Table of Contents

 

Advantages and disadvantages of SEO

Advantages of SEO 

The main benefits of SEO are:

● Significant traffic driver. showed that search marketing can attract a significant proportion of visitors to the site if companies are successful in implementing it.

● Highly targeted. Visitors are searching for particular products or services so will often have a high intent to purchase they are qualified visitors.

● Potentially low-cost visitors. There are no media costs for ad display or click-through. Costs arise solely from the optimisation process where agencies are paid to improve positions in the search results.

● Dynamic. The search engine robots will crawl the home page of popular sites daily, so new content is included relatively quickly for the most popular pages of a site (less so for deep links).

Disadvantages of SEO

Despite the targeted reach and low cost of SEO, it is not straightforward as these disadvantages indicate:

● Lack of predictability. Compared with other media SEO is very unreliable in terms of the return on investment it is difficult to predict results for a given investment and is highly competitive.

 ● Time for results to be implemented. The results from SEO may take months to be achieved, especially for new sites.

● Complexity and dynamic nature. The search engines take hundreds of factors into account, yet the relative weightings are not published, so there is not a direct correlation between marketing action and results ‘it is more of an art than a science’. Furthermore, the ranking factors change through time.

● Ongoing investment. Investment needed to continue to develop new content and generate new links.

● Poor for developing awareness in comparison with other media channels. 

Searchers already have to be familiar with a brand or service to find it. However, it offers the opportunity for less well-known brands to ‘punch above their weight’ and to develop awareness following click-through. For these reasons, investment in paid search may also be worthwhile.

Best practice in planning and managing SEO

In this section we will review six of the main approaches used to improve the results from SEO covering different search engine ranking factors. We describe these in some detail since is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing techniques, so it’s important to understand that SEO is a technical discipline and that the techniques used change through time.

For this reason SEO is often outsourced to a specialist SEO agency, although some companies believe they can gain an edge through having an internal specialist who understands the company’s customers and markets well. You will see that some of the on-page optimisation techniques recommended in this section are relatively straightforward and it is important to control brand and proposition messages. 

Content editors and reviewers within a company therefore need to be trained to understand these factors and incorporate them into their copywriting

1 Search engine submission

While some unscrupulous search marketing companies offered to register companies in the ‘Top 1000 search engines’, in reality registering in the top 5–10 search engines of each country an organisation operates in will probably account for more than 95 per cent of the potential visitors. Most existing companies and even startups will be automatically included in the search index since the search engine robots will follow links from other sites that link to them and do not require submission services. 

Google allegedly places new sites 

in a review status sometimes referred to as the Google sandbox effect. However, Google search engineers deny the existence of this and explain it is a natural artefact produced by new sites having limited links, history and so reputation. Either way, it is important to remember this constraint when creating startup companies or separate unlined microsites for a campaign since you may have to rely on paid search to gain SERPS visibility.

2 Index inclusion

Although a search engine robot may visit the home page of a site, it will not necessarily crawl all pages or assign them equal weight in terms of page rank or relevance. So when auditing sites as part of an SEO initiative, SEO agencies will check how many pages are included within the search engine index for different search engines. This is known as index inclusion

Among the potential reasons for not gaining complete index inclusion are:

● Technical reasons why the search robots do not crawl all the pages, such as the use of SEO-unfriendly content management system with complex URLs.

● Pages identified as webspam or of less importance or considered to be duplicate content which are then contained in what used to be known as the supplemental index in Google which don’t rank so highly. In these cases it is sometimes best to use a specific ‘canonical’ meta tag which tells the search engine which the primary page is. If you are a multinational company with different content sites for different countries, then it is challenging to deliver the relevant content for local audiences with use of regional domains tending to work best.

Companies can check the index inclusion through:

● Reviewing web analytics data which will show the frequency with which the main search robots crawl a site.

● Using web analytics referrer information to find out which search engines a site’s visitors originate from, and the most popular pages.

● Checking the number of pages that have been successfully indexed on a site. For example, in Google the search https://secretfocustips.blogspot.com/ lists all the pages of Dave’s site indexed by Google and gives the total number in the top-right of the SERPs.

● Using Google Webmaster Tools, a free service that site owners can register with which shows pages indexed and potential webspam problems such as a penalty.