Search - His Dark Materials

24 October 2009

Back to UKFast in the media

Making sure your business can be found on the Internet is essential. Michael Taylor talks to some people who can help you.

At Insider's Business of Media Summit in September, one of the liveliest speakers was Alex Connock, chief executive of Ten Alps, and a passionate advocate of what Manchester can achieve as a media hub. As well as the BBC's relocation, he highlighted Manchester's other strengths: business media (including Insider and his own company) and search businesses.

To many, search engine optimisation (SEO) has something of the whiff of the dark arts about it. While it is the backbone of all good online marketing: you need to get your page noticed amid the noise of 108 million websites on the Internet with 29.6 billion web pages, you need to know what you're doing. As with any new technology or gimmick, there are plenty of experts who warn of the dangers of snake oil salesman.

Stephen Alexander, managing director of First Internet, a new media solutions agency in Hale, says "SEO was once viewed as a black art because without raising a company website's search engine ranking, its carefully crafted sites will remain largely unexposed."

SEO has finally earned its stripes as a credible marketing tool. And it's achieved that by the integrity that comes from hard facts and visible results. Unlike many other, less quantifiable, forms of marketing, SEO can be measured using refined analytics suites such as Google Analytics. With clear objectives and gauges for success - whether page ranking, unique user figures or conversion to purchase - the success of an SEO campaign is transparent and extremely cost effective.

For Manchester Internet business UKFast success comes down to speed. Jonathan Bowers, communications director, says: "Our network has been designed for speed. Our bandwidth is premium and our online highways open up extra lanes whenever necessary to keep the flow of traffic.

"Following client feedback we complemented our network speed with new hardware designed to offer individual businesses a huge injection of speed - the SEO Server. Our research indicated that it improves speed on our network by 35%. And we know our network is twice as our main competitors already.

"Launched in July 2009, it is designed to work with your other SEO activity. While we know speed is an important factor we also recognise that it works best as a part of the SEO strategy - not the whole strategy."

Michael Di Paola, operations director at Studio North - the independent brand design consultancy in Manchester - says search has become a big revenue stream for his business since 2007.

"We realise the potential of search marketing as a brand awareness and business development tool a few years ago. Since 2007 an additional £500,000 has been generated in fees. As Google becomes more intelligent and the algorithms evolve, sites that are user friendly in terms of copy, content and structure will also become more influential. Attempts to 'fool' search engines will become harder and the most relevant sites will prevail.

"Potential adopters of SEO should always ensure that month-end reporting goes beyond keyword ranking reports because thorough analysis of what is happening to the traffic is essential. Clients shouldn't become too obsessed with just rankings and false 'we will get you number one' promises, either. It's far better to rank highly on a few terms that are being searched for than hundreds that aren't. Conversion is king after all."

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