Soda - Keeping Curious

Recent research estimates that the annual spend on search marketing will be worth £1.41 billion by the end of 2006, with paid search counting for £1.26 billion and organic search optimisation counting for £147 million. From a spend of £855 million in 2005, £1.41 billion at the end of 2006 is quite a leap. However, since the total search marketing spend in the UK grew by 100% in 2005, the estimates seem to be on track.

Firstly, to clarify, there are two broad area of search marketing; paid search and organic search.

Paid search, often referred to as Pay per Click or PPC, is where marketers choose a list of keywords that they think their target audience will be typing into the search box. They then bid on these terms, much like in an auction and the price the pay determines where their term will appear in the list of paid search results, or sponsored links. These usually appear at the top and down the right hand side of the search results screen as shown below,

Natural/Organic search, on the other hand, works in a totally different way. The idea behind all search engines is to have a “spider”? that crawls the internet, indexing all the pages that it finds. Each search engine has a different way of ranking the pages, to try and ensure that the most relevant pages will always appear naturally at the top of the search results screen. In terms of search marketing, search engine optimisation, often referred to as SEO, can be used to adapt the structure, content and design of a site’s pages to make them appear higher in the natural search results.

The two types of search marketing are useful for different things. Paid search is a quick and guaranteed way to get your product straight to the top of the relevant search listings. It is possible to closely guard the amount spent and tangible results such as click throughs and conversions are automatically quantified.

Search engine optimisation, on the other hand, is an altogether more long term strategy. There are many things to consider in this case, site structure, site content, linking strategy and so on. Basically, the best way to improve natural search listings is to make a great site that abides by structural guidelines and offers relevant, useful content to your customers.

One of the most important factors is the site’s linking strategy. Basically, this is about who links into the site and who the site links out to. Linking will not only mean that your site is easier to find for other users, but, in addition, each incoming link is like a “vote”? for your site from another. It is crucial, however, to pay attention to where the links are coming from. Low quality sites, directories and so on will not do much to improve your site’s listing. It is important to ensure that only high quality, relevant sites link to your site.

An important factor to take into account before seeking useful inbound links is PageRank. PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance. The higher the PageRank, the more a link from this page is worth. It is essentially a “vote”? by all other pages on the web about how important a certain page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support.

If your site has a low PageRank, a potential partner site will often refuse a request to link because linking to your site can actually damage their page ranking. It is an exponential process, once your site has enough links to give a PageRanking high enough for important sites to link, their endorsement will send the PageRanking even higher.

Adding new, useful content in the form of articles, information and special services is a very important ongoing part of SEO. Search engine spiders are attracted by updates and so will crawl your site more regularly. It is also important to ensure that new incoming links are constantly being formed.

Improving natural search listings is a much slower process than Pay per Click. The search engine spiders take a long time to crawl through all the pages on the web, Google estimates about 2 weeks, so it can take some time before changes are noticed and processed. Additionally, search engine spiders have anti-spam capabilities and will see a sudden influx of a large number of links as suspicious. Therefore, it is important to implement a gradual and ongoing process, whereby rankings improve slowly but steadily.

There are ways to manipulate search engine optimisation so that sites climb the rankings quicker than they should. These techniques are known as “black hat”?, named after the baddie in cowboy movies who always wears a black hat. These techniques are unethical and when they are discovered the site in question is completely banned from a search engine’s listings. For example, earlier this year the German BMW site was de-listed from Google for employing black hat techniques. Not only is this embarrassing for the company, but their PageRank returns to 0 and the whole process of improving search listings begins again. Therefore, any company that advertises instant results for this type of search optimisation will be employing black hat techniques and should be avoided at all costs!

So in closing, Pay per Click is useful for new companies or products, to get the name out there and attract clicks from high sponsored link positions. Search Engine Optimisation is a more long term and ongoing solution, it may take some time for search rankings to improve but ultimately, once you have a high ranking, it is much cheaper to maintain than PPC.