Search Results – 3rd Most Trusted Online Information Source

Just wanted to highlight a post by Patrick Altoft at Blogstorm where he points out that in a recent survey from Forrester, search results are shown to be the 3rd most trusted online information source. This is good news for search marketers everywhere, especially those practicing SEO related techniques that help improve the visibility of web pages in the organic search results of engines such as Google, Yahoo and others.

Patrick states that “the findings are significant because they show that although people might not trust a corporate blog or news article in the mainstream media, they trust it a lot more if they found it at the top of Google’s search results.”

He further suggests that if you want to gain trust from an online audience, you should “start an SEO campaign and add consumer reviews to your product pages.”

Here are the official findings in graph format.

As you can easily see, ‘Company Blog’ is at the bottom of the list with only 16% support. Even personal blogs beat out corporate blogs. That is not to say a company should not publish a corporate blog but that they should ensure their blog is “search engine” friendly so that its posts have the best opportunity to position themselves well in the SERPs.