Growing Importance of Search Engine Optimisation Highlighted

Search engine optimisation was the focus of a short piece in The Guardian on Monday, June 9th, illustrating the importance of search engine optimisation (or SEO) in driving local search engine traffic to business sites. Touching just the surface of what can be the seemingly arcane ‘art and science’ of getting a web page to the top of Google’s or one of ‘ the other’ search engine’s (Yahoo!, MSN Live, Ask.com etc.) search results page - and keeping it there - the Guardian article should have brought SEO at least onto the radar screen for small businesses and medium or growth businesses alike - if it was not already there.Search engine optimisation and the related field of search engine marketing  (or SEM) have been  areas of growing prominence for large companies as online advertising has caught and begun to outstrip traditional advertising outlets - such as TV, radio and print media - as a vehicle for advertising campaigns. Look no further than the recent U.S. Democratic primary race for the impact the internet has had on how products - in that instance, Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton - are marketed.

SEO has been a core concern for large companies and their marketing and advertising firms for several yeras now. The Guardian reports that ad agency, Media Contacts, has seen a significant uptick in its SEO work for large clients who have “begun to seriously get to grips with SEO in the past two years.” According to Therien Pieterse, Media Contacts’ head of search, “(SEO) is the center of all media activity, because most (media) channels drive people to search for (the) brands, catchphrases and promotions.” And that search is being done over the internet. More and more consumers are turning to the internet, via computer and increasingly via their mobile phones, to do their window and comparison shopping before making purchases. Those numbers are only forecast to rise as the population in the U.K. becomes evermore comfortable with internet technology.These trends and the publicity that the formerly unheralded art and science of SEO has garnered should drive home the need for small and medium-sized to focus attention on their company’s online ‘digital footprint’. Local business enterprises, as well as the large players, increasingly need to have a digital storefront for “Windows” shopping, as well as the traditional “bricks-and-mortar” storefronts that have long been the attraction for window shoppers. Recent stats show that 86% of internet users use the local search abilities of Google and the other search engines to find goods and services online, and yet 90% of these transactions that increasingly tech-savvy shoppers initiate online are completed offline, presumably at a local business establishment. SEO is an equalizer for small, local business. It is the process which drives local search engine traffic to a small enterprise’s web site and allows a small business to have its products and services googled and ogled alongside the products and services of large players with large marketing budgets.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 2:52 pm and is filed under local search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.