If you were to ask 100 people in the street ‘Which Irish companies have benefited the most form the economic boom over the past decade?‘ I’m quite sure what the majority of the responses would be.

It’s unusual to think that probably the richest and most powerful indigenous sector of the Irish economy is so poorly represented on-line.

I have been working with a company called The Real Dirtbusters, an industrial cleaning company, developing and optimising their on-line presence.

Their site went live around the third week in July and I have been watching the stats carefully to see how well the campaign is going.

One thing has surprised me quite a bit. Of all the pages on the site, one has seen more traffic and SE referrals than all others. That page was not created with SE’s in mind whatsoever but as part of the overall marketing plan for the website itself.

The page in question is the Clients Page which received over 35% of all hits on the site since July 20.

Checking the logs shows the following top 30 keyword conversions from organic Google search clickthroughs:

By now you should know the answer to the initial question I think.

However, what’s even stranger about this is that when you search for many of the construction companies in question, many of which are large corporations by anyone’s standards, you are often hard pressed to find their websites in the top 50 SERPs (if, of course, they have a website at all).

At least some of the searches made for these companies are likely to be potential home buyers looking for a particular development – very often you drive by hoardings or building sites which are heavily branded with developers logos and the like, so a subsequent search is likely to start with the developer’s name.

I can’t help but think that having better on-line findability may well increase company sales. And when the product is a new home with an average price of perhaps €400,000 the ROI on relatively small amount of Internet marketing could be exceptional.

As for The Real Dirtbusters? Well, although unexpected, these non-targeted key phrase hits are actually an added bonus. The clients page is often acting as a good landing page for the site.

This is evidenced by the average number of page views – the majority of visitors looking for construction companies looked at least one more page on the site – many looked a number of pages before leaving the site. So from a marketing perspective some of these searches are likely to result in the company’s visibility increasing in their key marketplace.

Is there a lesson that could be learnt from this? In a nutshell, publishing your client list on-line can be a great way to generate traffic to your website and increase the overall awareness of your company within your industry.