FORTUNE 500 STRUGGLES TO SUCCEED WITH SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

Research into some of the world's biggest companies has revealed that they are still struggling to be effective at natural search engine optimisation (SEO).

A study of top US brands showed that natural SEO - sometimes called organic search engine optimisation - is still in the early stages of development among the Fortune 500 group of public companies.

The research is ongoing and has been tracking more than four million keywords and phrases used in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

It checks the visibility of these keywords in the natural results pages of search engines (SERPs), and also investigates long-tail searches for these companies.

While the companies spend about £50,000 on almost 90,000 keywords, only about 21 per cent of these search terms feature in the top 100 natural search results.

For the most advertised search terms, almost half had low or zero visibility in natural search - and when five or more words were used in keyphrases, natural search visibility for these large brands dropped by nearly six per cent.

However, the study found that overall visibility of these bigger brands in natural search results has been improving quarter on quarter.

The study organisers are a US SEO firm. A spokesman said, "SEO is still in its infancy for the Fortune 500."

Results analysed were for the leading 500 US corporations which includes search engine optimisation (SEO) for banks, insurance companies, financial services businesses and retailers.