Usability Consultancy, Website Reviews, Website Optimisation

Can Google Keep Up?

Internet Marketing is a fiercely competitive business, we all know that. The big question in the minds of most SEOs is something like "how can I beat the search engines?" - or, in other words, "how can I 'game' the search engines?"...

That, I can assure you, is never my question because I firmly believe in the main reason that the best search engines exist, and that is to provide the most relevant search results for searchers. Sounds simple doesn't it. But, it's obviously not as simple as that when thousands of people ('expert SEOs') are constantly figuring out how to stay one step ahead of what Google (and co) will do next, rather than work completely within the scope of what the search engines can deliver to the 'honest' folks who simply want to provide relevant results.

• Tracking printed adverts via coupons with reference numbers that customers forgot to mention or sales staff forgot to ask for.

• Putting a unique offer in a specific advert but, during the buzz of receiving an enquiry, sales staff forgot to record which advert the enquiry came from.

• Using different phone numbers in each advert or publication but most people didn't record the number of calls on each number.

• Trying 0800 numbers, 0845 and 0870 numbers but only looking at the year end figures to determine if they added to the bottom line.

• Testing different adverts, usually on a rotational basis but, again, in the buzz of receiving an enquiry, combined with being busy, most people forget to analyse the data.

The data has always been there but not so simple to record and analyse, until now.

But you can essentially get information on low cost SEO anywhere in the Internet. Unfortunately, not all of these helpful websites actually explain in detail how to setup an affordable search engine optimisation strategy. So here's a few tips that do explain what you could, and should, be doing.

When I was helping a client decide on some top-traffic generating keywords the other day, he was worried that no matter how high we ranked for a particular set of phrases, he would be competing against some very established brands and wouldn't be able to tempt people to click to his site, no matter how high he ranked.

A very interesting view. And one which provoked quite a debate about how to compete against established brands.