By Jack Adams

The announcement of changes to the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) announced in George Osborne’s 2011 budget will see increased and easily accessible start-up capital for small business owners as well as R&D tax relief for UK SMEs. This coupled with Google’s organic search algorithm (also called ‘Panda’) update, which was made effective in the UK yesterday, gives SMEs a unique opportunity to drive sustainable growth online with this potential new funding; just as search marketing becomes even more effective for niche businesses.

In Google’s terms, the Panda update is designed “to reduce rankings for low-quality sites”. These are generally large content aggregator websites or ‘farms’ that “copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”. According to Google, as many as 12% of search results were affected, with many sites losing significant visibility online.

This isn’t a temporary measure either. Google’s Panda update has been a long time coming, forming part of a more concerted effort to improve the visibility of unique, quality content in Google’s organic rankings and ultimately improve the user’s search experience.

For every site that loses a ranking, one must gain; in this case, sites that purvey high quality, specialist content on a subject.

With most UK SMEs being experts in their respective fields, the opportunity to attain search presence at the expense of large content aggregators – which previously would outrank smaller websites based purely on the inbound links spread thinly across their mass of content – is now more possible than ever before. Coupling this with potentially increased capital as a result of the revised Enterprise Investment Scheme, UK SMEs now also have the funding to realise this opportunity too.

About the author and the company

Jack Adams is a senior search manager at Search Catalyst where he works on a number of client projects for a large range of firms, from small businesses to enterprise-level firms. Jack’s appreciation of both the different opportunities available to small businesses and the nuances of individual search markets mean he is well placed to develop successful SEO strategy tailored to the resources of small businesses. Jack has a background in statistics and the running of several SEO projects.

SearchCatalyst is a specialist search marketing agency that works exclusively with small and medium sized businesses. Developed by the country’s leading search marketing agency, Greenlight, SearchCatalyst offers affordable, tailor-made search marketing services to help SMEs attract more customers online. SearchCatalyst’s clients include Netmums , Ritmo Cars, Namesco, NotOnTheHighStreet.com and Thomas Mansfield LLP.

www.searchcatalyst.co.uk