Search engine gives good returns at tax time John Bolakis
TAX time is here again and getting help with your tax returns usually means visiting the same tax agent you used last year.
However, if are looking for information on tax returns on the Web, a search engine is the way to go.
People looking for tax return assistance on the Web are more likely to visit a leading search engine.
In fact, 87% of people online use search engines as their primary research tool to find websites.
The tables included show how accountancy firms that offer tax return services are performing in search engines.
Surprisingly, some of the largest tax accounting firms are not performing well at all.
We limited our investigation to the following keyword phrases found by www.webwombat.com.au to discover the five most commonly-searched keyword phrases in relation to tax: ‘Australian taxation office’, ‘tax’, ‘Australian tax office’, ‘tax returns’, ‘tax return’.
The Australian Taxation Office (www.ATO.gov.au) came first overall with a whopping 24.12% of rankings-based reach for most popular search engines used for searching the web by Australians. Top rankings included number one in Yahoo.com, Alta Vista Australia, AOL and Looksmart Australia for ‘Australian Taxation Office’.
Tax Returns Australia (Taxreturnsaustralia.com.au), which came second with 13.53% rankings-based reach, performed very well for an unknown brand. Top rankings included number one in Yahoo.com and Anzwers Australia as well as number two in Google.com and Lycos.com for ‘tax returns’.
The third best performer was Etax Online (Etax.com.au). Top rankings included number two in Anzwers Australia for both tax return and tax returns (plural). The next best ranking was number three ranking in Webwombat Australia for ‘tax returns’.
Surprisingly, apart from the Australian Taxation Office, which has the advantage of competing for rankings with a gov.au domain name, the next two most likely found websites were unknown brands.
Why? Well, the unknown brands Taxreturnsaustralia and Etax Online (not related to the ATO’s etax service), were found to have optimised their website in addition to scoring highly on the link popularity scale, with 34 and 36 respective links from other websites pointing to their home page (according to Google).
In comparison, the ATO had a massive 2,840 websites pointing to its home page—difficult to compete with that.
The top five search engines used to search the web by Australians, in order of market share, include: Google (39.18%), Yahoo (10.35%),
Alta Vista (7.72%), Ninemsn (5.30%), and Anzwers (3.62%). Australian based Webwombat is the 12th most popular Australian search engine used by Australians (0.95%) (Source: Nielsen//NetRatings August 2001).
Next month, we will be looking at which online broker offers appropriate visibility to the online community searching for trading, stocks, shares, futures, options, bonds and securities advice and investment opportunities.
John Bolakis is Chief Technical Officer of BMCOptimise and writes a regular column for B&T Weekly about search engine optimisation. E: john@seo.com.au.
