(Newswire.net — April 29, 2015) Salt Lake City, UT — There’s no doubting the importance of ‘search visibility’ for many of today’s businesses, particularly those that may rely on traffic or e-commerce transactions. A company’s position on search engine result pages (SERPs) can have a huge effect on traffic, sales and, ultimately business value.
Should investors start taking more notice of search visibility when considering their portfolios?
The birth of the SEO industry
Google are the undisputed rulers of search, currently holding almost 90% of the global market. Google have led the way in serving the best search results, the results you see when you Google something are generated using an intricate algorithm that takes multiple factors into account to provide users with the most relevant and accurate results possible.
A whole industry has developed over the last 15 years focused on optimising website content to improve website visibility on Google. Known as ‘search engine optimisation’ (SEO), this process is now a common practice in marketing departments globally.
Over the years SEO has been abused to artificially improve companies’ SERP positions, and Google are constantly battling what they call “spammy” practices by punishing companies that breach its quality guidelines. They do this by issuing penalties that affect search visibility, which can range in severity, but have been known to be absolutely crippling.
Linking SEO to site traffic and financial performance
In 2014, the vacation booking company Expedia was hit by a severe Google penalty that saw its search performance drop by 25%, which resulted in a 3.9% drop in their share price.
So, could websites’ compliance with Google’s rules be leveraged to make investment decisions? One concern might be “how can we predict when a site’s search visibility will drop?”. There are actually various ways.
Google is constantly striving to improve the quality of its search results, so it frequently issues updates to both its guidelines and its algorithms. This can result in websites that were previously compliant becoming non-compliant, and therefore suffering a drop in search visibility.
One of Google’s most impacting changes was its ‘Panda’ update in 2011, which reportedly affected a massive 12% of all search queries – to put that in perspective, that’s about 42,000 searches every second – with some sites seeing traffic from Google drop as much as 94%. The update was designed to penalise sites that had “thin” or duplicate content, with a view to promoting genuine, unique content.
This is just one example of Google’s algorithm updates, all of which receive regular updates themselves. If you’re interested you can see all of Google’s algorithm updates here, with a brief summary of what changes were made for all updates since 2011.
SEO performance can be impacted every time a change to the algorithm is made. So, with diligent SEO analysis, it should be possible to capitalise on the gains and losses companies make as a result of these updates.
What you should look out for
1.Google and the SEO community
Handily, Google will sometimes announce updates before deployment, giving enough time to research which companies are likely to be most affected. However, this isn’t always the case.
Luckily, there’s a dedicated community who closely monitor search trends, in order to detect when a change to the algorithm is made. They will then contact Google, and post an update on their site. As well as Google’s own blog, keep an eye on the Search Engine Land and Moz blogs, as they’ll often be the first to post news.
2. SEO winners and losers
Changes in search visibility are unlikely to have an immediate impact on stock prices, but this will occur over time as a knock-on effect of reduced site traffic. So, it can be possible to speculate on investments using Searchmetric’s winners and losers information.
The site allows you to see the top ten highest gaining and losing companies in terms of search visibility across 25 different countries. Searchmetrics calculate SEO visibility using a complex algorithm that’s updated in real time, but the table is produced on a weekly basis. Purchasing a full account will allow you to see real time SEO visibility for individual domains.
Once you’ve identified a company whose site has taken a big SEO gain or loss, you can then monitor their stock prices to make a decision on investments.
3. Backlinks
One of the key ways that Google ranks websites is by analysing the number and quality of links that point to that site – these are known as ‘backlinks’. The idea is that the more sites that reference a particular site, the greater its reputation and authority.
The guidelines around backlinks have changed a lot, with the biggest change coming in 2012 with the ‘Penguin’ update, which was introduced to penalise companies that were artificially increasing the number of links pointing to their website.
Penguin is frequently updated to further promote natural links, and continues to catch companies out. You can use tools like Majestic SEO to analyze backlinks to see if companies are complying with Penguin’s rules, as and when updates are made.
4. Website content
Another factor that Google analyses when ranking web pages is the amount of content included in the page that’s relevant to what’s being searched for. The idea being that the more relevant words – or keywords – that are included in a page, the more relevant it is likely to be for a particular search term.
The problem with this in the earlier years of Google is that website content started to become so focused on including these keywords that it was no longer actually useful, meaning “spam” content was ranking higher than genuine writing.
The Panda update was introduced to deal with keyword spam and duplicated site content. Like Penguin, it’s frequently updated, and often makes a large impact on SEO visibility. You can take advantage of these changes by analysing keywords using tools like Moz’s Open Site Explorer.
About the Author: Andrea enjoys spending her time writing about the issues closest to her heart including home improvement, business and youth alcohol/drug addiction. Follow her on Twitter@ https://twitter.com/jones05_a