Our world is becoming more and more digitised every day and it’s almost as though we don’t even notice as we take up the newest app or the latest piece of hand-held technology – it’s just a way of life nowadays.
But whilst the public take these things for granted, there are thousands of SEO companies that are working behind the scenes to beat competitors to the top rankings for themselves and their clients.
Since its beginnings in 2004, there is no question that the search engine optimisation landscape has change dramatically. There was little knowledge that it was even a worthwhile practice in the early 2000’s and social media certainly hadn’t hit its straps yet to become the global necessity that it is today.
Today, you would struggle to find a successful business without a well-designed website and numerous social media accounts as they constantly seek to attract new customers. The simple reason for this is that the internet provides direct access to 3.2 billion people across the globe making it the most cost effective and efficient method of marketing.
On top of this, these businesses are sure to have an in-house optimisation team or be working with a digital marketing agency to ensure that their social media accounts and website stay relevant and continue to gain traffic and facilitate conversions.
The Australian digital agency, SEO Shark Pty Ltd, knows exactly what it is like to achieve optimisation success with over 2000 clients having reached the first page of Google results. But it hasn’t been easy and it certainly isn’t getting any easier as the competition heats up.
Dirty tactics are coming in to play now as the organic optimisation scape becomes more and more important to businesses. Companies are now activity seeking to sabotage their competitors in order to achieve a higher ranking through irrelevant and dodgy backlinks to things like click-fraud in the paid landscape.
Dodgy backlinks to a business’s website will eventually be found by Google and likely induce a penalty resulting in a plummeting down the rankings. It can be extremely hard to find a way back up as Google now has a close eye on your business for any illegal tactics.
A plummet down the rankings is likely to cost many businesses thousands of dollars, if they act quickly, and could be more if they fail to identify it in its early stages and make amends.
Things like click-fraud are equally punishing for a business and cost valuable marketing dollars. Click-fraud is commonly done by an organisation to remove a competitor’s Google ads from searches by using up the daily budget. This ensures that the given company’s ad will no longer appear in relevant searches for the rest of the day.
Lucas Bikowski is the head of SEO Shark Pty Ltd which is a pioneer in the digital marketing industry in Australia. He is a PhD in economics from University of Sydney. He has been working on identifying these dirty tactics in their early stages to protect clients from any potential attacks.
With a strong track record, Bikowski knew it was a target for these types of practices and as of November last year this agency developed software that is able to identify and eradicate the effect of businesses involved in click-fraud.
The software simply identifies the difference between real and fake clicks and will no longer show the ad to those noted as fake clicks ensuring the ad remains on the relevant search engine results pages.
As a fast growing agency, SEO Shark is leading the way for others in the digital marketing industry as it looks to stamp out these dirty tactics and guarantee protection of clients so that they remain at the top of the rankings.
