April 2010: It seems like no one — except perhaps the very rich — has escaped the wrath of the Great Recession. (Many might even say they profited from it, but I digress). People have lost jobs, and businesses have seen their revenues decline, in some cases to the point of going out of business. One thing's for sure: Times have changed.

Between 1999 (the year I first used web traffic profitably) and about 2008, generating sales leads through what is now called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, was a relatively straightforward matter of organizing your website like a resume; making sure your "best guess" keywords were in all the right places and that you had plenty of content and web pages to reinforce those keywords. Making at least one page of your website appear on Page One of search results for important search words was a bit of work, but very doable.

That was Then. This is Now.

I'm hearing more and more often these days from potential clients that they are not appearing on Page One of search results like they did a year or two. Now, before you remind me of the Great Recession — and indeed, it was my first thought as to the reason for the traffic drop off — what people are telling me is that the same searches make their web page appear much further down in search results than they used to in the past (as opposed to a simple drop off in web traffic). A few years ago, they tell me, paying casual attention to SEO yielded the results they needed, and that today, that is not the case.

Just two days ago, I spoke with a CEO who said, despite having 90,000 inbound links to their four year-old [domain name], they rarely appear at the top of search results like they used to even a year ago. What happened, he asked me. Is there some big change that search engines have made?

Another prospect told me she feels like she's "on a big lake where there are lots of fishing boats and no fish".

I'm pretty certain I can help both these prospective clients, but let's talk about what's happening in the do-or-die world of search results.

Musical Chairs

Do you remember playing Musical Chairs when you were younger? (Skip this paragraph if you know the game). If there were 19 friends at the party, 18 chairs (i.e., one fewer than there were people in the game) were placed in a circle, facing outwards. The players marched around while the music played, and as soon as it stopped — caused by a parent pressing the pause button on the cassette player — each player in the game tried to sit down on one of the chairs. The one unfortunate child left standing was eliminated, a chair was removed, and the cycle repeated. Eventually, there were two children and only one chair. When the music stopped, the one who sat down won the game. It was every bit as exciting as World of Doom on an XBOX 360 today. No really.

It's feeling a bit like Musical Chairs all over again these days. The only place in search results worth appearing in is probably among the first three positions at the top of the very first page of search results. (It's called the "Google Golden Triangle", by the way). And depending on the characteristics of your particular industry, you might be playing musical chairs with eighteen other businesses but with only three chairs in the circle. In this "zero sum game" of Search Engine Optimization, the more competition there is, the more losers there are.

What changed?

For starters, more people today understand the basics of SEO. Two years ago, when I published Web Traffic Magnet, it was the only book of its kind ("an easy-to-read step-by-step guide on how to improve your search traffic for under $12"). Now, there are dozens of such books; some of them remarkably similar to my original book in fact (I don't feel bitter about that, I swear). And by all appearances, many of them are selling at comparable levels to those of my own book. So, a lot of people are reading these books, and likely putting SEO to work on their website. More significantly, there are countless other resources, many of them on the web, that also help prospective business owners compete for traffic to their website. It seems like the new euphemism for "unemployed" is "SEO Expert". I'm kidding about that last bit of course, but you know what I'm getting at.

We know that the right kind of web traffic can be worth a lot of money, and this has attracted many individuals and organizations to create "directories" that channel certain types of search traffic towards a list of potential destination sites. For example, instead of 150 attorneys' websites in the Seattle area fighting for the top position in search results, an organization may coalesce inquiries about legal issues in the Seattle area into a single website under the domain findaseattleattorney.com, and dedicate themselves to making it appear at the top of search results. They might then charge any interested area attorney a monthly fee for placement in that directory. If you're not in the directory, or in one of several that clog up the first page of search results, no one will find your website.

What does this migration towards directories mean to search results?

It means that instead of seeing a list of discrete service and product providers displayed on the first page of search results, we might see a list of (mostly) directories. It has not happened to all areas of industry, but this trend towards consolidation appears to be very real. It reminds me of how our planets were formed by loose material consolidating as the solar system cooled. Did you know that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was where scientists say another planet should have formed? The material just didn't reach critical mass. There I go, digressing again! Anyway, examples of "directories" are Yelp, ServiceMagic, SuperPages, CraigsList, as well as any number of Affiliate organizations wishing to cash in on search traffic as it flows by. This is a Big Change, and it speaks to the diminishing chances small organizations in certain types of industry have of ever appearing at the top of search results in the future.
(I'll talk about what they call "Local Search" at another time).

Who wins? Who loses?

If you are planning a sales generation project through Search Engine Optimization, consider the following:

• First, there must be a market for your product. By "must be a market" I mean people have to be spending money today on solving the problems your products or services solve. Your product might be very powerful, and well worth the money, but if no one is spending money, they'll never come looking for you.
• If your profit margins are tight, you may not have the funds to muscle your business to the top of search results, because the increase in web traffic required to cover the costs would be too high. By the same token, your competitors likely face the same challenges, so competition for the top of search results might not be so bad.
• If you only have one product with a small profit margin, and thus have little chance to cross-sell other products or services to visitors, the average profit on each visitor you attract is more likely to be less than the cost of getting that visitor.In this case, consider selling your product through an established retail site like Amazon.com instead of going it alone on an SEO project to attract buyers directly.
• If your profit margins are high, it is likely that your competitors' profit margins are also high, and they too will have the money to compete vigorously for the top position in search results. High tech, pharmaceutical, financial services, and other "high intellect" industries usually equate to a more costly challenge to get to the top of search results.
• If you have many related products, for example, if you sell a dozen different products relating to the care and maintenance of pet dogs, once you get a single visitor to your website, you have a number of ways to cross-sell to that visitor. Selling an average of 1.3 products per customer might be profitable, where selling an average of 1.0 products per customer might not be. Walmart, for example, although their margins are slim (that's what they tell us, anyway) sell so many products online, their investments in the web (millions of dollars) might look like a rounding error on their Profit & Loss Sheet.
• If you already have a physical storefront, the numbers bode well for your chances on the web if you already ship products. The physics of a so-called Bricks-n-Mortar business is often similar to those of the web. If you have enough products at enough of a margin for an existing market, you have a good chance of profit from a concerted SEO campaign.

What to do, what to do!

There is always a cost to acquiring a new customer. In SEO, however, time can be as effective as money, and there are many things you can do to improve your chances of appearing at the top of search results if you have more time than money. Sure, it has gotten harder in the past few years, not to mention the fact that buyers are shy in any recession, but even if there is only one chair left in the game, someone gets to sit on it. You just have to have your rear end in the right place every time the music stops.

The principles of SEO have not changed in a decade. Sure, there's Twitter and Facebook and blogging, but they are all just new types of mousetraps. It's still all about "who knows you" (versus "who you know"). If you do everything you can on the list of action items in Web Traffic Magnet, you'll very likely find your way back to the first page of search for important search words. The next time we meet, ask me for a free copy. I have one with your name on it.

Stop by again soon.
Liam