The Farmer update has shaken the world of SEO in the USA recently and was undoubtedly rolled out with the end user’s benefit in mind – ensuring the most relevant results for any given search. Hurray! Good for Google! Does that then mean that the latest changes to Adwords were rolled out for the benefit of its advertisers? Unquestionably, many of the changes that Google has made to Adwords over the last 18 – 24 months have been to the benefit of its users. As a PPC management company, we know as well as anyone the impact that ad extensions (for example) can have on CTRs and conversion rates; ergo users are finding paid results more and more relevant. However – and call me a cynic – I would argue that Google’s latest changes to Adwords are purely for the benefit of advertisers, and hence to the benefit of Google’s bottom line. So, let me explain my cynicism… Google is making its ads much more similar in appearance to the organic listings. Around 70-80% (depending on your sources) of search engine users ONLY use organic listings, so there is logic in disguising the paid listings as organic to trap the less savvy searchers. But how exactly has Google done it?

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For years we at Mediarun have been aware of the relationship between an increase in non-brand organic search visits and a direct correlation increase in brand search visits. Using standard tools such as Google Analytics this relationship in terms of traffic is relatively easy to establish and to get a handle on. Often convincing clients of this relationship has proved challenging but on the whole most informed client side marketers are happy to take this on board. Attributing a value on conversions however has traditionally proved a lot trickier. Writing on Econsultancy last week Paul Cook founder of Tag Man highlights some interesting points. The thesis of the article was that organic SEO and social media channels are being chronically undervalued. Based on ‘attributed conversions’  he identified that SEO should be credited with 14 times more value in terms of conversions and that social media is being undervalued by eight times.

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On March 1^st the ASA extends its remit to cover online marketing communications and claims that companies make on their own websites and other online areas they control. This means that parts of SEO will arguably fall under their remit: links out to other sites, copy, meta data visible to the visitor etc.

Needless to say, as complex as SEO is there are plenty of grey areas that we suspect the ASA will struggle to do anything about – there are so many more webpages than there are adverts. That said, we’ve made a wish list of the things we’d like to see them tackle, but know that they almost certainly can’t. Still, we can but hope…

There are plenty of examples of the below online but you’ll forgive me if I don’t help them out with a link.

1. We’ll take the “guaranteed results” bunch as read. For the googolth time (real number – look it up): no one can guarantee any search results unless they are the search engine. Also, it’s a meaningless promise. Tell you what, I’ll guarantee to get your site on page 1 for the keyphrase “large badger hats”. Think of the prestige!

2. SEM companies using Adwords positions screenshots as evidence of some kind of expertise. They are effectively saying “I have no respect for you, potential customer, you gullible fool.”

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