Business Week Goof
November 15th, 2005This Business Week article about Google Analytics is confused and confusing.
The author claims that Google's free analytics strategy "could spell disaster for search-engine optimization companies."
But she doesn't seem to know the different between search engine marketing firms, online advertising agencies, and search engine optimization companies.
She lumps everyone in web marketing that is not Google together into one mass and claims they are all in trouble.
Reputable search-engine optimization companies rely upon web analytics to know if what they are doing is working. The Google strategy might just save them money.
Search engine optimization firms design web pages that are optimized to get natural search engine traffic, not paid clicks. They don't manage online advertising campaigns.
They get free traffic from natural search results for their clients by making sure pages are designed right, have the right keywords on them, and are deemed relevant by the search engines because other high quality sites link to them.
While it's true that Google's entrance into the web analytics space could have a very negative impact on some companies, I don't believe for a minute that search engine optimization companies are among them.
If you can think of a reason why Google Analytics will hurt SEO firms (particularly since Google Analytics Terms and Conditions do not allow them to use analytic data from other sites to tweak their search engine algorithm or for any other internal purposes), please comment.
Posted in: Uncategorized
November 15th, 2005 at 18:07 PM
Well if Google's plan is to index all content/information in the world,
then yeah, SEO companies could be at risk becuase they
create and better manage site content for their clients' natural rankings. Granted,
not a big risk, but a risk none-the-less.
The greater risk is how non-proprietary SEO companies are. They are dependant
on external technology ie PageRank etc. I've seen sites benefit
from word of mouth networking that took a site's PageRank and
Alexa score off the charts with zero meta/content optimization. Traffic is king,
albeit natural or via optimized.
November 15th, 2005 at 19:51 PM
I agree with you on this 100%, Paul. I can't think of how the Google Analytics could possibly hurt SEOs. Quite the contrary, in fact, Google Analytics should help SEOs and all small businesses immensely. Urchin was a great tool before, and is actually better now than it was when they were selling it for $500/month (that was the price before Google bought Urchin). For the first time ever there is a free web analytics solution that actually provides actual busienss-grade web analytics! This will help SEO firms to better demonstrate the value they provide. It's possible that there were SEOs who were reselling the Urchin service, so I guess it could cut into that portion of their profits, but it won't put them out of business. No, the search engine marketing/optimization companies are safe for now, but if I'm a web analytics software company, I just messed my pants when I heard about Google Analytics.
November 17th, 2005 at 21:18 PM
I wonder how Omniture feels about this....
December 30th, 2005 at 14:43 PM
Looks good!
Go on like this and i will surely visit your site again sometime.
Post new comment