The Rising Costs Of Pay-Per-Click

Search engine friendly software enables businesses to ditch pay-per-click campaigns

Businesses looking for ways to replace costly pay-per-click campaigns are being heard by the ecommerce development industry.

Saratoga Springs, NY.— Bill Goudy, owner of FireplaceEssentials.com, was spending thousands of dollars every month on pay-per-click campaigns with Google and Yahoo! Tired of watching profit margins, often already slim, shrink as search terms became more and more expensive, Goudy began looking for a way to keep more of his money.

Goudy explains: "It was initially supposed to be a short term fix, something I used until the site got going. Unfortunately I found out the hard way that you can come to rely on it and before you know it you're committed to spending thousands of dollars just to generate sales from search engines. In my case the total pay-per-click bill soared to more than $40,000 annually. It was clear I needed to find a better way. Mountain Commerce 6 was the answer for me."

Mountain Media, a software development company in Saratoga Springs, NY, is the company that developed Mountain Commerce 6.0 and the driving force behind a new trend in ecommerce software development that calls for the software to be search engine friendly. Business owners nationwide are discovering the importance of the new standards set by Mountain Media as they move their existing sites into the Mountain Commerce 6.0 platform.

"It's not just a trend," says Chief Technology Officer Scott Fultz, "It's really a new standard. Software should never be in the way of search engine optimization efforts. Ideally, the software should be transparent. Business owners need to be able to focus on content development, customer service, market research, and all the other things a brick and mortar business normally focuses on. They shouldn't need to be programmers or computer experts to compete. They shouldn't need to find work-arounds to overcome the things search engines don't like about the way their sites are programmed. That's where Mountain Commerce 6 comes in."

Mountain Media's clients have recently begun reporting that they no longer need to rely on the traditional pay-per-click programs as well—big news for any company relying on traffic from Google to sustain their business.

Ejazzlines.com is a leading supplier of hard to find jazz works. They are a company founded by two brothers with a passion for music, and recently moved away from the pay-per-click engine that had been costing them nearly $20,000 annually.

Co-founder Doug DuBoff reports: "There's no question that the Mountain Commerce software has helped our search results. Since moving into the Commerce 6 platform and using the tools provided, our page rankings have been pushed up so much higher that we've been able to turn off our costly pay-per-click campaigns."

Moving the software out of the way

Mountain Media unveiled Mountain Commerce 6.0 to the search engine industry last November at PubCon, a WebmasterWorld search engine conference held in Las Vegas.

"We had search engine friendly ecommerce in mind from the second we began developing Mountain Commerce. The thing we wanted to stress to search engine optimization professionals was that we felt their pain," says Fultz.

We understood that they were often hired by clients who had sites that were just not very friendly to Google. Those systems made their jobs much harder. We heard several SEO professionals saying they wanted to focus on content, link building, and crafting high quality, user-friendly ecommerce sites. Instead, they were fighting an uphill battle using software with terrible URL strings, static catalog pages and coding errors. We felt they were telling the industry, Hey, get the software out of our way and let us work. So that's what we did."

Corey Creed, an Internet Marketing Consultant at Hippo Internet Marketing agrees. After seeing the software demonstrated at Pubcon and calling a number of Mountain Commerce 6 users, his company signed a reseller agreement and began moving clients into the Mountain Commerce system.

"This just makes sense," Creed says. "Mountain Commerce lets SEO professionals like myself do what we do best. It allows us to take control on a granular level, yet not worry about the technical side. For example, we have the ability to customize title tags If necessary. This is fundamental. Yet, we need not worry about the back end code causing the site to not rank well. We've tried other software. But this is the first platform that we've felt comfortable enough recommending to our clients."

The Mountain Commerce system does things that we shouldn't have to worry about as SEO Professionals. The sites are XHTML 1.0 strict compliant, the URL strings are clean, the catalog is easy to work with, and the entire site is cleanly indexed by search engines. When our clients use this product, it allows us to spend our time optimizing the site and marketing it. We can focus on writing quality meta tags, creating good product descriptions, and other aspects that focus more on the user experience."

"Adds Fultz, Letting people focus more on the user and shopper experience and less on how Google sees things was our goal. We believe the Internet experience as a whole can move forward once site owners and SEO specialists return to creating web sites for people and concentrate less on trying to please search engines."

####