Top UK brands 'poor' at natural search

by Gareth Jones, Revolution UK 20-Aug-08, 10:25

LONDON - One in five of the UK’s biggest spending advertisers has fundamental technical problems on their website limiting its visibility in Google’s natural search rankings.

Research commissioned by Revolution reveals that the majority of brand advertisers do not have an effective search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, leaving them with a poor online presence.

The first results of i-level's VisRank survey show that half of the UK's top FMCG, retail, telecoms and automotive advertisers have poor or no copy in their natural search listings, leaving internet users with no idea of what content is on that company's website.

Almost half of all sites reviewed ranked ‘poor' in terms of SEO, with few sites being found via Google searches on generic keywords relating to their brand or products.

Some sites could not even be found via searches relating to their own brand, while one third of big brand websites contained duplicate content that could result in penalties from Google for trying to fix the natural search results.

According to the research, the more a brand spends on advertising, the worse it fares in the SEO rakings. Of all the brands surveyed only B&Q was found to have a strong SEO strategy.

"Natural search is vital because it provides consumers with access to brands they are searching for," said Mark Creighton, managing director of i-level. " It also reduces the cost of paid-search, which is an increasing budget line in today's marketing line-up."

i-level's VisRank survey examined 37 brand sites from 29 of the UK's top 100 spending advertisers, according to figures from Nielsen Media Research.

Comments

Andy Derrick - 10/09/2008

I was shocked to read that the majority of brand advertisers do not have an effective SEO strategy. To increase their visibility in natural search listings, brands must ensure they have an SEO friendly website both structurally and from a content perspective.

While the main objective of ecommerce websites is to sell products, this usually involves little content for search engine spiders to crawl and index to appear in the natural search listings. There are several strategies that brands can adopt to combat this problem and elevate the position of the various pages of their website in the natural results.

First, brands should create content rich landing pages that feed into the individual product pages via keyword friendly links. Brands should also include pages that focus on ‘selling’, explaining the various qualities and benefits of the products on offer. These pages can also be fully optimised with keywords that the site should appear for and keyword friendly links to the product listings.

The structure of a website is also crucial. Brands must ensure they have SEO friendly URLs, keyword-rich meta descriptions and page titles that ensure the pages appear in the natural search listings.

Andy Derrick

Managing Director Motive Technology

www.motiveshop.com