Why SMEs are leading the way in SEO

Our very own Grace Chu has released an article explaining why small to medium enterprises are leading the way in search engine optimisation.

 

Sydney - 1 September 2009 - In a reversal of the ‘trickle down’ effect, corporates are learning their search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) strategies from their small and medium sized business counterparts.

Increasingly, consumers are looking online when searching for information – be it information on products or reviews of products or to compare prices for goods and services before a purchase. Because online search marketing is the bridge that connects consumers with the companies they are searching for, it is important for businesses to engage in SEO and SEM practices.

Marketing directors, often the decision makers behind how a corporate’s budget will be best spent, have taken SEM and SEO by the horns looking for an accountable method of spending ever shrinking marketing budgets. Pure online players and the SMEs have know for all too long the power of search marketing to deliver qualified visitors to their websites. Corporates are now learning from their counterparts the effectiveness of search marketing, which for the last four years has been the fastest growing channel of online advertising in Australia.

Supporting the case for corporate SEO

When it comes to natural (non-paid) search results, it is often large corporates that have a lot of catching up to do. Research has shown that about 60 to 70 percent of users choose natural search results over paid search results. Therefore, larger corporates have a lot to gain in optimising their websites to appear in the non-paid search results of the search engines.

A quick check at the search results pages for popular search terms such as ‘mobile phones’ shows the majority of large corporates are paying for sponsored links (paid search) and as a result, do not appear in the natural search results. In this set of search results, organisations that dominate the offline world such as Vodafone, Telstra, 3 and Optus are all paying for paid search results and yet are nowhere to be see in the top (non-paid) search results.

Companies with large product offerings own websites containing many thousands of pages and they often enjoy larger marketing budgets. Larger corporates are in the box seat when it comes to capitalising on the power of search engine optimisation and what it can do for not only bringing visitors to the website but also improving the bottom line.

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