A new study has revealed that some of the largest organisations in the US are not performing well when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), despite investing significant amounts of money in their campaigns.
According to Conductor, a provider of SEO technology, Fortune 500 companies spent $51 million (£37 million) per day on SEO during the last three months of 2008, optimising their sites for almost 90,000 keywords in total.
However, despite this, less than 25 per cent of these companies appear in the top 100 search results for their keywords, the research showed.
Almost half of the companies studied were also found to have little or no search visibility for the keywords they advertised the most, while overall visibility dropped by about six per cent for key terms comprising five words or more.
Seth Besmertnik, chief executive of Conductor, said that "SEO is still in its infancy" for these large US companies.
Hitwise recently released statistics indicating that web users are making greater use of longer search queries on the web.
Searches consisting of at least eight words surged by 20 per cent between February 2008 and February 2009, while queries of five words or more also increased by nine per cent, the research firm said.
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