Just read a great piece on Small Business Hub about SEO entitled Stopping The Google AdWords Morphine Drip: How We Saved $183 Last Week. These guys echo a sentiment that I’ve been expressing for a long time (and just posted about a few weeks ago)… Investment in SEO is virtually ALWAYS better than investment in Adwords/PPC.

Mike’s article boils it down beautifully. The search phrase that he cares about is “Internet Marketing Software”. Buying a click for this phrase costs about 7 bucks. Having managed to SEO their way to the #6 slot on that page, they got 25 visitors in a week. So, by investing in SEO, they’ve managed to get $700 in PPC value FOR FREE. I’d also imagine that searchers have a bit more inherent trust for organic search results than ads. So, if Mike’s visitors were buyers, I imagine they’d convert a bit better than their PPC brethren.

One of the things that Mike doesn’t talk about in the article (tho we chat a bit about in the comments) is the EFFECTIVENESS of what you’re presenting in the SERP (search engine result page, for you SEO noobs at home).

This isn’t uncommon. Having read a lot of Mike’s articles, I think he’s a rare SEO guy who actually thinks about it from more traditional angles. But most SEO people are very analytical people. They are looking for systems and formulas that allow them to exploit Google better than the next guy. There are degrees of evil here (referred to as “white hat”, “gray hat”, and “black hat” tactics), but they are all variations on a theme– getting Google to perceive your importance as very high in the keyword-spaces that are important to you.

So on to the point of this post– SEOs are so damn focused on getting in front of a ton of eyeballs that they often lose sight of the next critical step– putting something in front of them that inspires action. Pretend you hired an advertising firm to promote your new soft-drink. As you tip back your scotch and soda one evening (that’s what fatcat soft-drink executives drink, right?) you see a commercial on the TV for your product. You look on, horrified, as bizarre images move across the screen. The lighting is bad, the camera work is terrible, and it’s not even clear what product the commercial is about. The next morning, you call up your agency and demand an explanation. Their response: “Yeah, we saved a TON of money on production– but the good news is that we spent the savings on more ad buys! That commercial was seen by millions more people than if we’d blown all that money making a great commercial!”.

The (somewhat meandering point) I’m trying to make here is that you have a few hundred characters to make an impression and inspire action (the click), and you aren’t going to do that by seeding your listings with a jumble of keywords.

So let’s take a look at Mike’s listing.

Not too shabby, but it certainly isn’t inspired marketing copy. A lot of product people feel feel that marketeers are manipulators and that you should just present the facts. The fact is, you can be certain your competition isn’t thinking that way. And surely you’ll agree that you can present the same facts in different ways that result in some pretty different reactions. For example (my favorite– apologies to Robert Heinlein), would you rather have a nice, juicy steak or a muscle tissue sample from a castrated bull? If you’re still not buying it, I suggest you read the studies profiled in the book Made to Stick… You’ll be floored.

The realization that your SERP presentation is so critical is unfortunate. With most user experiences, testing is easy. With SERPs, testing is damn challenging. Changing your title and meta description is easy to do… But Google doesn’t re-index your site THAT often. And a bad change can have very real consequences to your traffic (and your revenue). Testing 5 good ideas could take weeks or months. I would love to hear any ideas on how you can test in the comments.

One idea that I have is creating a faux-Google experience. Create fake Google search pages with fake results that are presented when someone clicks on the search button (with maybe a few pages of results). Then get some test subjects in your target market in and ask them to search for your term and select their vendor based off what they see. Not only would you get to see which of your SERP ideas fly well, but you could also see which of your competition performs well. It’s about as expensive as a usability test, but I think the value would exceed the cost.

Of course, the herculean challenge here is that you don’t have free reign to create copy that sings. You have a tiny title, a little snippet (meta description) and no control over presentation style. And, most importantly, you have to be darn sure that the extra clickability that you create by optimizing your SERP content doesn’t cost you in the rankings game.