Site Match - March 1, 2004

Yahoo (owner of Overture, Alltheweb and Altavista) introduces Site Match, Overture's new paid inclusion product.
Site Match listings appear in the main body (among the free listings or will they replace free listings at the end?) of the search results of Yahoo, Altavista, Alltheweb, About, and a few other search engines powered by the same engine.

Pricing structure:

When you initiate your Site Match subscription, a non-refundable annual review fee is charged for setting up your account and for quality review of your pages. Once your pages are accepted into the program, a cost-per-click fee is charged for each lead driven to your site. See below.

Let's do a simple calculation for a small website. Let's assume we include 5 pages in the program.

Annual fee : $49 + 4 URL's * $29 = $165
Cost-per-click : let's assume you only get 10 clicks per day (it can be much more)
Tier 1 category : 10 * $0.15 * 365 = $547,50
In case of a Tier 2 category : 10 * $0.30 * 365 = $1095

Total annual fee : Tier 1 : $712,50 , for Tier 2 : $1260

Return on Investment (ROI) :

1. Your pages need to be optimized for the right keywords.

• You cannot select keywords and keyword phrases as you do in a PPC program.
  Your pages will be spidered by a robot every 48 hours, so your visibility depends on your keywords and the optimization of them found in your page code. If not properly optimized your site may come up for off topic keyword phrases. If you for example sell software products and you include the word "free" somewhere in your text (e.g. free shipping) your site may come up for "free software products" - which won't bring you any business.
  In that case the word "free" becomes a very expensive one.
• The best solution in my opinion is building very targeted and optimized pages, designed for inclusion in this program.

2. The products you sell need to have a minimum value to make profit.

• If your conversion rate is one sale per 200 clicks (Your CR may be better, but I think this is reasonable) you need to pay $30 (Tier 1 cat.) or $60 (Tier 2 cat.) advertising costs. This means you need to make $30 or $60 profit from each sale to cover the costs. Forget selling peanuts ...

Conclusion : The combination of annual fee and cost-per-click fee may be become rather expensive for most small internet businesses and there is no ranking guarantee. To get a good ROI (return on investment) pages included in the program need to be optimized for the right keywords and targeted to the right audience.

Is there no other way to get listed in Yahoo Search, Altavista, Alltheweb?

• Well, the fact is all search results currently returned by the above search engines are free listings. In our opinion only a minority of companies and website owners can afford the new paid inclusion product. So what about the current free listings, will they remove them all in the future? If they only return paid results in the future, searchers will stay away.
• In our opinion free listings will remain, and they need to update them to keep their database fresh. Currently all of our clients are listed for free in the above search engines. We want to keep it that way and find ways to include our future clients as well.
  We keep you informed.

Site Match fees (copied from Overture.com) :

1. Non-refundable annual fee, per domain

First URL:	$49
Next 2-10 URLs:	$29 each
11th URL and beyond:	$10 each

2. Cost-Per-Click Fee

Tier 1 Categories: Adult Automotive Books Computers & Software Dating Education & Career Jewelry & Watches Music & Video Office Other Reference Sports & Outdoors Toys & Baby Equipment	$.15
Tier 2 Categories: Apparel Electronics Financial Services Flowers, Gifts & Registry Health, Beauty & Personal Care Home & Garden Professional Services Real Estate Telecom & Web Services Travel	$.30

More information on the Overture site