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“You have to accept that it is a moving target,” said Paul Way, digital-business director for CMP Information, a division of the publisher United Business Media that houses more than 40 trade websites, including Building.co.uk.

“That is good for the consumer but as a publisher it needs work to stay on top of.”

Most companies achieve SEO by peppering their websites with keywords that Google’s technology can easily read.

“You have to be thorough and you have to be consistent,” said Way.

He cites SEO work done with the search agency Leapfrogg on its Info4security site that pushed up its top five appearances in industry word searches from 256 last September to 762 by January. Approval by Google News also raised its profile.

Such results mean that spending on SEO grew faster than pay-per-click online advertising — also known as paid search — for the first time in Britain last year.

SEO addresses “natural” search results that appear in the left column of the Google page, while pay-per-click relates to keywords it auctions to create the sponsored links ranked on the right-hand side and often shaded at the top. For a decade, these have been the moneymaking meat of the search industry.

The specialist online site E-consultancy said spending on SEO rose by 68% to £250m in the UK last year, compared with a 56% rise in pay-per-click spending to £1.97 billion.

Microsoft, which last week souped up its own search site with an easier-to-use system, thinks that pay per click in Europe, Middle East and Africa could grow by only 20% next year. There are two reasons for this.

First, pay per click is extremely buoyant compared with traditional media and its cost is rising quickly. Search marketers argue there is little point in, say, banks paying £15 to Google every time they want to be connected to a customer that has entered “credit card” into a search form. With a conversion rate of one in 100, it takes a long time to earn a return. Even more targeted searches, say for “student credit card”, have shot up in price.

Firms have also worked out that more than half of all web searches do not involve a transaction. To appeal to window shoppers, they are better off polishing their reputation and profile with future trade in mind.

And then there are increasingly shrewd customers to contend with. They often take against being spoon-fed overtly commercial messages by never clicking on a result from the right side of the page.

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