Depending on what study you read, you will get different guidance as to how much of the overall traffic for a particular key-phrase your site will get depending on its rank in SERP for that phrase. Most studies seem to suggest that sites will get at least a 400% boost in traffic from a particular key-phrase if they improve their rank from 2 to 1. This seems logical as most will click on the top result and substantially less would be expected to click on the second result. Interestingly, position number 10 is often believed to be more valuable than number 9 as people click on the bottom ranking page just before they had intended to move to page 2.

This morning, I decided to analyse the traffic from a particular key-phrase for a site that we manage. After a long stint in position 2, we have now secured top spot so of course I was interested to see how this impacted on traffic. As per the graph below, getting top spot has made a big difference but certainly not of the order of 400%. Based on cold hard data below, we see an increase in the region of 100% – hardly insubstantial but far less than the conventional wisdom would suggest.

As the above is just a single example, I decided to look at another example with similar characteristics. Again, after a lengthy spell in postion 2, we recently hit top spot. We achieved top spot on 18th July. Have a look at the graph below of traffic from this keyword.

You will note that before achieving top spot, we were struggling to break 45 visits in a single day but now that we have achieved top spot, we are approaching 90 daily visits from this phrase. However, daily visitor numbers, as per examples above have increased by about 100% so the difference between top spot and position 2 seems to be, based on the above, in the region of 100%.

I subsequently decided to look at how the above data fits in with the data provided from the Google Keyword Tool. This tool tells us that there are approximately 330 daily searches for the key-phrase in the bottom graph. As we are averaging around 150 daily visits, we are getting about half of the total demand for this key-phrase – the rest of the demand likely goes into Adwords listings. In the top graph, the Google Keyword Tool advises that there are approximately 500 daily searches for this phrase. Now that we’re top spot, we’re getting in the region of 100 visits per day or about 20% of total demand. This discrepancy is likely attributable to the fact that the keyword tool provides only loose estimates as opposed to actual numbers.

So, to sum up, the difference between top spot and position 2 is approximately 100%. From top spot, your site will hoover up around 20-50% of total demand so we know that from position 2 you can expect about 10-25% of total demand.

In the ongoing war between SEO companies trying to game Google’s algorithm and Google that just wants webmasters to produce great content to ensure the traffic / rankings will flow naturally, it was inevitable that the introduction of Google +1 would be another battle ground. No sooner had the feature been introduced than companies sprang up offering thousands of plus 1s from diverse IP addresses with guarantees of rank improvements. It is at this point hard to understand the logic of such vendors though as Google only improves the rankings of websites that have received +1s from someone in the searcher’s social network. So, thousands of plus 1s from India, the Philippines, Thailand etc are pretty much useless in terms of improving your website’s ranking. This won’t stop the fly by night charlatans trying to rip off decent companies by confusing them into buying these plus 1s.

Bar Sport Franchise’s website has driven onto page one of Google.co.uk for “bar for sale” and “bar for lease.” These compliment phrases such as “bar franchise” and “pub franchise” already on page 1. These improvements are feeding nicely into traffic. Congrats to Scott and all the team at Bar Sport!

Very often clients ask us “can you guarantee me page 1?” This is a fair question but is misguided. A better question would be “how much targeted traffic can you guarantee me?” The reason for this is that while many companies believe page 1 is the holy grail, in reality, even for the most sought after phrases a page 1 rank will add only a little traffic. Now that Google displays up to 15 results on page 1, the effect of just scraping onto the page is even less. I do wonder though if this recent update got a lot of SEO providers out of jail as they had contracts to achieve page 1 within a certain period – they just never said how many results would be on the page! In reality, it’s not until a top 3 ranking is achieved that the real benefits of an SEO campaign will kick in. So, if an SEO company guarantees you page 1, be sure to ask for what phrase and how much traffic can be expected as a result! Even better, ask them to show you Analytics data (with client’s permission of course) to back up their claims. Beware the fallacy of “page1 success.”

On the subject of paid links, Google is unambiguous. It has no problem with publishers monetising their content by selling advertising as this is perfectly normal in a commercial context: sites that get traffic can sell advertising. The only thing that Google asks is that such links are assigned the no-follow attribute to ensure that no PR / link-juice is passed from the publisher’s site to the advertiser’s site. In other words, feel free to sell advertising but you can’t sell link juice. It is however interesting to see one of the SEO industries leading websites http://www.seroundtable.com/ respectfully ignores Google’s guidance on this by selling links without a no-follow tag with optimised anchor text right on their homepage. Neither buyer nor publisher of these links is being punished. Further, some competitor analysis we’ve done of late shows that the practice is rampant among sites trying to rank for highly competitive phrases. So do you pay for the links, get the juice, climb the ranks and hope no one complains or keep plugging away the honest way. Not an easy decision!

