The First Page
As a business, it may be time to consider search engine optimization for your site- if you haven’t already. Here’s how an online payment gateway, CCAvenue, benefited from it.
What should you do if you were an online payment gateway looking for more sign ups?
Advertising online in the form of banner ads is an option, but since your potential clients are actively looking for solutions on search engines, your best bet would be to hope that you show up when they search.
Actually, simply simply hoping will not do. CCavenue an Indian online payment gateway, did not just sit hoping. They got their site professionally optimized and the results are patent. When you type in “credit card processing india” (without the quotes)
into google.com or google.co.in CCAvenue comes up first. And even something like“set up a merchant account” brings CCAvenue third on google.com and second on google.co.in and “credit card payment setup” brings it up sixth on google.com and first on google.co.in (in all this we’re not talking about sponsored links). It’s remarkable that an Indian company tops the search with such generic keyword searches. And it’s all courtesy the search engine optimization (SEO) that eBrandz, an seo company based in Mumbai, did for CCAvenue.
how come “credit card payment setup” brings up an Indian contender – CCAvenue – first in Google when there are so many global players out there?
eBrandz.com is an example of an Indian SEO company that rivals the best in the world.
The Client: CCAvenue
At a basic level Avenues (the parent company of CCAvenue, as mentioned) is a payment gateway services provider that enables websites to collect funds through credit cards or directly through customers’ Internet banking accounts.
Avenues has an 85 percent share of Indian market. It is the largest targeted e-commerce solutions provider in South Asia. Headquartered in Mumbai, it has subsidiary companies incorporated in Singapore, Hong Kong and Delaware in the US. The Avenues support and development centre is based at Santa Cruz in Mumbai.
A partial customer list includes the Indian Ministry of Information and Technology, The Press Trust Of India, The Indian Express, Business Standard, Greenpeace, The Leela Hotels and Palaces and Bharat Matrimony.com.
Relying On The Medium:
CCAvenues target audience is naturally e-commerce stores. Its physically impossible to have a sales team that can cover length and breadth of the country and market their services to individuals or mid-sized companies. Nor did they think it advisable to advertise on popular portals.
Vivek Nayak, CIO at Avenues, explains: “Right from the outset the management at Avenues was clear that in a specialized domain such as payment gateways, it would be a waste of money to rely on the traditional methods of communication to bring in new customers.
“Since the Internet merchant base space was very small, we felt the best way to bring in customers was to use the various opportunities within the medium itself. With this in mind, the Avenues management started looking for a partner who would assist them in their endeavour. There weren’t too many creditable players in this emerging space, and eBrandz seemed a serious player.”
Nayak continues about eBrandz, “They were deadly serious about the domain. They were proactive in their approach and constantly pushed the CCAvenue content management team to fine tune content. Their research process was the most comprehensive one we found. All in all, it came down to how passionate they were about the business.” And thus, CCAvenue chose eBrandz as their optimizer.
To improve the client’s rankings (in the organic SEO), eBrandz researched and understood how search engines work, and used knowledge to improve client’s site, making sure search engine crawlers were able to properly read and understand client’s site. Such research is ongoing, because search engine algorithms change over time; you can’t have it all figured out once and for all.
However, even after an all-out effort, organic SEO campaigns can fail for a variety of reasons. Results cannot be guaranteed, but the first step is keyword research. For the CCAvenue campaign eBrandz identified keywords such as “payment gateway india”, “credit card processing”, “merchant account india”, and so on.
eBrandz researched. eBrandz convened with CCAvenue content management team and began the process of including many of those keywords in the website copy. eBrandz also completely rewrote all their <title></title> and other meta-tags to incorporate the keyword research and accurately describe CCAvenue’s services to visitors as well as search engine spiders.
eBrandz started maintaining CCAvenue’s server log files, and started keeping track of their visitors, signups, and other statistics mentioned above. Apart from this, eBrandz analyzed which areas of the website visitors were also clicking and which areas they were avoiding. eBrandz put a signup button in and around where the visitor clicks were high!
When Do The Results Show Up?
For the CCAvenue site eBrandz got results in about tow to three months for India related keywords such as “payment gateway india” and “merchant account india”. eBrandz did not stop at that-they got results for international keywords such as “payment gateway”, “merchant account” and “credit card processing”.
eBrandz is still optimizing the site: the payment gateway industry is very competitive, and the SEO company needs to keep competing to be on their client’s competitors.
Rich Dividends
After eBrandz (consistently, month after month) top-ranked CCAvenue on all major search engines in a span of two years, CCAvenue managed to sign up more than 4,000 Indian e-merchants – and grabbed 85 percent of the Indian payment gateway market share.
They did not spend money on other forms of advertising nor did they open any offices elsewhere in the country. They didn’t suddenly go the conventional way and put their feet on the street to do proactive marketing either. They relied on SEM for visibility and it has paid off.
Nayak says “without any traditional marketing channels in place or extra visibility efforts, Avenues has grown to become the #1 player in South Asia. This has largely been possible due to the efforts and commitment put in by the eBrandz team.”
Vishwas Patel, in fact goes so far as to say, “We get about five signups every day and the sole credit goes to the SEO work that has gone into the site.” That’s testimony enough that SEO works!
Looking At The Future
The online advertising market was pegged at $4 billion at the end of 2004. This figure is expected to jump to close to $30 billion by the end of 2006.with such figures we might well ask: can any site at all be optimized to reach the top 10 or 20? If everyone decides to use the SEO, who will be on the first page?
Now Milind Mody CEO at eBrandz, explains that if all companies in a domain – say payment gateways – decided to hire SEO companies, the job of ranking in the top 10 would become much more difficult. Only experienced (and knowledgeable!) SEO companies will be able to get their clients on the first page of the results. Like we mentioned earlier, it’s a question of raw knowledge superiority. We’re headed towards a global game that will reward luck less and less and brains more and more.
One related question we haven’t asked yet: if SEO is so effective, why doesn’t everybody do it? Mody avers, “SEO is effective. Period! The reason not everyone is doing it is because there isn’t too much awareness about it.
“This is a very new industry. And it has not even reached half its potential. Many good SEO companies are working for themselves and not accepting any clients: they know how to get traffic online, so they create their own sites and promote them – then sell the business to offline merchants. “SEO companies are the kings of the online world.” That makes sense. If you’re talking about business in a world where anyone with a glorified typewriter can get on cyberspace, but where attention spans are limited to a minute or a page, it’s all about visibility. And if you can get someone else – or yourself – seen, you’re king.