Search Engine Marketing Has Become Very Competitive

That's not all, Google has finally addressed the gaming of inbound links from bookmarking sites and blogs (called Web 2.0) to boost sites in search results. What are we to make of all of this and how do we maintain our strong positions?

Through the years websites that we optimized and promoted held position in search results with little or no maintenance from us. Except for a few areas of very strong search engine optimization (SEO) competition, such as search marketing and porn, an optimized site with a number of relevant pages of information and strong inbound referring links could successfully compete for top positions against very large competitors. In 2006 there was a lot of talk about SEO. 2007 we began to see major corporate websites that were being optimized for search results. As the big players with plenty of resources to put to work creating content start emphasizing optimization of the content for searchers, it will become increasingly difficult for smaller companies to compete, even in natural search results, never mind in pay per click where a large budget is an obvious advantage.

Inbound Links

In the meantime Google, which made referring links an important part of ranking sites in search results, has decided to get tough with the gaming of referral links by slick SEO firms. The take on this by the industry press is that Google is penalizing the practice of directories including those that pay for links. If that is the case, paying Yahoo $299 per year to list your site suddenly becomes much less valuable than it was before. Yahoo is Google's closest search competitor in the US, hmm.

While Google is going along with the idea that they are getting tough on sites selling links in order to bolster the linkee's position in search results, earlier in the year, they introduced algorithms to defend against "Google bombing" the practice of boosting a Web page in search results by many people with popular blogs linking to the page with a particular phrase. The most famous example was the top result for a Google search for "miserable failure" pointing to George W. Bush's biography. This was all taken care of with a change in algorithm, Google contends. The same Google bombing technique was being used by SEOs to boost client sites in results for specific keywords, so Google's algorithm change has to affect the search result rankings for a lot of websites. These moves by Google call into question the impact of inbound links as part of the search optimization strategy.

Pay-per-click Sponsored Listings

Meanwhile on the paid listing front, ad agencies and corporate web marketing teams are increasingly hiring search engine marketers and competing in the pay per click (PPC) arena. The larger agencies are more willing and able to invest in pay per click management and analytics tools. Google has always favored big spenders with support and interfaces. All of this challenges small businesses and small search marketing agencies.
Fortunately for us, we have not yet found an automated PPC management tool that improves on what we do. We are watching one tool called Adgooroo that seems to give a bit of competitive insight for AdWords campaigns, but in trials we did not find ways to improve on our largest PPC program. And in trying various analytics tools, we have found the (free) Google Analytics to perform better than some very costly analytics packages. We will continue to keep an eye on all of these developments, however, to make sure that we bring our clients the best service available.
Although the sites we manage have been holding firm to their positions in search results we have seen a lot of movement in key indicators we use to determine the visibility of websites. Google Page Rank has been moving around, without necessarily changing a site's position in search results, and the Alexa position of many of the sites we watch has fallen like a rock. So there is much for us to pay attention to as we enter 2008.

Try our Cost per Customer Acquired Calculator to aid in setting your average keyword click budget.

For more information about these and other online marketing concerns e-mail or call 928-284-2704.