SearchPath Blog
SearchPath Internet Marketing Blog - Thoughts, ideas, humour, information and more ...
Friday, October 31, 2008
A recent post on the SEOmoz blog observed and confirmed what is a surprising trend in the search engine marketing industry:
"SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets."
This has been the case since I have been in the industry (2 years+) and has always seemed strange to me; it has always reflected a short-termism endemic in clients using SEM services. Most businesses seem to be attracted to the immediate ROI provided by PPC advertising, rather than enacting link building campaigns to boost a firm's organic SEO position.
Certainty also appears to play a part; most SEO companies would advise to allow at least 6 months to see an SEO campaign take effect, even then, for very competitive phrases, it is not certain that good rankings will be achieved. With PPC, you are pretty much guaranteed to have a page one ranking if you bid high enough (allowing for quality score). This makes PPC a potentially more certain medium.
I would suggest that the best SEM strategy would one that takes in the benefits of both PPC and organic; combining the flexibility, immediacy and certainty of PPC with the traffic and high visibility of organic SEO. A two pronged approach in this manner has been enacted successfully by many of our clients; see how it can work for you. Drop us a line on 01285 643496.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Many companies have regarded marketing as almost unnecessary during the good times as orders have just flowed in. However, with a recession looming, finding and winning new business is set to get an awful lot more difficult. So, should companies be spending money on marketing?
Often the first thing to be slashed in a downturn is the marketing budget. However, for many companies, doing nothing is not an option and in taking a longer term view, can emerge stronger from any downturn by focusing their efforts on intelligent, cost-effective marketing.
A downturn can also highlight how complacent an agency has become and presents opportunities for pro-active and efficient agencies such as SearchPath. We're also beginning to see more enquiries from London-based companies looking to move away from paying the high London-agency rates.
Since the last UK recession, we've seen the advent of the Internet and online marketing. Its flexiblity and transparency should give it the edge over any other, more expensive form of marketing and PR in these times and we recommend that our clients increase their focus on their search marketing - both Pay Per Click and Search Engine Opimisaiton - and ensure they're in the best possible position to benefit when the economy recovers.
For more information about how you can best position your company and its marketing for the downturn, please call Rob Caston on 01285 643 496 or email
found@searchpath.co.uk.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Google has just released a new function in Webmaster Tools that enables site owners to see where other sites are linking to non-existent pages on their website.
Links to your site from other websites are a crucial part of getting your site found on Google through search engine optimisation. However, a link to a non-existent page on your site is pretty worthless in Google's view, and users following a link to a non-existent page will get a bad experience. This is where Google's new tool comes in.
By analysing links to non-existent pages, you can contact site owners to ask them to redirect their link to another page on the site. When the other site fixes their link, their visitors find your site directly, and all search engines can follow those links and give you credit for them.
Converting 404 links to links to the right pages converts poor links to something useful for a user and it should help your search ranking.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Google has made some alterations to a document that many consider to be a sacred text - the Google webmaster guidelines. Two statements have been recently removed:
1. "Have other relevant sites link to yours."
and
2. "Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites."
This has caused some consternation in the SEO community; the Yahoo directory has been a starlwart in the SEOs link building armoury for many years. For Google to remove this piece of text suggests that this well-used link source has been devalued by Google. However, Googler John Muller had this to say in a Google Groups thread:
"I wouldn't necessarily assume that we're devaluing Yahoo's links, I just think it's not one of the things we really need to recommend. If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it's obviously fine to get listed there. It's not something that people have to do though :-)."
In my opinion Google are devaluing the Yahoo directory by removing it from the webmaster guidelines. But rather than making a slight on Yahoo, Google may be making a more general point about paid directories, which are, after all, paid links. It may be that Google is angling for a more coherent strategy regarding paid links, and this content change is part of that.
On the other hand, it could be a move by Google to discourage link building. This is backed up by the recent link-based entry in the Google webmaster central blog (see previous SearchPath blog entry) where it is stated that webmasters should "...not engage in mass link begging."
SEOs and SME owners should bear these possible trends for Google in mind when formulating their internet marketing strategies in the future.
Check it out if you want to brush up on some link based knowledge. In the series of posts this week Google offers a series of tips for webmasters interested in improving their sites. Tips include: using descriptive anchor text instead of "click here"; not to bother page rank sculpting (using nofollow to channel link juice away from certain pages and towards others) and how it is good to link out to relevant sites (some webmasters feel that if they do this they will lose visitors from their sites).
The mention by Google to use descriptive anchor text is useful for link building purposes - we now know that anchor text
is important in determining rankings, so can conduct our campaigns accordingly.
See the the link posts
here.
