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Let's say you're a midsize company in an industry dominated by giants and you want to play with the big boys. They're big for a reason — established brands, technological or manufacturing leadership, highly effective distribution networks, proprietary products or services with loyal customer followings, marketing juggernauts — some or all of the above. And they're rarely vulnerable.

Oneupweb's recent study of the 100 largest online retailers includes some good news for smaller competitors looking to level the playing field with their bigger rivals. Sixty percent of the largest Internet retailers do little or no search engine optimization on their primary Web sites. Many are using the power of their brand and active paid search campaigns as a substitute for, rather than an addition to, sound SEO practices.

And this is not a new phenomenon — we've seen similar results over the last four years in our research.

The very fact that so many large, successful retailers aren't doing much SEO seems to argue against its importance. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

An entire industry has been built on this premise: All things being equal, an optimized Web site will always achieve better positions on the search engines than one that's poorly optimized.

But all things are never equal. Certain sites with established brands perform well in spite of themselves; some would call them “accidentally optimized.” But they could perform better, digging a trench around their brand against the whims of a changing marketplace. Amazon.com — the unquestioned online marketing leader in recent history — could rest on its brand, but doesn't. Amazon constantly maintains and updates its outstanding SEO efforts. The results speak for themselves.

If a good SEO program works at achieving better positions on the search engines, what does that mean to the bottom line? In a 2005 study, Oneupweb found that in the first month after appearing in Google's Top 10 search pages, the typical Web site's traffic went up 337% and conversions rose 142%. Similar results can be seen for those sites that enter the top 30 search pages: more traffic, conversions and sales.

Our 2007 online retail study showed numerous examples of relatively small online marketers — some with no offline presence whatsoever — outselling much larger companies with multiple online and offline channels.

Consider the case of Zappos.com, an 8-year-old shoe retailer. Zappos is hardly a brand that comes to mind when mentioned among the likes of Adidas, Foot-Locker, Nike, Payless and Timberland. But through a strategy of intensive natural and paid search marketing, coupled with the industry's most effective customer service program, Zappos' 2006 sales exceeded those of all the aforementioned brands combined.

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LISA WEHR (info@oneupweb.com) is CEO and founder of Oneupweb, Traverse City, MI.

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