Marketing industry commentators have noticed a further marked increase in attempted click fraud rate in recent months. A recent report 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 quarter last year. Some countries are more prone to these practices than others.

Click fraud is a cause of worry for a business considering pay-per-click promotion. It may still be a rare abuse of bought advertising but it is becoming more common. It has even resulted in legal action by one business against Google apparently arising from wilful action by a rival business, 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 bought advertising, it may be time to assess a different strategy, such as search engine optimisation. Your business should already be using search optimization skills to enhance natural search engine positioning of its pages, but it could be the time to increase the effort in that direction. Search engines still dominate the way that many intending customers search for goods, so it is vital to attract intending customers by making your enterprise’s domain more prominent on a search engine’s results page. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to imply that many searchers deliberately overlook sponsored results and concentrate on those with a high natural 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 rivals for popular keywords but it is not as hard as with services such as AdWords or the corresponding services from other search engines. Any trustworthy search optimization consultancy that you engage to promote your enterprise’s
domain will be realistic about the amount of time it takes to have a visible impact on your rankings. Some basic physical alterations can have an impact on even well-established websites, especially those that have somehow managed to overlook the simple things that any good webmaster should consider as second nature, such as titles and significant descriptions on each page. The sort of alterations that may be needed 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 do that takes time. The writing of features created to comment on matters related to your enterprise’s website is a long-term technique but should be productive without any interference from rivals.

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