Ever-Changing SEO

With the economy heading south, the importance on acquiring new customers is much greater. For many brands, there are a number of low hanging fruit opportunities; enhancing SEO being one of them. Sadly, SEO has always been the bastard step-child that few understand the power of, or are honest enough to say that they just don't understand what it is. "Why focus on SEO when there is SEM?" Ugh.... Yes, I have heard this question asked before. Let me remind you, SEO is FREE!

The truth is, methods we used only 12 months ago to increase natural rankings have changed. As Google's algorithm change, so must our strategy to enhance natural search rankings. Yes, content is still important, but the trends I am seeing are in the following three areas:

1. Site Performance: That's right, if your server is a dog, chances are that your natural search results will tend to be a dog as well. This is especially true for sites with highly competitive search terms.

2. Bounce Rate: Years ago, this wasn't as important. Now, Google is heavily penalizing sites (if not dropping them all together) if they have a bounce rate of 80% or higher. So, if a website is bouncing 80% of its users back to the search results page, they've got major problems. 50-60% is considered acceptable.... how is your site performing?

3. Links: We have known about the importance of links for a long time. BUT, there is now a much greater focus on the diversity of where the links are coming from.

It only makes sense that things are changing with how Google looks at links. The introduction of social networking sites, blogs, RSS feeds (to name a few) have forced Google to change the way they rank. Different types of content from different types of places call for new algorithms.

So, what does all of this mean? It means that we need to change how we approach SEO. Focus on acquiring relationships with bloggers to build links (i.e., send them product), look into how your webserver performs (sorry, it's not only an IT issue these days) and put some thought into the keywords your customers will use and use this to optimize your website design.

- Chris