Model for Auditing Search Engine Optimization for E-business

Abstract: E-commerce combines web technology with business economics. As of the last 10 years, online visibility for such online enterprises now heavily rely on the relationship between the own online sales platform and Search Engines for improved traffic consisting of presumable customers with the intent of acquiring products or services related to the customers’ needs. In 2008 an Internet behavioural analysis showed that over 90% percent of Swedish internet users make use of search engines at least once a week, stating that online visibility through the use of search engines now is a crucial business marketing aspect. To improve the relationship between online e-commercial platforms and search engines several applications exists within the technical field of Online Marketing – one being Search Engine Optimization (SEO), As a subset of Online Marketing, SEO consists mainly of three subareas; Organic Search Engine Optimization (Organic SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media Optimization (SMO). The true nature of how Search Engines operate to crawl and index web contents are hidden behind business secrets owned by the individual search engines operating online, leaving SEO auditors and operators to systematically “try-and-error” test for optimal settings. The first part of this thesis unfolds the SEO theory obtained from online sources, acclaimed literature and articles to discover settings in which SEO auditors and operator may use as tools to improve online visibility and accessibility on live websites to search engines. The second part sets on forming a theory driven work model (called the “PS Model”) to systematically work with SEO; structure for implementations and ways to measure the improvements. Third part of the thesis evaluates the PS model using a case study where the model is implemented upon. The case study uses a website (in this thesis referred to as “BMG”) owned by a company active in the biotechnological research and development field situated in Sweden (in this thesis referred to as “BSG”), which at the start of January 2010 was in need of SEO improvements as the relationship between the search engine Google had somewhat stagnated leaving several vital documents outside of Google’s indexing and the relevancy between performed search quires and site-wide keywords had been lowered. The focus of this thesis reside on bringing forth a work model taking in essential parts of SEO (Organic SEO, SEM and SMO), implementing it on the BMG platform to improve the website’s online visibility and accessibility to search engines (mainly focusing on Google), thus enhancing and solving the stagnated situation identified as such in January 2010 by the BMG site-owners – consequently validating the PS Model. In May 2010 it was shown that the PS model did improve site-wide indexing at Google and search queries containing the main set of keywords in use of BMG was improved in terms of relevancy (higher placing on search result pages).