Rob Snell is Managing Partner of Snell Brothers, a consulting firm specializing in search marketing for Yahoo! Stores and a co-owner of Gun Dog Supply. He posts somewhat regularly in his Yahoo Store blog and guest posts from time to time in the official Yahoo Store Blog.
Recently, Snell visited Washington D.C. to explain to our congress people what the Search Engine Marketing business can do for small business people. As he said, he went from “doing $400,000 a year and struggling to pay the bills to a multi-million dollar retailer in a few short years.” His story on record went a little like this:
“Good morning. Thank you for asking me to appear on this panel. I’m here today to talk about how search engine marketing has transformed my family’s business, my clients’ businesses, and to show how other small businesses can take advantage of this effective and affordable way to drive visitors to their Web sites.
My name is Rob Snell. I’m from Starkville, Mississippi. These days I wear quite a few hats. I am a co-owner of Gun Dog Supply, our family retail business that sells supplies for hunting dogs. I’m also the managing partner of Snell Brothers, the consulting company my brother, Steve Snell, and I started that helps Yahoo! Store owners with their online marketing. A couple of years ago I wrote a book on Yahoo! Store: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies. I’ve included information from a few of the marketing chapters at the end of my written testimony for your review.
Today, I’m going to share real numbers with you, so you can see the impact of search marketing on a real small business in dollars and cents. Every year our Yahoo! Stores get millions of visitors from the search engines. Tens of thousands of those visitors convert into paying customers. This year we will sell over $10 million dollars though several different Yahoo! Stores.
The Internet levels the playing field for small business folks like us. As a consultant and speaker, my job is to teach the little guys how to compete with the big guys. We use the Internet to leverage the strengths of small business: unparalleled product knowledge, enthusiasm for what we sell and do, and outstanding customer service and support. Bigger retailers cannot compete when we go head to head, product to product. They sell too many things!
Background
My parents, Warner & Anne Snell, started GUN DOG SUPPLY, back in 1972 on their kitchen table in Jackson, MS. They ran tiny display ads in hunting dog magazines and went full time with the business in late 1970s. Slowly, the business changed to a retail store with less emphasis on sales.
In 1996, Petsmart opened across the street. 50% of our competitors went out of business sales dropped, too. We dusted off our mailing list and put together a new catalog. Unfortunately, our list was stale, and we lost money on every single catalog sent.
In 1997, I built a 5-page Web site. I wrote a killer Yahoo! directory listing, and we started getting tons of visitors from Yahoo! We had to figure out how to sell online and fast. Fortunately, we found the online store builder which is now Yahoo! Store.
For my family, selling on the Internet has literally changed our world. We went from a retail company doing $400,000 a year and struggling to pay the bills to a multi-million dollar retailer in a few short years.
Search Marketing = Free Search + Paid Search
Search marketing is the one-two punch of free search and paid search together. By performing search engine optimization on your Web site, you rank better and get more free traffic. Buying paid search ads insures you control your advertising message, and you’re not at the mercy of shifting search engine ranking algorithms.
Almost 40 percent of the traffic from the Big Four search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, and Ask) comes from paid search ads. I believe you should buy paid search ads when you already rank well for your keyword terms in the free search results. Why? When do you normally get two chances to make an advertising impression with a prospect who is ready to buy? It’s like buying an ad in the newspaper that runs right next to your feature story. You can’t control what they write about you in the paper, but the ad is all yours!
Using all the content from our print catalog for our online catalog was the secret to our initial success with the search engines. Those 50 pages of text covering hundreds of products would help us sell our dog training collars, Garmin Astro GPS, Tri-tronics collars and retriever dummies.
Originally, half of our traffic came from banner advertising and half was free traffic from search engines. My Yahoo! Store stats would tell me not only where the traffic came from, but what keywords folks were searching for. This information was gold!
For example, someone would buy a leather dog collar and the source of the order would sale coming from a search on Yahoo for leather dog collars. Another order would come in with a search for retriever training supplies and they would buy some training dummies, and/or a book or video on training retrievers.
I caught on pretty quick that keywords were important. People were buying the things they were searching for, so I started to obsess over our keywords and their search engine rankings.
By 2003, the search engines started selling text ads based on keyword searches. The free ride was over. I opened an account with Google Adwords and started buying ads on different keywords. I also had a Goto.com account which later became Overture and is now Yahoo! Search Marketing.
Paid search is good, too! With an online store, a small retailer can instantly have access to millions of potential customers. With as little as a $5 deposit in a Google Adwords account, a small business owner can buy targeted advertising and get instant traffic to his Web site.
Retailers can run national ad campaigns targeted only to folks searching for what they sell. You can buy ads but only for keyword searches relevant to your product mix.
Local retailers can also target their ads to run only in the specific markets they serve.
Selling on the Internet via an online catalog is much cheaper than sending catalogs through the mail. Advertising on the Internet is more cost effective than any other medium we’ve tried.
Search marketing is extremely efficient because you are ONLY marketing to those interested in your products. It is the least obtrusive form of advertising as the customer is literally asking for your ads when they perform a search. No other marketing method can touch search engine marketing for targeting the right prospects in the right places at the right time – when folks are ready to buy.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before this committee. I look forward to answering any questions you may have.
The entire post is located here for you to read.
If you have a online business for sale or are looking to buy an internet business, I would recommend dealabiz.com. It’s free for buyers and sellers and they have several hundred listings available.