Car Insurance

Online marketing agencies typically offer SEO (search engine optimisation) and SMO (social media optimisation) as distinct offerings. To now, this approach made sense as separating the two disciplines was logical in the same way as one would separate television advertising from radio. SEO is about keyword analysis, great on-page factors & lots of links. SMO is a softer science whereby marketers try to engage meaningfully with the target market of their clients, be part of the conversation, talk with their client not to them etc etc. Identifying suitable performance metrics is difficult here. This contrasts sharply with SEO where there are four clear metrics of success: rank, traffic, conversion rate, ROI: simple! Social marketers try things like the number of followers on Twitter or likes/shares on Facebook. Social marketers would, with excitement, advise their clients that they now have over 1000 followers on Twitter. They would omit to mention that very few, if any of these followers, constituted the client’s target market and so was never likely to generate any sort of return. My own view is that business owners and marketing directors hear about how important social media is and think “God, we’ve gotta get on Twitter!” However, there are huge swathes of businesses where social media should play literally no role in their online marketing efforts. If you’re a carpet cleaning company in Limerick, a photographer in Dublin or a security company in Waterford, forget it, it’s got to be SEO and PPC. Such traditional industries benefit little, if at all, by engaging in the social network. If people want a photographer in Dublin, they will Google “photographers Dublin.” The sites at the top get the business, simple. That’s of course not to suggest that no business should use SMO as of course it can be a great tool for those with more exciting product and service offerings that people do want to talk about while socialising online.

However, as per slide 38 on Rand Fishkin’s fantastic recent study (see it here: http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/ranking-factors-data-2011-smx-elite-sydney) there is substantial correlation between websites that rank well (SEO) and those that have a lot of Facebook shares(SMO). Crucially, correlation does not always constitute causation and it is quite possible that there is not a causal relationship between the number of shares and a website’s rank. However, Rand concludes, and I tend to agree (as search engines told us they do!), that Google and other search engines are using social indicators as part of their ranking algorithm and so SEO and SMO converge! This does make some sense as when search engines are trying to harness the collective intelligence of the web to understand which websites are best and so should rank highest, the amount of people who have seen fit to share a site is certainly worth looking at in conjunction with the over 200 other ranking factors that search engines rely on.

So, does this mean that a skip hire company in Cork now has to go out and get a load of people to share their site on Facebook and re-tweet their site on Twitter to ensure they maintain top spot in Google.ie for their most important phrases?? Perhaps not but, all else equal, if their competitor has 100 shares and they have none, their competitor will outrank them.

So, SEO companies and their clients can no longer silo SEO and SMO but rather need a joined up approach where one reinforces the other. Hemant, Rahul (our heads of research) and I are assimilating the above report into our processes to ensure all of our clients’ sites gain the likes and tweets they need as well as the links to ensure they outrank their competitors. As usual, we dance to Google’s tune!

The recent study by Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz is interesting if perhaps a little inconclusive: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings SEO executives around the world spend hours and hours building links to target URLs to improve their ranks. Why does this work? Because such links give the impression that lots of people really like your website so much that have decided to post on forums about it even if no one ever naturally did this even once. Essentially SEO executives create votes to a website that otherwise would get none. Search engines guide us that our focus should be on building websites that are so great that links come naturally but this isn’t feasible for the typical SME and so artificial votes/links need to be built. However, search engines are constantly evolving as their goal is to rank websites that people like higher than ones that they don’t.  Heretofore, old fashioned links were the best, albeit somewhat crude, the search engines had to determine popularity. As per Rand’s study, Google and others are increasingly relying on social indicators such as how many “shares” the page has, the authority of the sharers (how many friends (s)he has), the number of tweets, the authority of those tweeting etc etc etc. This makes sense as popular websites are likely to feature in social media sites. As Rand says, correlation does not equate to causation and just because there is a high correlation between the number of shares a website has and its rank in Google, this does not mean the number of shares is responsible for this rank. However, if the correlation is coincidental as opposed to causal right now, we can be sure over time a causal relationship will evolve. SEOs everywhere need to understand how they fit into this evolving picture. While traditional link building is not dead, it is dying! Lots of reading to do!!

On a related (ahem) note, if you need limo hire essex, it must be LA Stretch! Yes, this is shameless……sorry!

It is difficult to underestimate the importance of the predictive search results from an SEO perspective. Very often, people open a search engine with a particular phrase in mind but end up selecting one of the suggested terms. This has implications for key-phrase analysis as obviously ranking well for a phrase that appears in predictive results is more valuable than one that doesn’t. Another area where predictive search is influential is in online reputation issues. DPFOC has had numerous companies approach us with problems whereby “scam” “fraud” “complaints” appear after their name. This can have a devastating impact on a company as people researching the company will automatically click on such terms and in most cases, the potential client will chose an alternative provider for fear of being scammed. One could certainly argue that a company for which such negative terms appear must be doing something wrong as the predictive search results merely reflect what people are searching for and if a lot of people are searching for and selecting these negative phrases, there can’t be smoke without fire. There is an element of truth in this but we have seen one case at least where such negative terms were artificially inserted into predictive search results by a competitor of one of our clients paying people to search for these negative terms from different geographic locations over and over to get the negative terms into the results. Once there, a sort of self fulfilling negative cycle ensues as everyone clicks the negative term which lends more importance to it and reinforces its position in the auto-complete options. Our client was totally reputable but had its reputation severely tarnished and this had an  impact on their business. Thankfully, the negative terms no longer appear. To be honest, we’re not sure why not. Google does seem to have limited the appearance of such negative terms and this is thought be attributable to a French case in which a plaintiff successfully brought a case against Google forcing them to remove the word “arnaque” (French for scam) after their company name in predictive results. For more on predicitve results and how they work, see this great article by Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/how-google-instant-autocomplete-suggestions-work-62592

Good to see one of DPFOC’s newest clients closing in on top spot for the key-phrase “Shutters” on Google.ie. www.tradeshutters.ie are in position 3 at the moment and top spot well in range now! Also in top 3 for “interior shutters” “exterior shutters” and more. If you need domestic or commercial shutters in Ireland, you know who to call!