CoFounder & CEO of gShift Labs. gShift is a SEO software company with a different approach to SEO or search engine optimization called WPO or web presence optimization. Our vision it so change the way people think about and perform organic search optimization. We ’ re doing this by making it possible for non-technical people, primarily business users to understand, track, manage and measure their digital footprint, all with the objective to optimize for organic search. This is my 3 rd software company in 12 years and my team has performed hundreds of SEO projects over those years. My goal for you today is to understand the shift that is taking place in SEO and how to apply that to your business.
Interesting new data about searcher behavior from a recent User Centric eye-tracking study : Whether using Google or Bing, all 24 participants looked at the organic search results for their queries, but between 70% and 80% ignored the paid ads on the right side of the page. User Centric studied the search behavior of 24 “experienced users” of both Google and Bing, all between 18 and 54 years old. They were asked to do eight searches — four on Google (with Google Instant turned off) and the other four on Bing.
To give you an idea of the size of gShift ’ s market opportunity we have to take a look at two areas: the traditional Organic Search market as well as the Social Media market. According to Forrester Research the size of both markets is growing significantly. This slide gives you a visual of the Organic Search market which is set to grow to over $5 billion by 2014. Keeping in mind that this is only US data from surveying only 867 agencies and marketers.
Here ’ s why organic search is so important. Because over 95% of searchers don ’ t go beyond the first page of search results. iCrossing.com, a leading marketing agency in the US published a study in February 2010 where their data included 8.9 million queries over a nine-month period. They found that the sites surveyed received more than 95% of all of their non-branded organic search traffic from page one results across all three major search engines.
According to Forbes Ad Effectiveness Survey from 2009, SEO is the most effective online marketing tactic for generating conversions according to senior level marketing executives.
So what exactly is your web presence and Web Presence Optimization? Web Presence Optimization is about optimizing all the content about your organization on the web for organic search. So it used to be that you only had to worry about optimizing your web site for organic search results, but things have gotten pretty crazy in the past couple of years. You now have to optimize your blog posts and you micro marketing websites. Press release content and email marketing needs to be optimized. You need to worry about optimizing content for your organization in Google Local. You need to worry about Blog and Social Aggregators plus Diggit and Stumble Upon. And just recently all hell has broken loose and you now need to optimize your organization ’ s content across all the social media and social networking channels including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube because believe it or not, Google actually cares more about your social presence than your corporate web site. So if your web presence doesn ’ t look like this (entire image above), and if you ’ re not optimizing it every single day, then you ’ re missing out on the 70% of searchers that click on he organic side of search. By the way, if you feel overwhelmed you ’ re not alone. This (above image) is humanly impossible to manage on a daily basis which is why you need the gShift software. So our software analyzes your web presence then provides you with English language recommendations on what to do next in order to rank higher organically. It then also tracks the results over time. So who is feeling the pain the most?