A while back we received an email from the Contact Us page on our website. We love this and fortunately we get this type of email all the time when a potential customer finds our website, likes what we offer, and sends us their contact information. In and of itself this shouldn’t be surprising since this is what we do for our clients – help them generate sales leads from online sources. We try to practice what we preach!
This incident, however, was unusual in a couple of ways. First of all, the form had been completely filled out. Typically, the contact person will fill out a few sections like the required fields and that is it – they hit Submit and send their information to us hoping we will call back. But this form had every single field filled out in detail – including a list of competitors.
But there is more!
The email address of the contact person ended in @dell.com. As I mentioned the Contact Us form on our website is filled out often but, sadly, not very often by a company the size of Dell. I’ll admit my first reaction was disbelief. To give you an idea of how large Dell is, it ranks 41 on the Fortune 500 list. Revenues are $61 billion. To give you some perspective Google ranks 92 on the Fortune 500 and has revenues of $29 billion. I suspected that this was a hoax or someone playing a joke on us. In fact, we were originally contacted in April so this could have been an April Fool’s joke.
But it wasn’t.
I called Jeff H and asked him how we could help out. He said that he was responsible for sales to small and medium sized business in the United States. He mentioned that they spend a lot on paid ads on search engines which made sense because I see their ads all the time on Google. They weren’t looking to reduce there budget but they did want to increase the profile of their website pages on the natural or organic side of the search engines.
I mentioned a few of the advantages of search engine optimization (SEO) which Jeff H seemed to appreciate. The list below is similar to what I told him:
1) Free Targeted Traffic
The primary advantage of SEO over any other type of internet marketing is found is that once your website is listed on the first page of results for your keyword phrases, you get clicks to your site for FREE. This means that you can receive traffic from prospects 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year at no cost. And here’s the kicker – they are looking for the products and services that your company has to offer! Wow – that is beautiful.
On Google.com search for “business laptops”. Dell.com should be on the first page – probably at the top of the page.
2) Excellent ROI
A return on investment is one of the major advantages of SEO. It may take a few months for your website to rank well for the targeted keywords but once ranked, the ROI is excellent because you are getting free traffic to your website. Nice!
I can’t say how much Dell paid for our services but they have re-cooped their investment many times over.
3) Cost Effective
SEO is one of the most cost-effective ways of marketing. The initial work of keyword research, optimizing pages, and improving inbound links takes some effort and investment. But if the site is powerful (read lots of high quality inbound links) and properly optimized then the rankings on search engines should stay in place for months and sometimes years. Brilliant!
We optimized this page http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/laptops a few years ago and it is still working very well for Dell.
4) Increased Brand Visibility
SEO leads to the increased brand visibility for your website. Your business will start showing for strategically important keywords, and more and more visitors will be there to look for the services you are providing via your website.
You can try a variety of other keyword phrases and Dell.com is on the first page of results. Try: “business computers“, “servers“, and “workstations”.
5) Credibility
Your company will get a boost in credibility and reputation because the search engines are ranking your website highly for specific keywords related to your industry.
The end result for Dell was free visitors, excellent ROI, at a low cost, with increased visibility on a variety of keywords and excellent credibility. The screen capture below was taken today. Dell is still ranking well for “business laptops” and beating out over 34 million other web pages.
