You delve into Google Analytics on occasion and you marvel at how visitors are finding your website with words you would never have dreamed of using yourself and you may think how?

This could lead you into investigating further which will eventually lead you on to the right path to turning your online presence into an even more competitive proposition.

All of a sudden you notice a dramatic drop in visitors to your site, you understand the basics of how search works and you know that those visitors to your site have taken a dive, dramatic enough to have you scratching your head and thinking why?

You have done nothing with your site since it was launched, you have added content day after day or whenever time allowed. From what is already a stressful situation in managing every other aspect of your business, you don`t have time to go looking for the whys, to begin with if you have never even delved into SEO, so how are you supposed to know you have some kind of duplicate content or paid link penalty? Do you even know what they are? Who would tell you if you had?

You are not alone, and in all probability that number is growing, there are an estimated;

• 6.9 Billion people on the planet
• 2.1 Billion of those have internet access

Of those 2.1 Billion internet users there are an estimated 129 Million+ domains. That number would increase furthermore if you also consider that there are currently 306 TLD`s. So a conservative estimate of 200 million+ commercial websites if we take into account country specific TLD`s.

So the potential of 2.1 Billion consumers worldwide with a rough estimate of 9 Million active site owners serving content across 100 Million active websites.

Those numbers fall down fairly quickly because there is currently no published data on how many active site owners there are on the planet. It would be a very hard number to accomplish or conclude, hence an estimate.

Now consider that of those commercial websites there will be quite a few of those estimated 9 million site owners competing in the same search spaces of travel, financial, gaming etc at any level of SEO. Does that leave more than 191 Million websites left untouched by any kind of SEO? or from another angle less than 1 in 20 websites are even aware of what SEO is?

There is a point to this post, hang in there.

I suggested that not every business owner online has either time nor inclanation that SEO exists. So what happens when a major search engine tweaks their algorithm, which results in re-ranking of sites based on factors to counter act spam efforts. Yes there will always be collateral damage to sites.

My main concern though is that of the collateral damage, what of the site owners that had no clue that they were supposed to use a “nofollow” on a paid link, or that they have canonical issues because they have 40 product pages that look the same to the spiders crawling there site.

How many site owners go beyond the use of their free Google Analytics package and even enable Webmaster Tools?
What of the sites that do not even use an analytics package at all? As a business owner you may want to look into integrating Google Analytics or any number of other paid or free analytics packages.

How about a simple message from within GA to notify site owners that there has been a change to the guidelines or an update to the algorithm that may effect how they could be found in organic search. Again this would be helpful to the reported 12 million sites that are using GA.

Thoughts?