Digital Marketing Articles

The Value of Organic Search

Numerous studies have demonstrated the importance of high search engine rankings. One study, undertaken by Enquiro in mid-2000, investigated where users look when using search engines. The image below, taken from this study, shows that users spend most of their time looking where the colours are hottest - in the red, orange, and yellow sections of the page. This shows visually that users' eyes are directed to the top search results, the "golden search triangle”.

Other research shows:

• The first search result has a click through rate of 42%, the second 12% and the third 8% (approx.)
• Between 70% and 90% of searchers click on a search result in the first page of search results. (approx.)

These statistics show how important it is for websites to appear on the first page of the search engine results, and appear as high as possible for competitive keywords.

Universal search results

In May 2007, Google started to blend listing from its news, video, images, local and book search among those it gathers from crawling web pages. The result of these blended (also referred to as federated and universal search results) has been a change in how searches click through on search engine result listings.

Few year back, iProspect published a study which investigated how user behaviour is impacted by universal search results. The results of this study showed that image, video and news sections blended in with search results have a high click through rate:

• 31% of users click on images blended in with search results (approx.)
• 36% of users click on news blended in with search results (approx.)
• 25% of users click on videos blended in with search results. (approx.)

Understanding the Long Tail of Search

The effectiveness of a Search Engine Optimization strategy is underpinned by choosing the right keywords to target.

At first glance it could be considered advantageous to only target keywords which have the largest traffic numbers. Although keywords with large traffic number should be targeted, they are normally very competitive and highly popular keywords actually make up less than 30% (approx.) of actual overall searches online.

Because 30% of online searches are made up a few highly popular keywords, the remaining 70% of searches which are called the ‘long tail’ of search provide a huge amount of unique searches that may only be conducted a few times a month. The chart below shows the concept of long tail keywords:

Search Engine Keyword Demand

This demonstrates the importance of optimising for both highly popular queries and longer tail queries. Essentially this can be done by creating quality content and informational pages. Well written informative pages if well written with good structure are likely to drive long tail keywords.

What Are Top Line Requirements For SEO Pitch

	On-site Optimization	Link-building for SEO(Off-Site)
Needs	Site URL for the SEO activity Key objective (e.g. generate new organic search visibility and volume for new products) Future plans for the site (e.g. redeveloping a new site) Have they carried out other SEO work and access to SEO reports? Most important keywords / current terms that are being targeted Timing for proposal and activity	Site URL for the SEO activity Key objective Future plans for the site Have they carried out link building in the past, can they provide any reports? Most important keywords / current terms that are being targeted Timing for proposal and activity
Wants	Budget Website Stats Previous SEO reports Online Competitors All channel / marketing plans Paid search campaign results How often the site is updated	Budget Any strategic partners (suppliers, buyers, affiliates, etc.) Google webmaster tools Summary of previous link-building Do you do online / offline PR Any link-building opportunities, e.g. website widgets / tools ROI tracking? How will we measure results?