Have you ever wondered why, although your website search programs are more sophisticated and your budget finer every year, search engines organic results get harder to achieve as time goes on?
Don’t blame yourself. What you’re facing is the increasing competition of the search engine results page. As more and more companies are realizing the baseline importance of having a Web site, and the number of sites increase, so will the search engine results naturally increase in volume.
However, I believe this can be attributed in part to the rising importance and budget allocated to search marketing strategies. The more companies and site owners invest in paid and organic search strategies, the hotter the competition gets.
Some key differences in the 2010 results you may have noticed:
- More sponsored ads – particularly in the space above the organic listings.
- Increase in the variety of results such as “news results” and YouTube videos (versus regular Web pages).
- Multiple page listings for a given site.
- The “Google” logo is smaller.
- The “books” link in the blue bar directly below the search box has been replaced with a “show options” link.
By far the biggest difference is the sheer volume of results. On which the right-hand side will read, “Results 1-10 of about X.” This is telling you that the SERP is displaying the top 10 organic results of the total number of results (X).
In the face of increasing competition, you may want to:
- Be smarter about which keywords and focus on very niche/long-tail terms. This is exactly what Search3w D2S product does.
- Ensure your Web site content is surprising and offers something that no one else does. Keep it fresh and do frequently updates
- Look beyond Google presence opportunities (e.g., tweets are now being indexed in search results, which presents another opportunity to get content out there).
- Google announced that they started to use site speed as one of the 200 signals that influence the position of a website in the search results. Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. A “cheap” web host could cause problems.
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- Workout your Google Quality Score – Increasing your clickthrough rate (CTR) which leads to a better Quality Score and paying less per click (lower CPC).
- Call Google PPC expert and reduce time and effort spent optimizing campaigns.
- Promote your business on Google Maps. It is much easier (and faster, only 8 weeks) to be on top of seven A to G spots than on Google organic.
