SEO is the life blood of many e-commerce sites. It’d be rare to find one that hasn’t done at least a little SEO, even if it is creating some meta tags and optimising page titles. Most of us have gone and done at least a little link building.
The world of SEO is changing though. The real value is getting into the top 10 of Google. There’s plenty of studies that show most people never go past the top 10, and the most value is in the top 3 or 4, what shows above the fold (without scrolling). But, the game is changing.
I did a Google search today for Guatemala (the South American country).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=guatemala&btnG=Google+Search.
Try the search now. I’ll wait.
In the top results, I get:
A preview of Google images results
A wikipedia article
A lonely planet article
CIA world fact book entry.
Let’s say I’m selling tours to Guatemala. The image results, there’s nothing I can do about as an SEO. The wikipedia, lonely planet and CIA world fact book entries – well, it’d be a brave SEO who would claim to be able to beat those three. It’s probably possible with a huge budget, but who has that sort of money for one word?
This is becoming increasingly common. I’m seeing in the top of the Google search results:
YouTube videos, with preview images
Google Book results
Google Images previews (like above)
“Refine results” (here’s an example)
The ubiquitous Wikipedia results.
I’m sure I’m missing some, and the list will only grow. www.Ask.com are really pioneering this trend, the classic example being their search results for Spiderman 3. Have a look. There’s a good chance that what you are after is on that homepage above the fold.
The result is there’s increasingly little room for “organic” results in the top 5. Remember, Google’s job (and Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc) isn’t to keep you in business. It’s to keep them in business. They stay in business by providing the most relevant search results. If the most relevant search results means making organic results the also-rans, then that’s what they’ll do – and are doing.
What’s the solution? Well there’s no easy answer. Here’s some suggestions:
– Paid ads, of course. Unlike some sceptics, I don’t believe Google is doing this to drive us to paid ads. It is a nice side effect though!
– Long tail search results. Don’t SEO for Guatemala. SEO for “Guatemala boat tours”, “Guatemala cheap holiday”, and about 10,000 other results you can think of. This is where a content rich site is invaluable.
– Keep building links, but make them real links that drive traffic. Think of the SEO benefits of those link as secondary, not primary.
Take this site for example. I get a good chunk of my traffic from Google. However, a relatively small percentage is from the big terms. I got 2 people last month search for “free shopping carts review”. Add up all those 1′s and 2′s, and you have about 40% of my traffic. There’s a bunch of sites linking here, and they drive a lot of my traffic as well. I’m sure they help with my Google results, but there’s about half a dozen links which get me almost as much traffic as Google.
I hope this isn’t doom and gloom, just a good chance to re-think your SEO strategy.