Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Success in SEO is dependent on understanding the most important SEO ranking factors which give you the best position and then working hard to perform better than competitors.

It’s also important to stay up-to-date on the updates Google makes – we cover the major updates in our weekly enewsletter.

Google has some good basic resources on SEO success factors. This video is useful for small and startup businesses this video.

Google’s Head of Webspam Matt Cutts also has a good video introduction which is useful when training others.

In March 2013 Google has updated this to an interactive infographic on how SEO works.

This extract shows the efforts from 2005 to 2012 to manually remove Spam.

For a more scannable form see our in-depth 7 Step Guides or this free 2012 SEO Starter Guide from Google.

Some useful new summaries of SEO best practice from 2013 are:

• Mobile SEO tools by Aleyda Solis on State of Search
• 25 Step How to Rank post on SEOmoz

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves achieving the highest position or ranking practical in the natural or organic listings as the main body of the search engine results pages (SERPS) across a range of specific combination of keywords (or keyphrases) entered by search engine users.

As well as listing pages which the search engine determines as relevant for the search performed based on the text it contains and other factors such as links to the page, the SERPs also contain other tools which searchers may find useful. Google terms these tools part of a strategy known as Universal or blended search.

The Natural or organic listings are the pages listing results from a search engine query which are displayed in a sequence according to relevance of match between the keyword phrase typed into a search engine and a web page according to a ranking algorithm used by the search engine.

The advantages of SEO for marketing

The main benefits of SEO are:

1.  Highly targeted. Visitors are searching for particular products or services so will often have a high intent to purchase – they are qualified visitors.

2.  Potentially low cost visitors. There are no media costs for ad display or clickthrough. Costs arise solely from the optimisation process where agencies are paid to improve positions in the search results.

3.  Dynamic. The search engine robots will crawl the home page of popular sites daily, so new content is included relatively quickly for the most popular pages of a site (less so for deep links).

Disadvantages of SEO

Despite the targeted reach and low cost of SEO, it is not straightforward as these disadvantages indicate:

1.  Lack of predictability. Compared with other media SEO is very unreliable in terms of the return on investment – it is difficult to predict results for a given investment.

2.  Time for results to be implemented. The results from SEO may take months to be achieved, especially for new sites.

3.  Complexity and dynamic nature. The search engines take hundreds of factors into account, yet the relative weightings are not published, so there is not a direct correlation between marketing action and results  –  “it is more of an art than a science“. Furthermore the ranking factors change through time.

4.  Ongoing investment. Investment needed to continue to develop new content and generate new links.

5.  Poor for developing awareness in comparison with other media channels. Searchers already have to be familiar with a brand or service to find it. However, it offers the opportunity for less well-known brands to ‘punch above their weight’ and to develop awareness following clickthrough.

Remember also, that search engine marketing is only one online digital communications tool. For established brands, we commonly see from web analytics that more than half of site visitors arrive at a site, not through search engines, but directly through typing in the web address or following a bookmark (web analytics tools label these as ‘no referrer’). The volume of direct visitors shows the power of branding, PR and offline communications in driving visitor traffic.

• Search engine popularity statistics
• Customer search behaviour – iProspect has for years had some of the best information on this

• Comparison of Google clickthrough rates by position
• Yahoo Site Explorer Reborn
• Mobile search volume more than doubles year-on-year
• Most popular search engines - UK, US and Worldwide
• The Number One Spot - how to use the new search curve CTR data

Sites covering SEO in-depth

• SEOmoz blog – Best for practical tests and insights on how to improve rankings. For the latest Google changes see the SEOmoz Google Algorithm History.
• Search Engine Land – Best for analysis of new search features by Danny Sullivan
• Search Engine Roundtable Google updates category – Best for the monthly analysis of changes made by Google
• Search Engine Watch – Not as good as it once was, but worth following

Google Resources to include in your feed

• Google Webmaster Central Blog - Main source for updates to search
• Google Webmaster Central – Help and advice for site owners on how to get their sites indexed
• Matt Cutts Blog – Matt is a Google employee who mainly updates on the Google blog these days, but occasionally still has useful insight on his blog