Marketing industry observers have noticed a further marked increase in attempted click fraud rate in recent months. A recent study produced by Click Forensics shows that the overall industry average click fraud rate was 18.6 percent, up from the 17.4 percent reported for the first quarter of 2010 and the 12.7 percent rate reported for the corresponding period last year. Some countries are more vulnerable to these attacks than others.

Click fraud is a cause of worry for a business considering pay-per-click marketing. It may still be a rare abuse of paid advertising but it is becoming more common. It has even led to legal action by one organisation against Google allegedly arising from malicious action by a competing organisation, deliberately clicking on the plaintiff’s adverts to increase the quantity of charged clicks for no benefit. It could be that with worries|concerns|problems related to paid advertising, it may be time to consider a different method, such as search engine optimisation. Your organisation should already be using search optimization techniques to increase organic search engine positioning of its pages, but it could be the time to raise the effort in that direction. Search platforms still dominate the way that many potential buyers search for services, so it is vital to attract potential buyers by making your organization’s website more noticeable on a search engine’s results page. There is enough anecdotal evidence to imply that many searchers actively bypass sponsored results and concentrate on those with a good organic search engine positioning. All the more reason to make the best of what search optimization has to offer.

The nature of search engine optimisation is that there can be competition from competitors for popular keywords but it is not as hard as with services such as AdWords or the corresponding offerings from other search platforms. Any reliable search optimization consultancy that you engage to promote your organization’s
website will be realistic about the amount of time it takes to have a visible impact on your rankings. Some basic mechanical changes can have an impact on even well-established websites, particularly those that have somehow managed to ignore the basic things that any good webmaster should consider as second nature, such as titles and significant descriptions on each page. The sort of changes that may be required to improve page loading speed may take longer to apply but can also be worthwhile.

It is the off-page promotion that your optimization specialist needs to perform that takes time. The publication of documents designed to comment on matters related to your organization’s website is a long-term method but should be productive without any interference from competitors.

It can be difficult to decide whether some forms of click fraud are truly suspect, as the generated clicks may arise from inexpensive pay-per-click advertising. One way to avoid this problem is to depend on the use of search engine optimisation methods to enhance your organic search engine positioning. This can attract more business at any time without being too influenced by the actions of competitors or being caught up in bidding wars for popular keywords in the pay-per-click operations.