I have this old time client, I believe most of those in the company believe the Web is an important part to their business. But there are some decision makers that feel that the Web does not deserve any investment on the company's part. They do not want to spend any money to upgrade their site, improve their rankings, sell online or mend their online reputation (which is pretty bad).

Several months back, possibly a year ago, I met with them to give them a list of low cost options they can implement to solve one of the many Web issues they have, their online reputation. Since then, the company created a blog at one of those free hosted blog sites. To give them credit, they update the blog once a month, but since it is located at this free hosted blog space, it does not rank too well. Their online reputation is as bad as it was when we first met, a year ago.

Now internally, I am told, they are having conversations with several of the management to figure out how to improve their online reputation. I.e. removing or pushing down the bad listings for their company name in the search results, specifically in Google. They play with the idea of getting free banner ads from newspapers they advertise heavily in. They get the ad space was free, but they spent time creating the banner ad, they spent a "favor" with the paper to get the as space, but they (1) linked it to the number one listed site (their own) which won't push down the bad listings and (2) the ad is linked through redirect after redirected link and (3) it is an image ad.

So the management spends more time discussing if this will work. Possibly 20 hours between all of them over the year (I am sure it was more than that). 20 hours of their time may be equated to $300 per hour, so lets say $6,000. Plus the favor they called for from the newspaper, no idea how to quantify that, let's say $800. Plus any banner ads and creatives they spent time creating, lets say $200. So figure about $7,000 is lost time.

Ok, now how to we calculate two years of having a few negative pages rank well for the company name? How much in lost dollars for people searching on the company prior to buying the product? How much? The Overture tool shows that about 700 searches are done each day for the company name. So let's say fifty-percent are prospective customers, 350 people per day. Then let's say thirty-percent of those would buy from the company, heck they are searching for the company name, so they are probably more likely to be in "the buy mode" then searching on the product category type, so we have 105 people.

105 people each day are ready to buy from the company but search on the company name prior to buying. Now, of the 105 who search, how many of them are likely to buy the product if the 3rd listing's title says something very negative about them? Let's be nice at say five percent are still willing to buy. That is 5.25 people buying the product each day, that is about 100 less orders per day from Internet savvy people (which is increasing).

Let's say the average product sells for $1,000 (I think that number is about right). That is a loss of $100,000 per day. 365 days per year make it out to $36,500,000 loss in revenue per year? Doubt it is that high but you get the picture.

Spend 0.0005 percent of the lost revenue over the year on your Web initiative. See what happens...

Invest those 20 hours of lost management time on your Web initiative. See what happens...

That is my rant for the day. :)