Phew! Can’t believe that a year has whizzed by since I last blogged. Things just have been really crazy (but awesome) around here. Firstly, I’ve rebranded LarryLim.net into SearchGuru Pte Ltd. We also provide SEO in Malaysia via SearchGuru Sdn Bhd, where our team (all five of us) is now based - at the Gardens North Tower in Mid Valley City. Business has grown 5-folds in the last year and we’re now picking projects, because we still want to have time experimenting with new SEO methods, new online marketing services and new business models.

One such business model that we’re working on right now is a “pay-for-performance” model, where we provide the full turn-key solution and charge only for sales enquiries - not rankings, not page visits. Our first guinea pig is a private limo company in the ultra-competitive maxi cab niche in Singapore, which has witness a surge in demand due to the increase in tourists to the island republic.

1) Website
We started by writing SEO-optimized content and then built a website around a very focused brand - Maxi Cab Singapore. The website is designed for lead-generation and conversion, hence, it is quite sparse and has call-to-action buttons in many places to guide users towards the goal, i.e. booking a maxi cab. The choice of maxi-cab.sg domain name was not really for SEO purpose, since exact-match-domains (EMDs) have reduced in value, but to encourage click-throughs on the search results.

2) Tracking
Since we are literally charging on a pay-per-lead basis, it was crucial that we were able to track not only enquiry forms but also phone calls. Fortunately, there was a service in Singapore that provided disposable phone numbers with 30-day call history - it wasn’t set up for serious call tracking like in the U.S. (where it’s integrated into Google Analytics), but it is sufficient …for now. Naturally, we installed Analytics but also CrazyEgg to track user behaviour on the site via heatmaps, scrollmaps and click overlays.

3) Advertising
The easiest way to get leads is still hands-down Google AdWords. Although, we’d have to be very careful with our CPCs because the maxi cab industry is very competitive, revenue can go as low as S$40 per customer, and also because we’re just a middleman charging for leads and hence have a very tight margin to play with. So we worked very hard to get good Quality Scores - we’re averaging 7/10 and also have 10/10 for some of the keywords.

4) Mobile Site
A couple of days into the campaign, we noticed about 40%-50% of our visitors were using mobile devices to access the site, which was completely natural due to the nature of the service. This led us to create a HTML5-based mobile version of the website, so that iPhone and Android smartphone users will have a better user experience - like being able to click on a button to automatically call the booking number. We created a seperate ad campaign for mobile to lead them to the mobile site, but gave them an option to return to the regular website.

5) Conversions
It is quite easy to track conversions at this stage since we currently have only one source of traffic - AdWords. All we needed to do was count the daily enquiries and divided the cost of AdWords with that number to get our Cost per Conversion (defined as “enquiries” in our case). By dividing the number of enquiries with the AdWords clicks, we could also ascertain our Conversion Rate - which is about 80% on average.

Whether this model will become popular is quite difficult to determine at this stage. Because to protect our interest, we would obviously prefer to optimize, promote and advertise our own website. The client might then feel there’s a conflict of interest on the SEO service we provide him. And if he’s also an AdWords client, that we’re competing with him for similar keywords and driving up the already-high bid prices. There are also fears that you may get your friends to call the booking number to artificially drive up the number of enquiries so that you can charge the customer for them - which I personally find it to be quite dumb, really :P

Anyway, if you’re looking for a more comfortable airport transfer or simply want a more spacious ride to anywhere in Singapore, do consider booking a maxi cab - it’s quite worth it, as I’ve experienced myself on my recent trip.