Some of the SEO community’s priorities have been identified through a survey that asked participants what the most important search engine marketing tactic would be for the year ahead.
Virginia Nussey of Bruce Clay asked visitors to her blog in the SEO community to fill out the brief survey last week and has posted the results today. She listed 13 internet and search engine marketing tactics and asked people in the SEO community to indicate their relative importance in their overall efforts for the year ahead from #not important’ to ‘vital in 2010′.
Although Nussey’s sample was extremely small – 22 respondents from 9 different countries – it still provides an interesting insight into the direction that SEO and search engine marketing could take over the next year.
The tactic rated as least important by respondents was “targeting a new demographic”. Although this is fundamental to conventional marketing, Nussey suggests that this is less integral to SEO. She says that “it suggests that SEO’s understand the importance of creating content and targeting keywords based on the intended audience”.
Conversely, the most important tactic was on-site optimisation. “Not a single respondent marked on-site SEO among the two lowest priority levels” says Nussey “which was unique among all tactics listed…on-site optimisation is now a basic requirement of doing business online.”
More than half of those surveyed rated localised SEO on local business listings as important or vital in 2010. This indicates the growing capabilities of Google’s local search results and the growing incorporation of geotargeting into universal search results – and possibly the increasing use of mobile devices.
Similarly ‘Link building through strong content’ was rated as important or vital by over half of the respondents. This contrasts with the ‘Link buying’ tactic, which was viewed as not important or only somewhat important by the same proportion.
This is almost certainly due to Google’s crackdown on link buying over 2009 and the inherent risk associated with any future use of the tactic. From these responses, it is possible that content marketing may become a more integral part of SEO services as the links generated from quality content are generally of higher value than those bought or hosted on sites with poorer content.
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