The State of Search
Online marketing to the search engines should be a key element of your Internet strategy.
Ewen Angus - Trinity Heriot
The biggest talking point online today is the growth in power of the search engines and the marketing opportunities for business that they offer. In the space of a few years search has become second only to email in people's usage of the Internet. With over 80% of Net users using search engines to find the products and services they need, if your business can't be found then you're losing an important revenue stream. As the larger search engines have expanded the number of web pages indexed being found is becoming harder and harder; with websites, it is not a case of 'build it and they will come'. The numbers involved are staggering - Google has indexed over 4 billion web pages, is used by more than 100m people each month and processes over 3,000 searches every second of the day.
The following table shows the share of web searches in February .
| 34.7% | |
| Yahoo | 30% |
| MSN | 15.4% |
| AOL | 15% |
The table shows that with all the mergers and acquisitions in the search market over the last few years the top four websites serve over 95.1% of worldwide searches. It's big business as well. Google is set for an IPO ( initial public offering ) later in the summer with a value estimated at between $20bn and $30bn, which for a six-year-old company shows the incredible profitability there is in search. Microsoft has seen the value in the business and is scrambling to catch up with the leading two players with a new product set to be launched near the end of this year. With all the media attention in the battle to be number one in the market, usage of search engines will continue rising exponentially.
With all the competition how can potential customers actually find your website amongst the rest? If your website isn't at or near the top of the search-engine rankings, then it is effectively invisible - few surfers ever venture past the first listings.
Websites don't get to the first page of search-engine rankings by accident; in general, they rely on search engine marketing or search engine optimisation. Optimisation is the process of re-engineering and marketing a website to improve its ranking in sites such as Google, AOL and Yahoo!. It is the fastest-growing online marketing technique because it delivers highly targeted visitors to your website, as the customer is actively looking for the product or service, rather than being exposed to a banner or print advertisement.
Search engines look at over 50 different factors on your website - including its structure, on-page content and behind-the-scenes coding - which collectively determine how highly the site will rank for a certain search term. The optimisation process takes time and effort but if carried out properly it will lead to more visitors, more customers and more sales. As only 1% of people look beyond the first 30 results on a search engine, the top-placed companies are bringing in the vast majority of business from the Internet, which totalled £23bn in the UK in 2002, with a substantial increase expected for 2003 when the figures are released. Merely registering your website with the search engines won't give your pages a decent shot at page one of the results, unless it is backed up with a targeted search engine optimisation campaign.
At Trinity Heriot we've worked with a wide variety of businesses to improve their search engine rankings, from magazines to government agencies, and have found that there are few companies that wouldn't benefit from having their website optimised to their customers searching patterns. Our own website is an example of how search engine optimisation can deliver the targeted customers that increase profits and make a website more than just another addition to your business card. One of our main clients is an internet training company, they run one day courses in a variety of technologies from their Edinburgh base. Before optimisation they received inquires from all over the world about these courses, this meant the company spent time each day writing emails to Columbia and Calcutta explaining that perhaps attending the one-day HTML course in Edinburgh wouldn't be terribly cost effective for them. We've now optimised their training course web pages to a geographical area where people can actually attend our courses without an international flight on either end. The end result is not only are they increasing sales dramatically but practically all the inquiries taken through the website are targeted customers who are far more likely to convert into sales, saving them time on those reply emails to South America.
At present, only a small percentage of businesses in Scotland have search engine marketing applied to their websites and those that have are now reaping the benefits of increased sales. A website opens up the opportunity of global sales reach but without targeted marketing, the vast majority of potential customers will never find you.
