During the last month, I have been keeping a keen eye on Google’s new approach to search. In my previous article, The Impact of Personalized Search on SEO, I mentioned that the decision to include Google+ social content in search results might not be welcomed by everyone. This especially stems from the fact that it seems as if Google places priority to Google+ information in its search results. One can argue that Google is entitled to include Google+ content, since they own the search engine. Also, Google mentioned that they would index data from Facebook and Twitter if they made their platforms open. One thing that is certainly sure however, is that Google has received significant backlash because of the decision.

Google’s social rival, the massively popular micro blogging site Twitter, are on the forefront of the accusing camp. After the new search algorithm was launched by Google, Twitter accused Google of trying to drive traffic to their social network by manipulating search results. A Twitter representative made the following statement: “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the internet. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter, as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users”.

Personally, I think Twitter has a point. Twitter has had a massive social impact over the last few years (the “Twitter Revolutions” for example) and breaking news can often be found first on Twitter. If results from Twitter (or any other site for that matter) is the most relevant, the information should be available first in Google search results. This also ties in with the aforementioned Search Engine Optimisation. If you have to compete with only slightly relevant data from Google itself, you’re in for a losing battle. One option is to embrace the change from a social marketing perspective. But is this really best for the user?

In conclusion, it seems that many are worried that relevant results get pushed down in favour of Google + content. Fundamentally, relevancy is what it all boils down to. Google might not be in the wrong here, they are certainly entitled to promote their social network, but they should not compromise the quality of their search results in the process.

Twitter/Facebook - image credit - www.cbsnews.com

On the 10th of January Google included content from Google Plus, the newly launched Social Network, into their search result algorithm. Calling it “Search, plus your world”, it marks the true beginning of social search. You can still perform a global search, which omits all social results, which therefore presents you with two options: global and personalized (It does not appear that this feature has been fully rolled out in the South African version of Google at the time of writing, although I did come across it last night on Google South Africa). Some of the features of Personalized Search include an indicator of the total number of personal results in your search as well as the results themselves accompanied by a blue icon on the left. Additionally, Google included Google Plus Profiles in Search and People and Pages.

Having all the Personalised content from Google Plus mentioned above weaved into search result pages might not be welcomed by everyone. And at first glance it might seem to completely change the way we approach SEO. A lot of us in the field of Search Engine Optimization have been preparing for the day that search gets social. The option to switch between Global and Personalized results however, came as a surprise. Users can choose whether or not they want to use personalised search. This essentially means that current SEO practices still play the same role as always.

One cannot, however, predict the changes Google will make in the future, and tapping into the SEO potential of Personalised Search will play an increasingly important role in a Search Marketing campaign. Google might require us to be logged in at all times to use any of its features, including search. Even if this happens, I believe traditional SEO will remain alive and well. In its core, SEO is about optimization for the user, to optimize websites in order to facilitate and improve the search experience. This will always remain relevant.

Presence is not enough. No one will visit your website if they don’t know it’s there. Optimising your website to ensure it’s picked up by search engines – an absolute essential necessity. You need to be SEEN.

With Search engine optimisation (SEO) you not only build brand awareness, but more importantly, you gain trust within your industry. The higher the ranking of your site in the search results, and the more frequently your page appears on the results pages, the more visitors and sales you’ll have, because you are targeting people who are looking for your product. Being listed on top of search engine results also almost automatically cements your company as a market leader.

Trust + brand awareness + more visitors = more sales.

So what is SEO? SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of structuring a web page so that it is found, read, and indexed by search engines as effectively as possible. It improves the visibility of your website in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

These search engines use crawlers to follow links from one page to another and retrieve the contents. This is indexed and added to their databases. Search engines’ web crawlers rank sites according to their relevance to search terms, which is calculated using criteria such as the extent of keyword matches and the number of sites linked to a website. Done properly, SEO ensures that, when users search for terms relevant to your business, they will find your website every time.

Unique content counts. Having professionally written, relevant copy on your site (different from the content on other sites in wording, structure and topics) can provide a big boost for your site’s rankings. Frequency of content change is also a must – not small changes to existing content, but new content which shows that your website is active and dynamic.

