Here is my eighth annual survey of the top UK companies for
search marketing and optimisation based on the rankings they have
achieved for themselves for the 5 most searched key phrases.
This year I have used the Google keyword tool to find the most
searched phrases in the UK. It shows the following number of
searches in November 2008. Note that Google says these are good
indications rather than accurate numbers.
| Search Phrase |
No of searches
Nov 2008 |
| SEO |
368000 |
| Search Marketing |
135000 |
| Search Optimisation |
90500 |
| Search Engine Optimisation |
74000 |
| Search Engine Marketing |
49500 |
I checked the top 10 listings on the UK results
pages in Google.co.uk, uk.Yahoo.com and Live.com (=MSN).
According to Hitwise, these search engines accounted for 75%, 4%
& 3% respectively of November UK searches. In fact
the second UK search engine, with 14% of the market, is actually Google.com. However, since you cannot search effectively
for UK specific data on Google.com, I left this out.
I then counted the number of top 10 positions
achieved by each company but weighted them according to the
market share of each search engine. Clearly it is now much
more important to get a top Google ranking than the same
position with an engine with just a minor share of the market.
Here are the champions:
So congratulations to these 10 companies -
especially those who have proved their consistency for at least
2 years. Google lists 13.3 million UK search results for
'SEO' so it is a really competitive market. Proven
performance in achieving good rankings is of course only one
factor in making your choice of supplier. But most of the other
factors are not so open to direct competitive challenge.
In 2009 all markets are going to be more
competitive so make sure you have the right help to improve your
profitability.
Good Luck and Happy New Year
Stephen Orr
