Utah Companies Don't Get Search Engine Marketing
I've been doing search engine marketing here in Utah for over seven years. Over that time I've come to realize that a lot of Utah companies don't really have a clue about online marketing, and especially don't understand search engine marketing. We recently did a study of the top 100 private companies in Utah, and found that an alarming number of them don't show up in the first 30 search results (first 3 pages) for their keywords in Google, Yahoo, or MSN. There were 82 percent that don't show up for their keywords in MSN, 79 percent didn't show up in Yahoo and 71 percent don't show up in Google. Only 7 percent of these companies' websites show up in the first page in Google for their keywords. I was amazed to see that 15% of the companies studied didn't even show up for their exact name!
We were looking primarily at the natural, or unpaid search listings for this study. We did note whenever we saw a company who was showing up in the sponsored listings, however, and only found 6 out of the 100 companies that were using Google Adwords or Yahoo Sponsored Search (formerly known as Overture). It is likely that other companies do some keyword advertising for keywords that are different than the ones we checked, but that wasn't really the purpose of this study anyway. It was focused more on the natural search listings.
My overall impression is that the lack of good search engine placement by these companies is not primarily due to competition from other sites. It appears to be due mainly to a lack of proper website optimization, incoming links with link text, etc. Essentially it is because of a lack of understanding basic search engine optimization principles.
We are located in Utah, which is why we chose to look at the top private companies in Utah, but I assume the results would be similar elsewhere. Search is very hot right now, but people don't really understand it. There is a huge market of people who are searching for products, services, and everything else. These customers are often ready to buy, it's just a matter of getting in those search results so the customer can choose to do business with you.
We were looking primarily at the natural, or unpaid search listings for this study. We did note whenever we saw a company who was showing up in the sponsored listings, however, and only found 6 out of the 100 companies that were using Google Adwords or Yahoo Sponsored Search (formerly known as Overture). It is likely that other companies do some keyword advertising for keywords that are different than the ones we checked, but that wasn't really the purpose of this study anyway. It was focused more on the natural search listings.
My overall impression is that the lack of good search engine placement by these companies is not primarily due to competition from other sites. It appears to be due mainly to a lack of proper website optimization, incoming links with link text, etc. Essentially it is because of a lack of understanding basic search engine optimization principles.
We are located in Utah, which is why we chose to look at the top private companies in Utah, but I assume the results would be similar elsewhere. Search is very hot right now, but people don't really understand it. There is a huge market of people who are searching for products, services, and everything else. These customers are often ready to buy, it's just a matter of getting in those search results so the customer can choose to do business with you.
posted by Dave @ 2:09 PM
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