Rafael Sosa’s Weblog

Companies that don’t have Search Engine Optimized pages stand to get a pretty surprise if they decide to optimize them. The surge in traffic is substantial. On the flip side, companies built to rely on search engine traffic as its forte are playing a very risky strategy. When Google dances, a few businesses are bound to get stepped over.

And so, this is the latest example of a public company taking a hit in Search Engines – Answers.com Seeing Lower Traffic . In their report to investors, the company discloses a dip of “28% from levels immediately prior to the change.”  This has got to be a few million uniques, given the estimate of nearly 11 million monthly uniques according to Compete.com.

When investing in a content company, I’d look for:

– What percentage comes from Search Engines

– The distribution of search engines

– Percentage of type-ins

– Is the type-in trend positive

– Growth in backlinks from other reputable sources

– Percentage coming from advertising click throughs

Unless these questions are answered correctly, investors of Internet content companies might be going on a very wild rollercoaster ride.