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The importance of SEO
By bear | April 7, 2009
I had the great pleasure today of attending the first day of a three day training course with SEO legend Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Global Internet Marketing Solutions. What the early stages of today’s session on search marketing quickly pointed out was the incredible importance of a top 5 search rank, and of the shared responsibility of SEO within all levels of an organisation (ie marketing, technology, finance, management).
This got me thinking about a certain ticketing website I used to work with, that as far as I know to this day is still structurally incapable of being indexed by search engines, and has had this limitation for at least the last six years!
A simple statistic shows the major issue this presents – 87% of clicks on Google fall into the organic search listings. The lack of organic search listings by said ticketing company is “mitigated” with a PPC strategy – a strategy that using three months of its PPC budget would in effect pay for the required technical solution to fix the indexing problem. And yet it has not been seen by either management, nor technology, as a major issue worthy of prioritisation!
The major arrogance here is that major ticketing companies deal in exclusive products via their venue contracts. Want to see AC/DC at Acer Arena when they come? Then you WILL have to use Ticketek. This breeds a belief that organic search listings aren’t necessary, because there aren’t any competitors to the product.
Whilst this may be true in a literal sense, it certainly is not true to a consumer making decisions on how to use their entertainment budget. I would like to see AC/DC in concert but I may also like to go the rugby, or go to a movie, or to dinner with friends, or to a music festival at Luna Park, or to Moonlight Cinema and so forth. There are hundreds (thousands?) of competitive products competing for consumers entertainment spend, and the sooner ticketing companies take this view the better able they will be able to compete for true market share.
The crime of this lack of SEO focus is that their traffic is substantial, inbound links numerous & well qualified and content that is important to consumers. With these assets alone they could dominate rankings should they consider search engines an important channel for connecting to more consumers. And how could they possibly think otherwise?
Topics: Marketeer Babble | 3 Comments »
April 8th, 2009 at 9:22 am
This reminds me of a great analogy I heard re the SEO/SEM dichotomot a while back – If Search were property then SEO is buying a property whilst SEM is just renting it.
April 8th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Ugh – dichotomy. More coffee.
April 8th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Very much so. SEO is a long term investment too, whilst PPC is an expensive “works while you are spending” model. Very different to each other.