People ask me a lot what is the best to do: PPC or SEO. Now with a limited budget I would say start of with a PPC campaign because you will start to see results immediately. With SEO it tends to take a bit longer. If you can afford to do both PPC and SEO at the same time I would say go for it, as you will just gain more out of both campaigns. A lot of people really don’t like clicking on paid ads so if you can be on the top spot organically that will also help you a lot. If you can rank high for your relevant phrases organically the nice thing is even if your PPC budget runs out you will still be visible on search engines.

One advantage of PPC is that it is a lot more flexible than SEO, you can cover a lot more keywords than with a SEO campaign, so while you optimize your SEO campaign to rank high for your beter performing keywords you can also target a whole range of other keywords to drive people to your site.

I want to show a comparative report on how these can work together and especially how you can  even double your visits if you do SEO together with your PPC campaign.

For one of our clients we started doing SEO more than 2 years ago, you can really see a difference in the traffic they get. The graph below shows visits from the first of January 2009 to the 30^th of September 2010. The orange line  represents Paid traffic and one thing you can clearly see from it is that they haven’t increased their Adwords budget, it stayed the  same. If you look at the green line which represents organic traffic you will see that it gradually got more, up to a point 7 months ago where it started outperforming the PPC traffic.

The quality of the visits don’t differ a lot however, the bounce rate, average time spent and page views are a bit beter on SEO traffic than the PPC. The blue line indicates the total visits to the website, so you can imagine what the difference would have been if the client only focused on PPC or SEO. By doing both PPC and SEO you can maximize your reach to clients looking for your services.

By looking at these statistics you can clearly see how SEO traffic grows over time and how it can work together with PPC to give you a great Search Marketing campaign. So if you are just doing just PPC or SEO at the moment, you have now seen what your traffic can look like when you combine it.

Search engine optimization or SEO as it’s more popularly know, is still something most decision makers still don’t understand. Now I can’t cover everything about SEO in just this one blog post but I’ll try and explain it a bit by discussing it briefly, by looking at the costs involved and then I’ll show you some case studies to illustrate what it has done for some of our clients.

Search engine optimization in essence is the practice of altering and tweaking a website and factors outside of your website to gain higher rankings in organic listings for targeted search terms. Organic listings are also referred to as natural listings these are the results that are not “paid for” (Payments to search engines that is).

Now a big misconception which people quite often make is that SEO is firstly an once off thing and secondly is something cheap. Now back when search engine’s started to become popular it might have been cheaper to rank well but since the benefit of ranking well in search engine result pages has been noticed it has become quite competitive. Thus it takes experts to analyze competitors to make sure you do more than your competitors to out rank them.

It also definitely isn’t a once off thing. Once you reach your rankings you will need to ensure you keep one step ahead of your competitors. Thus there are definitely costs associated with SEO which is determined by the vertical your company is classed in, the state of your website and what your current rankings are. SEO is also definitely a bespoke service and as such this adds to the cost and time needed to work out an effective strategy.

We have achieved some amazing results for our clients by using SEO. I’m going to look at 3 of our clients who have reached great results since signing up for SEO.

In our first example above (Company One) you can see we have done an comparison of their organic traffic compared from July 2007 to July 2010. We started this campaign off 3 years ago and have been constantly working with this company advising them on every step they take. They compete in quite a competitive vertical so it is important to be involved every step of the way. They did initially have some organic traffic before we started as indicated by the green line on the graph above but from the graph above you can see that this was nothing compared to what we have helped them achieve by utilizing SEO. We trebled their organic traffic in the last three years, which was a phenomenal feat. This has lead to our client becoming leaders in their relative industry.

Our second example is Company Two, who competes on a less competitive vertical. They started out with very limited organic traffic and no SEO strategy as well as website that was not search engine friendly at all. We helped them transform their website and define a SEO strategy both of which has helped them achieve the amazing results you see on the graph above. Their organic results have grown by a 613%.

Our last example is of side project we started in our company with the goal of turning it into a business. We thus had the opportunity to work with it from start to end. We created a website which would target our audience and use a very clearly defined SEO strategy. This meant me could develop the website with this strategy in mind. This resulted in us completely overshooting all our targets and building an extremely profitable on-line business driven by only organic traffic. The traffic in this comparison shows a growth of 890%.

So now that you have a few examples of what SEO can do for a company, do you really think you can compete without it? Feel free to drop us a line to find out how SEO could be helping your company. Have a great week and check in again for our case studies on social media and it’s benefits.