Searching the Internet;- Science or Art?

Like with any section of the computing industry the best way to learn is to practice and after optimising a couple of sites last week my knowledge of Search Engine Optimisation has greatly increased. As I enter my third week here at Just Search I am beginning to understand what it is we do here and why it is important, not only from our clients point of view but also from the consumers that our clients are targeting. The services that we provide are proving very popular and are managing to get our name about and about in all of our current markets, the UK, Ireland and South Africa.

Because this is my first, as I like to refer to it as, “Life Job” out of university I have had all the questions from family and friends.
Conversation has tended to start with “Oh! That’s great news! What is it you do?”
To which I reply, “Search Engine Optimisation at a company called Just Search”,
Now with this reply there are two possible responses.
The first; they ask me about the company itself, to which I’d reply by giving a brief summary of the team and our infrastructure and how I’m enjoying my time here (something along the line of last Monday’s blog: The Importance of Making Tea).
Whatever the choice, the topic of conversation will always come down to the second response; they’ll ask me about what S.E.O is and I tell them.
That’s normally when the conversation tends to take a turn for the worse. No matter who I’m talking to I tend to get a blank face and slow realization that maybe they’ve just asked me the wrong question.
“Oh right, is that something to do with computers?”

And that’s the common misconception that we, as a company faced many times a day when dealing with new clients, trying to get across the message that S.E.O is not just another insignificant computing blind alley. Just because Microsoft doesn’t do it doesn’t mean it’s not important.
With our own success of hitting a first page listing within Google UK last week (under the search phrase: search engine optimization*) we have found that we are now getting perspective clients calling us asking for quotations. This cuts out the long and yet not so topical conversation on what S.E.O is because the customers already know what they want otherwise they wouldn’t have searched for it.

This brings me to my point this week; we understand what clients want because we want the same thing. We all want first page listings to draw in our respective target customer audiences. Make them come to us rather than us going and pestering them. That’s the obvious point taken care with. It is not hard to see that successful website promotion away from the sponsored links market is going to help your company in the long run.

So what do the customer’s want and what do we do to benefit them (because we do you know)?
Basically research has shown that if a common everyday person is searching the Internet for a precise thing they will probably only hit the fist 5-8 listings on a specific search phrase before changing it, with about 75-80% of all searches within the UK done on Google UK. We benefit consumers by communicating with our clients and doing the research with the main aim being to make sure that the majority of those websites on the first page listings are relevant to the search phrase. I know I get annoyed when I’m browsing for something and I have to trudge through the listings before I find exactly what I want.

To sum up, we want our clients on the first page because not only is it what they want but getting them there is slowly cleaning up the act of searching the Internet, making it more a science than an art.

Martin Vernon
Design and Activations

* We were 8th on the 1st page but because of the current Google “Jagger” dance we are seeing, like many others, a fluctuation with our rankings. See previous blogs… Google what’s going on?, MSN Page Rank Return, What has happened to MSN? And Google Dance.

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