Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimisation’

A fantastic blog by Karl Harvard this week on econsultancy.com talks about how SEO is evolving from just keywords and content. Off site optimisation such as blogging and contributing to other social networks.

A social media engagement strategy is now key in terms of SEO for clients. The key is getting clients to buy into this and accept this as part of an SEO strategy. With SEO, there is a distinct skill in writing optimised content and being able to code effectively for SEO. With social media marketing, its all about research and time - making sure that you put the effort in and that you are selective in where you put the effort in.

The theory of themes still runs true - if you run a site that sells gardening equipment, make sure you post on other sites within your genre. Relevant quality traffic is what you want, and building a picture of your site being a regular contributer to popular relevant content sites is key.

Social Media Marketing as we term it here, is the area we expect to grow the most over the next 12 months, and its long and short term benefits towards your overall SEO strategy should not be overlooked.

Not too sure about the goal hanger term though Karl. Where I come from it was called a “jonny liner”, presumably because a lad called Jonny was obsessed with standing on the goal line…

A recent post about writing content for SEO sparked a thought about generally writing website copy…

In every case with a new website, we tell clients to make sure they write compelling copy, and even look at hiring a copywriter. Most copywriters we have worked with have heard about SEO, but are not always sure how to write good optimised copy. Give them a list of keywords and phrases however, and the copy comes back keyword rich and focused on the user. This is exactly the balance everyone should aim for.

All content on the website must be interesting to humans, and as such should be written for them. Its all well and good getting web content ranking highly in search engines, only for users to visit the content and find it dull and uninspiring. This will not encourage the user to carry out the action you want, whether it be a sign up, a purchase or whatever. It’s kind of like walking into a store which you have seen a great advert for only to find the store is hard to find your way around, or the staff are unhelpful. It’s not going to inspire you to do what the advert set out to do.

A study this week highlighted how major US companies are failing to take advantage of organic search. It’s well documented that blue chip business invest heavily in paid search, but the figures this study unearths are more than enough to raise an eyebrow. A staggering $51 million is spent by Fortune 500 companies on paid search per day, on around 85,000 keywords.

Looking at how these businesses perform on organic search should make fairly depressing reading for marketing directors of these businesses. Just over 10% showed a strong visibility in organic search results, with this defined as having presence in the top 100 total organic search terms and a rank in the top 30 results.

Just imagine what these business could achieve through online marketing if 10% of their yearly paid search budget was apportioned to natural search! The old chesnut of “no one searches for our brand online” (a phrase I have heard far too many times from major UK businesses through the years) no longer applies. By actively investing in paid search, these businesses are stating their intent to attract more visitors to their website. There are contrasting opinions about how many search engine users click on paid results compared to organic results, but we have always worked on a 80:20 split in favour of organic. Does this not make this look even more appealing for these businesses?

We can only assume that this type of assessment holds true of equivalent UK businesses. If this is the case then such companies should take heed of this report. The right SEO strategy can work wonders for any business - and we have the results to prove it! Not only have we increased traffic to our clients websites via SEO, but we have also managed to reduce paid search spend, whilst increasing conversions from the same campaign! This has to be the target for any business serious about gaining an ROI via search marketing.

When measuring the effectiveness of an search engine optimisation campaign looking at the volume of traffic to a site is more a measure of the ROI than the rankings.  The rankings are a reflection of the presence in the market, but it is the volume of traffic that the rankings produce that will be the true test of the campaign.

Looking at the traffic from search engines over a period of time can show specific trends.  Some of these can be attributed to seasonal variation (so not many people search in Google on Christmas Day!).  However there can be some trends which cannot be accounted for.  Google Insights which

‘Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.‘

This can be invaluable when trying to work out why certain trends have occurred on site and how to communicate these to a client.  I was looking at why an increase in rankings had not correlated with a larger growth in traffic to the site for one of our clients.

Interestingly, one the key terms the volume of searches over the last quarter had slightly dropped.  Even though the client had a wider presence on the search engines, fewer people were searching overall.  So if we had not increased the rankings, then potentially the effect of the slight drop in traffic could have been greater.