The Rank Magic Blog

SEO Produces Higher Conversion Rates

July 24, 2006 ::: MarketingSherpa did a study of conversion rates. Conversion Rate is the proportion of web sites visitors who order a product on an e-commerce site or complete some other desired action on other sites, such as filling out an inquiry form. Comparing organic search (SEO campaigns) against paid search (PPC campaigns), they found the following:

• SEO had higher overall conversion rates than paid search (4.2% versus 3.6%)

• For e-commerce purchase campaigns, SEO had higher conversion rates (4.1%) than paid search (3.8%)

• Looking at delayed e-commerce/service purchase campaigns, SEO also had higher conversion rates (6.3%) than PPC (4.2%)

In a related study by WebSideStory covering the October-December holiday buying season in 2005, the overall search engine conversion rate for business to consumer (B2C) web sites was 2.3%. That was more than twice the conversion rates of banner ads, affiliate marketing links, shopping search engines and other referring links (0.96%).

Retailers Need More SEO

July 23, 2006 ::: Industry research shows that most e-commerce sites are not well optimized for organic search engine rankings. A 2005 study by OneupWeb revealed that 83% of Internet Retailer Magazine's top 100 websites fail to use basic search engine optimization principles to gain high rankings.

The study went on to show that of the well-optimized web sites, 89% were found on the first three pages of the search engine results for their respective keyword queries, and 52% appeared on the first page.

By contrast, only 4% of the non-optimized pages did as well. The implication is pretty clear.

2005 E-Commerce Sales 25% Greater than Previous Year

July 22, 2006 ::: The Department of Commerce has estimated total e-commerce sales in 2005 at $86.3 billion, an increase of 25% over 2004. That compares with total retail sales increasing just 7% over 2004. e-commerce sales constitute 2.3% of total sales, and are estimated to  reach $139 billion annually by 2008.

Many Retail Store Sales Driven By Search

July 20, 2006 ::: "The Role of Search in Consumer Buying" is a new study by comScore, commissioned by Google. They examined the search behavior of 83 million Americans who conducted over 552 million searches within 11 product categories using one or more of the 24 top search engines. Some interesting results:

• 25% purchased an item directly related to their search query

• 37% completed their purchase online

• 63% completed their purchase in an off-line retail store

Moral of the story: local retail stores can no longer afford to ignore the impact of the Internet. No matter how local your establishment, and no matter how narrow your market, customers are looking for you and your products online. If they can't find you in the search engines, which of your competitors do they find? It's easy for you to test out.

Can You Get Decent Ratings for Flash Sites?

July 18, 2006 ::: Flash movies are a great way to add multimedia elements to a web site. Unfortunately, Flash cannot be indexed by most search engines. For that reason, it is very difficult to get high search engine rankings for Flash sites.

Even Google officially tells webmasters that it is difficult to get ranked with Flash sites: "If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a [simple] text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site."

Although it is very difficult to get high rankings with Flash sites, it is not impossible. The trick is that you don't have to optimize your web page content. You have to optimize the links to your site.

<more here>

Advertisers Lost $800 Million to Click Fraud Last Year

July 13, 2006 ::: In a blog entry at Search Engine Watch, it's reported that a click fraud study that claims 14.6 percent of all clicks and $800 million worth of fraudulent clicks were charged to advertisers.

The study conducted by Outsell Inc., a market researcher in Burlingame, seems to have been a survey of "407 online advertisers representing a cross-section of U.S. business."

<more from Search Engine Watch>

Click Fraud is Setting Records

July 8, 2006 ::: Click fraud has become so large that it's setting records, and not in a good way.

"We've seen indications that the overall losses due to click fraud could equal more than $1 billion" each year, according to a financial expert quoted  in Business Week. That figure is "larger than the total magnitude of credit card fraud in the U.S.," according to Fair Isaac's director of product marketing, Kandathil Jacob. Fair Isaac, a credit-scoring firm, is in a position to know, since it analyzes some 85 percent of U.S. credit card transactions.

Are Made for AdSense Sites Ruining Search Results?

July 5, 2006 ::: It's happened to you. You've searched for something on Google and several promising results appear. You click on a link, but when you get to the site all you see are a few ads and nothing even remotely close to what you searched for. So you go back to the search results and try again, only it happens again and again until you finally find a page with some decent content ... or frustration sets in and you give up all together.

Why does this happen? How come in this day and age Google can't give you the results you're looking for? A large part of the answer is the growing number of made for AdSense (MFA) sites on the web today. MFA sites are designed for the sole purpose of getting you to click on a Google AdSense advertisement.

When seeking link partners for our clients, we find a very large percentage of sites with links to some of our clients' competitors are MFA sites. Those links aren't helping our clients' competitors, but certainly add noise to our link-finding efforts because we don't want to solicit links from them. They're presenting an increasingly frustrating component to link building.

For a better understanding of the impact of MFA sites and the likelihood of Google and others dealing with them, read Adam MacFarland's article from Site Pro News.

Aging Links: A Good Thing

July 3, 2006 ::: In a search engine forum, someone asked about the value of links to their web site that were temporary in nature. One response was this:

"Search engines look at how long a link has been in place. Links that come and go don't count for much while links that stay in place longer the better. Basically, when the search engines find the link that would be considered day 1. If that link is still there on repeated crawls six months or a year later then that link has earned some trust points with the algorithm."

You can read the whole thread here.

Changing Domain Names or Page File Names

July 1, 2006 :::  A question we're asked often is what impact it will have on rankings if a client changes their domain name, or if they want to change the filenames of some of their pages. Noted SEO guru Jill Whalen recently addressed the question very effectively. Here's the question and Jill's answer from High Rankings Advisor: