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Search Engine Marketing Insights By Marc Phillips, Search Engine Specialist
One of the biggest buzzwords in the financial services sector in the past 6 months has been search engine optimisation. As its name suggests, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves the 'optimisation' of a website to ensure that the major search engines rank the website highly when a specific keyword is used as the search query. Ensuring that your website is listed in the first 10 or 20 search engine results for a specific keyword or phrase is often the 'make-or-break' factor in the success or failure of any search engine marketing campaign. Search engines such as www.google.com.au and www.yahoo.com are providing financial services institutions with the ability to advertise by purchasing keywords that are typed into their search engines by an Internet user – such as credit cards, home loans and investment funds. Whilst many banks are buying keywords to rank higher in the sponsored section of results page on search engines, buying keyword advertisements is leaving many banks with lost opportunities. There are keywords that are not being purchased, or worse still, many bank marketing executives don’t know the lost opportunities they are missing. To illustrate the lost opportunities that Australian banks are missing out on, consider the number of searches performed by Australians in August, 2004 on the word ‘credit card application’. The answer is 26,572. Most banking clients only purchase keywords such as credit card and often forget about the different ways that Internet users think about financial products and services. Although some search engines will display combinations of keywords contained in a users search, there are inevitably lost opportunities as not all combinations are known about and hence not purchased.
Whilst many banking institutions advertise on search engines and online directories, ethey face declining yields on their investment. Put simply, less Internet users are clicking on the sponsored links on the results pages of search engines. Therefore, it costs more to acquire a customer. This is based on our knowledge that today only 15 per cent of Internet users click on sponsored links where as 85% of users prefer the websites in the natural section (left hand side) of the returned results pages generated by search engines.
The burning questions financial institutions are asking today is how to increase or optimise their rankings on the natural returns within search engines. Firstly, no organisation can buy their way to the Number 1 position on the Number 1 page of a search engine. A recent audit conducted on the variables that search engines look for when indexing websites in their directories show that the National Australia Bank (NAB), Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), Macquarie Bank (MBL) and Westpac (WBC) all performed with sub – optimal results ranging from 22% to 32%. NAB CBA MBL WBC
Source: APT Strategies, August 2004 Westpac performed better than their rivals, the National Australia Bank and Commonwealth Bank. It is vital that banks review their websites and take the necessary steps to optimise their websites – not simply throw money at keywords, many of which are not the words that their customers are using to query the search engines with. ___________________________________________
APT Strategies is Australia’s most experienced search engine marketing and SEO consulting company. APT Strategies provides a 15 phase methodology for search engine optimisation to increase the natural listing search engine results and provides search engine marketing analysis and strategies for clients. APT Strategies provides the latest search engine marketing insights and search engine optimisation tips in our consulting practice. Since 1994, APT Strategies has provided search engine optimisation strategies. Our search engine marketing clients include some of Australia’s largest businesses. We practice ethical search engine optimization techniques in all aspects of planning an pay per click or cost per click campaign, website optimisation or website submission.
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APT Strategies search engine optimisation strategies has over 15 phases, several of which are detailed below:
These reports and
Evaluation and
Measuring visibility of current keyword phrases
Determining benchmarks for future
Comparing and measuring selected keyword phrases Analysing backward link Determining which
Search Engine Marketing and Optimisation Strategies APT Strategies deliver clients reports and consulting services that feature analysis and recommendations on:
Search Engine Marketing Copywriting
Our consulting services
and
reports are provided by our inhouse
search engine marketing consultants and derived from
the latest search engine industry news
which enables organisations to gain valuable insight
into
Search Engine Marketing in Australia
as well as important and relevant
changes in the search engine industry.
Mergers and Acquisitions
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International Mergers and Acquisitions Activity
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Domestic Mergers and Acquisitions Activity
Search Engine Infrastructure Technology
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Vendor analysis of Spidering and Crawling
Engines
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Technology Market share, popularity and results
sharing within search engines
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Organic Algorithms and Page Ranking updates
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Paid Sponsorships updates
Search Engine Marketing - Cost Per Click Advertising
APT Strategies provide
clients a strategic approach to cost per click and
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