Omoii asked 527 UK entrepreneurs a number of questions about their online marketing campaigns for 2013, with some interesting results

When asked if they were concerned with the potential impact Google has over their online business, 83% of respondents said they were worried, with the remaining 17% unaware of the potential implications to their website traffic.

Steve Pritchard, founder of Omoii “This was one of our regular research papers and was finished before the recent Penguin 2.0 update, however, the fact that business owners were worried of the impact to their business, indicates how many rely on one media owner to drive traffic and revenue”.

Google has updated the algorithm it uses to rank websites a number of times over the last 24 months. Many of these updates have had a significant impact to businesses that were not prepared.

The updates are developed to ensure that consumers get the most relevant results to their query, as such websites which are not deemed ‘a good user experience’ or do not comply with Google’s guidelines can see their rankings drop or even removed completely from the search engine.

Pritchard continues “It has been a turbulent year for Google updates; as such many businesses have seen a negative impact on their rankings. It’s great that business owners understand the importance of SEO and complying with the latest guidelines.”

Additionally only 25% of those asked said they were prepared and were ready to react to any changes, with 60% stating they would respond as the updates happened.

Pritchard concludes “The fact that 60% of businesses are not prepared and will look to respond to any updates as they happen is quite worrying. Many of the updates focused on penalising websites who had questionable practices in the past. As such businesses need to audit their past activity, to try and minimise impact, failing to do so could result in lower rankings”.

Google will be releasing a number of large algorithm updates over the coming months, focusing on removing web spam and increasing the quality of search engine results for a better user experience.

Omoii Ltd is a full service digital marketing agency based in Leeds, focusing on developing highly transparent digital marketing campaigns which get results.

For more information contact Steve Pritchard, steve@omoii.com or visit www.omoii.com for more information.