SEO And Google

SEO And Google

Author: David Holland

It seems that not a day passes by without the UK press including SEO articles. It seems to be an increasingly hot topic these days, which is understandable in light of the prospect of tougher times ahead.

There are many online companies who have been doing very nicely out of Google AdWords. Lets face it, if you are making £20,000 a month it is not that important to you if your ad costs are £5,000 a month. It seems that as sales are starting to slow that these retailers are looking to reduce their advertising costs. SEO offers the perfect solution for cost reduction. Depending upon the niche and keywords an SEO campaign will cost a fraction of an equivalent AdWords campaign. SEO Might cost £10,000 or £15,000 in year one and two, but the cost savings really begin to stack up in year three.

I have to predict that the long term costs of SEO are going to rise in time. This is because currently the quantity of sites using SEO is very small as a percentage. This means that once your site achieves a top ten or top five ranking it only requires a maintenance budget to keep it there. However as more and more competition piles into your niche keywords you will need to keep your top ranking via a more proactive strategy across a longer time frame.

Even so, SEO represents a big bang for your buck and is the most cost effective method of attracting qualified leads to your site. Google seems to be concentrating its efforts on protecting the integrity of it organic listings. The best way for it to do this is to prevent larger organisations from buying their way to the top via paid links.

The tightrope currently being walked is tricky to get right, for in effect Google is a seller of paid ads themselves. In actuality they are a publisher who displays Dutch auction ads on their pages, and not much more..... but the sum of the parts quite frequently adds up to more than the individual components.

When is a paid ad a banner? Are all banner ads going to be penalised? In which event many Google Ad sense campaigns would surely fall foul?

I get the feeling that it is more the case of being seen to be doing something rather than actually doing something that is the important issue here.