A Case for Natural Search

Netstacks SEO Strategist

They say that if you are not taking advantage of Search today you might want to find a long term disability plan for your company, as it will be seriously disabled and unavailable for anybody searching for your products or services online. The main reason is simple. It is not that everyone is taking advantage of Search related services but rather there are just a few companies that feel it is vital to their success.

Here is what we should consider and as an example let’s analyze a comparison from a local phone book. When we open a phone book and view a category of interest you will notice that there are many companies representing most any category, and of those companies only a fraction are “Search Aggressive”, meaning they employ teams, time and money into the business of Search.

However, we must consider that for every online search there are about 10 to 20 results per page that are very visible to the consumer, and that would include Natural Results and Sponsored Listings. Now here is the reason it is increasingly more difficult and expensive to rank naturally in the top ten.

First, factor the cities per state and there are 50 states and within each city there exist both local, regional and national business owners and then there are entrepreneurs and juniorpreneurs all trying to compete in varying degrees. If you add the increasingly influential international companies competing you begin to see that it only takes a small few to make a search phrase saturated and very valuable.

Do the numbers. Lets stay conservative and just as an average take 20 states X 4 competing companies per city within our example, not including International or Organic content from non-competing sites that get top rankings. That leaves 80 aggressive and highly focused companies trying to compete for the top ten in Naturally in Google’s Search Results. There is Yahoo and MSN all measuring things differently but for the most part they have similar results for attracting competition among rankings.

Here is good news! Of those 80 competing companies in our example about 20% will give up within a year looking for other ways to get visibility or will be satisfied ranking in 100th place, about 10% will try to beat the system and put on their “Black Hat”. Sure they may have a moment of glory but that seems to be very transitional and definitely not the road to take. So that leaves 50 companies that will try to do it right and jockey for rankings but that is until the 80 newbies try to compete next year, and they may never stop coming.
At this point what is a company who wants to be a “top ten competitor” to do?

Well, you can go Ad Words and that is hopeful for anyone able to spend very large amounts of money per month and can survive on marginal profits. A savvy campaign manager should be able to earn a profit from the monthly PPC Cost. Now that does not factor the Cost per Acquisition (CPA) when you add administration and fulfillment expenses.

Those with high margin products certainly can earn large profits from Ad Words but in most every situation Natural Search Dominates both CPC and CPA with the strongest Conversion Rates for most any industry and in many ways, has a powerful Validation effect for any consumer faced with choices. Those with Ad Words cannot pay for this validation, and it happens to be the strongest influencer on a consumer taking action.

What is the right solution? Start now with an aggressive attitude. At a recent Google event I found myself in a room with some of their top Computer Science Engineers who were fielding hundreds of questions from people searching for answers. I was very impressed with the responses as they were well thought but really told you nothing that they didn’t already know. Most of these questions were from the more aggressive companies and all the questions were complex. Eventually I asked a simple question, “What does it really take to be on top, what is it you like to see?” He simply stated, “Today we are really looking for anything or something unique.” I started to formulate a strategy to increase our clients “Value to Market Rating”.

**Tim is a Senior SEO strategist for Netstacks.com and is earning a reputation as an industry leader for managing and creating complex and aggressively successful SEO campaigns**