Brits like a bargain it seems and nothing pleases them more, when search marketing, to compare the price of goods and services with one another.

Which is why, some of the most successful websites in the UK are based on comparison engines. They are very clever at not only providing a comparison for all manner of products, but then monetising that comparison for the benefit of their own bottom lines.

And one of the first, and still biggest areas of comparison, was the car insurance industry.

This particular sector of commerce is a internet marketing man’s dream. Millions of people need car insurance and there are thousands of companies and products out there offering to take the job on.

In other words, this is prime comparison country, but all a consumer need do, is create a profile of the type of insurance they require, and then press the search engine. Then, seemingly by magic, all the different choices and combinations are displayed before the viewers eyes.

This is quite sophisticated search marketing and it allows users to see all the various options open to them within one website. It is also very good for the comparison websites themselves, who are rewarded following a click through from their website into the website of the company offering a particular policy.

The downsides are of course that some of the best players (either too big, or too specialist), are not included within the comparison websites and, it is said, that searches can be distorted for companies that offer the best commission.

It does seem to work though!

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Indeed, search marketing in reality emulates more traditional types of marketing which apart from the major companies that can afford huge budgets, always comes down the question of how to get enough exposure for a smaller company’s products and services.

Search marketing is concerned with getting a company (or more usually its products and services), near the top of a search engine index page.

The problem comes down to the ever growing size of the internet. Currently, the largest search engine is basically a huge index of all the websites that exist on the internet. It is similar to the index at the back of a large book, but the thing it doesn’t do, it place the listings in alphabetical order.

Now, arguably, that might be fairer, but then you’d have every company named Aardvark, or AAAA Holdings. Nor would that system allow Google to fully monetise its search engine. So Google has created rules – commonly called algorithms – which index a website (in theory), in terms of its popularity. And this is judged on a number of secret criteria, although it’s well known that it’s basically popularity based. Thus, Google will look at number of website visitors and who links to a particular website, to judge where that site should be placed in their internet index.

So that’s search marketing basics – it’s gets more complicated the more you try and figure out how to please Google and your website visitors!

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Now, all those owning a combine harvester needn’t worry, because in this case, farmers refer to websites that are there to provide banks of content, not for the reader, but to attract traffic which can be monetized by page ads and affiliate campaigns.

In other words, content farms are in the Google cross-hairs and webmasters will do well to ensure that their sites do not resemble these type of sites, otherwise they could be penalised.

A content farm is basically a website which has masses of freshly updated content which is either of mediocre, or poor quality, and spread across a huge number of websites. Indeed, it might also include good quality content, but is there not to sell a product, or service from the pages, but to support ads, affiliates, or links.

The attack from Google comes in the shape of a search algorithm change which has been labelled the Farmer Update. It has caused consternation amongst the SEO consultancy professions, a number of which are complaining that many legitimate content farm sites are being unfairly penalised by having their rankings adjusted downwards.

The other issue is that links from such websites could also have been depreciated, although experts believe that the old links will remain true to their original values, whereas new links won’t get the weight they once did.

But it’s not just content farms that will be hit; sites that have high volume, low value content (which is deemed to be duplicated, or not relevant), could lose their rank as well.

So, farmers beware, the good days could be over. And SEO consultancy operations will have to take note as well; things are changing!

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