When Bill Stevenson set up a test website to learn about search engine optimisation, he didn't expect it to turn into a million-pound business. But that's exactly what looks like happening for Spices of India, the online grocery Bill set up for curry fans in areas without specialist shops.
A five-figure sum blown on traditional magazine advertising netted the former IT man ten responses. But after concentrating on the search engine optimisation (SEO) of his website, the business now takes £400,000 per annum – and Bill expects it to turn over £1 million by the end of the year.
Website developed SEO skills
The Spices of India website was only supposed to be a test, where he could develop his internet marketing skills and improve sales of the e-commerce software that he believed would be his real chance of a fortune. According to Management Today, the company offers 1,300 varieties of ingredients for Indian cooking online, and Bill has worked full time on his intended sideline since early 2006.
His test project involved a spread of advertising media because he doubted how quickly an improved Google ranking could translate into sales. "I didn't have much experience of search engine optimisation before I started, but I knew it would take months for the likes of Google to fully index my site, so I decided to use two forms of paid advertising," he says in an interview published on the Management Today website this month.
From PPC and paper to search engine optimisation
"We used pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with Google and Yahoo!, and off-the-page advertising with top food magazines like Delicious, Olive and BBC Good Food, as well as titles like Heat and Hello."
The magazine advertising cost Bill more than £10,000 and emphatically didn't work. He received 10 responses (or two for each magazine he advertised in, at a cost of £1,000 each), prompting him to look at search engine optimisation instead.
Search engine optimisation meant, in the words of Management Today, that, "He focused on tuning the website to get higher up the search-engine rankings.
SEO success
"Spices of India now ranks among the top hits for many of the key search terms, and revenue is running at £400k per annum, and he expects to hit £1m by the end of the year," the magazine continues.
The success comes because Bill's potential customers – those searching for a general term like "Indian spices", or some of the ingredients – find his company on the first page of the search engine results page, vastly increasing the chances of a sale.
Bill would still like to branch out into other marketing areas, "either as a branding exercise or to push particular products, but at the moment we're still too small for that."
Too small? Spices of India has grown from test project to £400k-a-year business in less than two years, and with the million-pound-turnover expected. Lots of businesses would like to be that kind of small.
Thanks to the low-cost, high-return internet marketing techniques of search engine optimisation, they could be.