an analysis of the sector and also backed off - saying the market was too fragmented for them to determine if it was safe to recommend investment (which included the problem of the product offerings).

This means that you are poorly optimized, underpowered compared to the competition, are penalized, or are in a sleepy industry with low volume

Poorly optimized - well, that's the SEO question. So far, we have been following best practices. Underpowered? I need a definition of power, but the business that has done it right is of comparable size but from what I can tell, hired an SEM company very early on that has done an excellent job - almost all their work seems to be incoming link-building. They aren't even creating impressive content, they have very well-placed simple content. Our own attempts to get placement on the same sites haven't yielded the same results, so someone knows what they are doing. We'd love to know who they hired.

Sleepy industry with low volume? Actually, an ancient industry with high volume and very low margins as big foreign companies move in and buy the companies they have bankrupted. The product is essential; there are hundreds - perhaps thousands - of them right around you right now. There are no unessential expenses in this domain.

We will do it for $5000/month is wasting your money if $20,000/month is needed.

I understand - anyone who is in business understands what a proper investment and real return is. I can tell you that in this industry, the idea that a $5000 / month budget gets you nothing would come as a big shock. Of course, spending $20K and getting $30K in profits back would make it worthwhile, the problem is that we would have to pay the equivalent of one year's salary to find out if that is even possible.

[EGOL]

What would be considered a realistic monthly budget - given that the business itself is quite small?

The realistic monthly budget depends upon the amount of work that needs to be done.  That depends upon the current condition of the site, the industry that you are competing in, and who you are competing against.  This requires an detailed SEO audit.  Anybody who gives you a number without doing that work is guessing.

The fact that this business is small is irrelevant.  If you don't have the resources to compete then you are wasting any lower amount of resources that you put into the project.   That means, anybody who just says.... We will do it for $5000/month is wasting your money if $20,000/month is needed.  It's like sending me out to fight the heavyweight champ.  I am going to get my ass kicked.

The problem is that the revenue from any one particular keyword term doesn't return enough sales to make the effort worthwhile - sales are scattered allover the product spectrum.

This means that you are poorly optimized, underpowered compared to the competition, are penalized, or are in a sleepy industry with low volume.   Or you have multiple of these problems.   So, the more of these you must solve the higher your cost is going to be.  Meaning. Anybody who gives you a budget number without doing a lot of work is spouting baloney.

Everyone here knows that SEM and SEO "experts" are everywhere.

Right... if you hire the right one, after an initial ramp up, you should be able to support the cost of the SEO with the additional profits generated.   You just gotta hire the right one.  The one who studies and understands before giving you a budget and refuses to allow you to talk him down to an amount that is lower than the resources needed to compete.

In our earliest days, one SEM "pioneer" company issued us a refund after realizing they couldn't do anything to affect our placement.

Maybe your budget was too low to be effective, so SEO said... just give them their money back, it ain't a lot.

[CrashAlpha]

Those aren't product pages - there are over 35,000 of those (the product pages represent all the various dimensions. This is for manufacturing supply - so the same product in a different size will have wildly different pricing and box quantities, so each requires its own product page). And this is old data, those numbers will be going up very shortly.

Using Amazon's "Item Type Keyword" for our market segment as a guide, we have 140 broader keywords that we can apply. Still, a very daunting task for a very small company that is busy manning the phone lines.

[Ywsw]

instead of focusing on the innumerable product page SEO, perhaps it would be best to focus on few main category pages (or even the sub category pages if they are manageable).