SEO. A marketing SOS 
SEO is an ongoing marketing campaign for the internet. At its most basic SEO is about getting your product or service in front of your customer when they look for it on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. A successful SEO campaign is measured by the return on investment through increased sales, traffic, brand awareness and/or ranking. The work involved in SEO is 1. making your site readable by search engines and 2. increasing your site’s position on the search engines via various technical and non-technical labour intensive methods (these are detailed on our Work and Technical pages).
1. Search Engines
Search Engines such as Google and Bing’s major goals are to find and index the billions of pages on the web, and then deliver the most relevant to users when they search.
Search Engines deliver two types of results in response to a user’s search : natural (organic) results and paid for (PPC/Adwords) results. SEO is concerned only with the natural (organic) results.
In order for Search Engines to deliver the best results for a search they use mathematical formulas to determine the most relevant site.
Example:
A user performs a search on Google for ‘digital camera’. Google delivers the results for all websites that have the key phrase ‘digital camera’ in their content. It orders them in accordance to its algorithm which determines which websites are likely to be closer to the user's search than others based on many different ranking variables. These variables are the key to SEO.
Search Engines
- Finding and indexing the billions of pages and files on the web.
- Delivering the most relevant pages and files to users when they search.
2. Why We Search
The basic goal of a search on a Search engine is to obtain information relevant to a query. The user experiences the need for an answer to their query and formulates it into a string of words (a key phrase) consisting of one, two or three words (the average length is 2.9).
80% of searches are informational and 20% are transactional or navigational.
Like all marketing campaigns, one of the corner stone tasks of SEO is to understand the psychology of the target audience and how they use search engines. Once this is understood an SEO campaign can be developed to effectively reach and retain these customers.
Each search is one of three types:
- Navigational - the user is looking for a website.
- Transactional - the user is looking for something to buy.
- Informational - the user is looking for information only.
3. How We Search
Searching is a multistep process. A user may make at least five searches in a search session to find what he/she wants. Whereas the initial searches will more likely be informational and the key phrases used more general and shorter, as the user gets closer to finding what they want their key phrases become more specific and longer and the search may change from an informational to a transactional search.
Example:
A user looking for a mobile phone may initially search on the key phrase ‘digital camera’, but then become more specific to ‘casio digital camera’, then to ‘casio digital camera 12 megapixel’ and then finally to ‘casio EXILIM Hi-Zoom EX-H10 Digital camera’.
There is also a strong correlation between being found online and offline sales. Studies show that for a high percentage of High Street sales start with an online search. This means that even for companies that solely sell their products or services on the High Street it is important to appear on the Search Engines when users search.
"Studies show that for a high percentage of High Street sales start with an online search. There is a strong correlation between being found online and offline sales."
4. What We Click On
Searchers are very selective about what they click on. Searches have an intention - the searcher is looking for something in particular. A high percentage of users will search again if they do not find what they are looking for on the 1st page of the search results instead of clicking on to the 2nd page (confirming the importance of Page 1 ranking). Searchers will conduct searches over several stages possibly taking days to find what they want.
In relation to PPC, 85% of users click on a natural listing rather than a paid listing. The top ten results from a search get 90% of the clicks, while the remaining 10% is split between the 2nd, 3rd and 4th pages.
Percentage of Clicks on Natural vs Paid Listings (SEO vs PPC).
