Michigan-based Oneupweb (www.oneupweb.com), a leading search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM) firm, published on September 30 its second study of leading companies' search engine optimization usage.
The study, available free at Oneupweb.com under the Articles section, reveals that only a dozen use SEO well, and more than a third aren't using SEO at all, and discusses the risks those retailers face in ignoring search engine optimization benefits, among them lost sales, lost market share, brand equity erosion, increased marketing costs and reduced profit margins.
The study identifies four levels of SEO participation: well-optimized sites, moderately-optimized sites, nominally-optimized sites and those sites not optimized at all. After reviewing each site for signs of optimization, Oneupweb searched for the retailer in Google and Yahoo search results. As expected, well-optimized sites placed higher on search engine results pages than those that only used basic SEO tactics or overlooked it altogether.
Oneupweb president Lisa Wehr said that Oneupweb shows how companies can use search engine marketing to get ahead in sales, profit and brand equity, and how few are doing it, that companies ignoring SEO are giving their business to competitors, and that Oneupweb hopes the number of well-optimized sites will have doubled by next year.
