Making it to the top

New Media Age

29/03/2007

It's great to win. And when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), winning is all about being at the top of the search listings. But the race for pole position is becoming more important as paid search reaches saturation and new technologies, such as personalised search, come on-stream.

Clients still want to be number one, according to most search agencies, but the truth about the advantages of coming top of the pile depends on your business objectives. If you're brand focused and aiming to become a massively high-traffic website, then being at the top is important. If sales are your goal, coming top will have no value if none of those clicks are turned into sales. However, there's still an affinity in the mind of the user that equates coming top of the list with quality. Research by Jupiter has shown that up to 36% of searchers believe that the top-ranked brand is the best in their field.

Rising interest

In addition, more and more companies are developing SEO strategies as the rise in prices in the paid-search market edges out all but those with the deepest pockets. Neil McCarthy, director of search agency Tamar, says the cost of PPC is rising by 30% year on year and many brands are finding that SEO is offering them better conversion ratios for their investment.

"Clients now come armed with information about SEO and the market," he says. "But we've been trying to educate them that they need to think not in terms of ranking position but in terms of traffic." Clients have to have a more mature approach to SEO, believes McCarthy. A retailer like B&Q needs to appear on the first page of results for both drills and kitchens, but appearing top for everything isn't always necessary.

SEO agency Fresh Egg takes the argument one step further by suggesting that it's often better for clients not to be at the top of results. By analysing the SEO market and user behaviour, you can detect subtle nuances that mean it may, in some instances, be better for a retailer to occupy third position.

Ammon Johns, senior SEO strategist at Fresh Egg, says the agency gives its clients surveys to take home and give to their families, asking them how they would search for products or services offered. This gives the client an outside perspective and can lead to some surprising insights.

"If you're selling a commodity product, it could be better to be number three in the results," says Johns. "If the user gets there after the first two results and realises that all the prices are the same, then it's unlikely they'll go back to the first one to buy, they'll buy from your site."

Adam Stafford, MD of Fresh Egg, says that the rule is applicable to a whole host of purchases that consumers make online and should be taken into consideration before demanding top spot. "If you're selling hot-tubs or cars, you'll get as much traffic at number six as you would from the top spot," he says. "People won't buy the first thing they come to with large purchases, they'll be doing their research thoroughly."

There are other factors to consider before fully dismissing the advantage of taking the top spot in the results, though. Mike Grehan, CEO of search optimisation agency Site Visible, says that by looking to the US, the UK market could learn an important lesson about the importance of being top of the pile. He points out that in the US in recent months the trend for fewer than five natural search results to be displayed before the bottom of the browser window is reached will only intensify the battle for the top spots.

Grehan argues that Google results in the US are now often returned with three sponsored sites at the top, followed by news listings and pictures. Some natural results are also being listed with individual site links (to specific pages, such as an airline's reservation form) under its main site address. If you add to that a Google toolbar and the usual paid results on the right-hand side of a page, then you might at best see three natural listings before your browser runs out of space. "All search engines have done usability research that shows users will refine their query rather than scroll down the page, and they'll then go to another search engine if they still don't find what they want. So being as close to the top as possible is becoming more important," says Grehan.

Getting personal

As the battle for the top spots intensifies, so SEO is undergoing a fundamental change from being a coding practice to become a marketing activity. There are multiple reasons for this change. One is the general maturing of the SEO industry as it looks for new ways to boost clients up the list of search results, another is the refining of the algorithms used by the search engines, which is cutting out more spam every day. And now there's the introduction of personalised search.

Personalised search (see box, page 14) is an initiative by the search engines to learn more about their users and, in turn, deliver results more effectively. It's also a productive way for the search engines to add extra value to their paid advertising listings by making the results more relevant and by segmenting their users into different user demographics.

The search engines are each trying slightly different approaches to personalised search, some allowing users to log their searches and share them with friends, while others rely on a process of reviewing past searches to learn habits and trends that can be used to make results more relevant in the future. All will require you to log into a service so that they can track your habits and learn more about you as a user.

Google is concentrating on search history as a way of delivering personalised search, and the automatic filtering of results will change the dynamic for SEO practitioners. This means that basic optimisation of a site's metatags to get to the top of natural listings will become less relevant, as the results can be filtered out. This creates a renewed focus on linking.

Nathan Levi, head of search at digital agency DNA, says that if personalised search does succeed in gaining mass adoption, then getting a good listing in the natural search results on Google will be down to good marketing and branding, rather than the more technical skills associated with SEO. "If consumers can filter out sites, then natural search will become a popularity contest and more to do with branding and content than an algorithm," he says.

Taking user content into account

Grehan goes further and says that textbook SEO is going the way of the dodo. In the future, he believes, it will be based around links and how to leverage user-generated content (UGC) to win the popularity contest among consumers and come out on top of the listings. "SEO will stay as a phrase, but it'll be much more of a marketing-led approach," he says.

Nico Brooks, search technology director at Atlas Solutions, says that more and more users are finding information via search and that while their search experience won't be changed very much by using personalised search, the SEO's bag of tricks will evolve. "As more UGC comes online, it'll influence the linking, so the results will be affected," he says.

He argues that popular online UGC, such as product reviews, are already beginning to have an impact and that this will only gain momentum. "Shopping engines are beginning to get good placings in search results, so getting a good position in a shopping engine should also be part of your overall SEO strategy," he says.

What this all means for the client is that what they've learned up to now about SEO is still applicable, but the goalposts have moved. The work they've put into their site optimisation will no longer be enough to guarantee them that top spot. A more comprehensive marketing strategy, including taking advantage of the burgeoning UGC market, is required.

David Elms, chief executive of not-for-profit independent financial advisor promotion service Unbiased, says he's expecting to benefit from the introduction of personalised search. Unbiased offers its IFA Finder service to third parties to place on their site, giving them a tool to offer users and also increasing the amount and quality of the links back to unbiased.co.uk. It's a strategy that's working well.

"We occupy most spots across the first three pages for our key search terms through our own site and third parties," says Elms. "Searches for IFAs are usually in the research phase and our strategy has ensured that we're giving users the maximum opportunity to access our database of 9,000 IFAs."

In addition to the work put into the third-party programme, which has created good quality links, Elms is expecting the rise in online activism through blogging and customer reviews to increase Unbiased's strong natural search position.

"We'd expect to benefit from personalised search as the service is not for profit and is genuinely trying to match people up with an IFA," he says. "We're already benefiting from blogs and recommendations, and in the future I expect linking to be even more important."