The Ocean Agency

One of the major obstacles faced when explaining search engine optimization and what SEO companies do for new clients is explaining the impact of online marketing.

While you can regale your client hopefuls with statistics of SEO’s importance (like “42% of search users click the top-ranking link. 8% click the second-ranking link, and the click-through rate (CTR) continues to drop thereof” or “organic click-through generates 25% higher conversion rates than equivalent Pay-Per-Click (PP) click-through”), statistics can seem vast and vague to some. Luckily, there are stories.

This one is about indie rock band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Internet Buzz
It’s an old story, but it’s fitting.

As NPR put it, a “wave of Internet buzz … helped launch the group’s career.”

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are one of the first “Internet bands.” It did no promotion, other than self-promotion. It reportedly sold albums out of the guys’ apartment. It used the Internet to reach people, and reach people it did.

Wikipedia puts it bluntly: ” [Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is] notable for achieving [its] initial fame and commercial success via the Internet rather than through a record label.”

While CYHSY (a band well worth checking out, by the way) were not using search engine optimization, it was using the power of social media and the blogosphere. Nowadays, every start-up band attempts to do this, but no one does it quite as well as CYHSY did. By leveraging the power of certain blogs and finally ending up on Chicago’s own Pitchfork Media, the leading online music magazine for underground bands (the same magazine credited with launching the career of The Arcade Fire), the band ended up selling more than 200,000 copies of its debut album, according to Sound Unwound.

Strictly through the Internet, the band was able to come from a small apartment in NYC to playing the Late Show with David Letterman. Just take a look:

How This Band’s Story Relates to SEO Companies
And this is what you can do with your product. Indie music blogs are, to a degree, akin to search engine results for certain products, brands and services.

When a music lover looks for new music, he scans the blogs and reads whatever shows up quickly and easily. He goes to Pitchfork Media and other prominent blogs.

When a consumer searches the Internet for a product, he reads what pops up first on the search engines. He goes to Google, since that is the most trusted and prominent of the search engines.

And that is where you want to be. At the top of Google.

I’m not saying do what CYHSY did and forgo all other types of promotion, but the Internet holds great power. It is where people are and where people connect. It can help a band sell 200,000 records without a record label. And it can help your product be the new big story.

The power is there; you just need to capture it. And working with SEO companies makes that possible.