It has to be said that even as businesses become aware of the forces currently shaping the web towards a multichannel e-marketing future, still for many SMEs and even mid-size e-commerce websites, the only objective they are concerned with is to drive visitor traffic to site page conversion.
Unfortunately, traditional strategies may no longer be enough to sustain PageRank and overall visibility with search engines scoring more for social content relevance.
Not only has Google been constantly updating its search algorithm to more clearly rate site page content for the most fresh, up to date and relevant to return to search queries, Google has made a decisive move into the social media space with the recent launch of Google Plus. In just two weeks from the July 2011 launch, there were 10 million users, which reached 40 million by October. Facebook, currently have 800 million, and Twitter, 225 million users.
Yet, for many companies, running everyday business and trying to keep up with the pace of change online is difficult enough, let alone begin to understand the processes of an integrated e-commerce policy, which require bespoke web solutions if they are to successfully operate in the new multichannel and platform environment.
When measuring the performance for a successful campaign, search engine optimisation is still seen by most businesses as having the most significant impact - by up to 50 per cent, while pay per click accounts for around a quarter to a third of site traffic, while social media marketing performs at just below 25 per cent.
Social media traffic is often negatively viewed as lacking a purchasing intent and more as brand awareness. As a result, the opportunity to listen and learn how the new principles of online engagement actually work with audiences is missed by a traditional mindset still focused on ‘push’ marketing.
It is not clearly recognised that social networks are also channels to promote meaningful content and foster lead generation over long term and built up trusted relationships.
It is no longer enough to simply have a website without the possibility of interaction driven by a constant supply of fresh, relevant content. Business online presence must be socially active and provide rich, valuable ‘customer experience’ as well as traditional paid search and SEO.
However, while internet industry research finds that businesses are always keen to increase their SEO budgets, it’s common knowledge that increased competition will, invariably, focus very narrowly upon the most popular and used search terms within an industry sector. Thus, always making it extremely tough to rank for the selected keywords.
Google algorithm updates continue to downgrade low quality content sites and spam link farms with the intention of reducing the temptation for site owners to obtain illicit PageRank. Quality content assessed by human rating combined with Google's own automated user search data has more influence to determining whether a website is trustworthy and most relevant to human search criteria and content sharing.
The fundamental principles of relevant, valuable and above all, shareable quality content is now more crucial to social profiling and site authority than the days of basic search engine spiders indexing for site PageRank.