As SEO has become is a huge part of search engines and how results appear, watching trends is also just as critical. Heather Hopkins takes a look at the “credit cards” search data for the last four weeks.
The market share of US Internet searches for “credit cards” nearly doubled (+98%) in the past four weeks and were up 20% year on year last week. Searches for “credit cards” experience a fairly predictable pattern with spikes in August and in November with the November spike being the greater of the two. The likely reason for this is anticipation for holiday spending.
Alright, that makes enough sense to me. But what about SEO? Who cares about SEO since we’re just talking about credit cards? Google’s results, Yahoo!’s results, and Live.com’s results all show different data. This is natural, but let’s take a look at where it really differs.
We will look at this from the search engine optimization (SEO) view and from the financial view.
SEO View
Are credit cards a seasonal item that is only hot during one point of the year? Certainly not, but Christmas is often a time where it could get a little hotter in the industry. If you’re looking for a credit card, you are most likely going to use a search engine to find one. Whether you’ve seen the billions of ads on TV or not, you still want to know all the specifics of an account and what each credit card company has to offer you. Maybe they have a promo or maybe they have a low or zero annual fee.
The SEO view is this: Be on the first page or don’t be anywhere. As any SEO will should know, consumers will rarely look past the first page. Being on the first page is paramount in driving traffic to your site/product/company.
SEO is not everything though when it comes to search (and conversions.) If you have amazing rankings, but your design completely sucks, you will lose a large amount of conversions. Of the top 10 sites for “credit cards” on Google, let’s take a look at a couple of them.
CreditorWeb.com has a nice and aesthetically pleasing design. It makes me interested in looking further. However, CreditCards.com’s design is not. It makes me want to close the window immediately and skip to the next site. Even though CreditCards.com has the number one ranking on most search engines, it still might have a lower conversion rate than those with second or third place rankings — but have a better overall design.
Financial View
Taking a look at the financial view of things, we will dig into the PPC arena. PPC — also known as Pay Per Click — is very expensive for the financial industry. It’s expensive because the return is high. If companies can get those $1 or $2 clicks to convert into $500 or $5,000 returns, it is certainly worth their time to invest into the PPC avenue.
Looking at CreditCards.com again, they are doing both. They use both SEO and PPC to drive traffic to their site. CreditCards.com has a slightly better Alexa.com ranking than CreditorWeb.com does. Let’s look at one more visible metric for these two sites. Compete.com. When viewing Compete’s rankings, CreditCards.com is absolutely destroying their CreditorWeb.com competition by nearly a million visitors. These numbers are never exact, but they help give a general ballpark range.
In closing of the financial view of things, design, seo, and ppc all go hand-in-hand and are important. Conversions are by far the most important, but if you don’t have the traffic, you can’t get conversions. There needs to be an overall blend between those three elements I have just described.
