David Towers

David is the Head of SEO at MEC a GroupM/WPP company), leading a team of 25 SEOs across Manchester and London. Since joining MEC, David grew the team from just himself to a team of 25, helped increase SEO revenue to over £2 mllion and quadrupled the client base.

When not working at MEC, David writes about online marketing at GoodWebPractices, consults for a number of charities, is on the advisory board of icould and is an industry speaker at the University of Salford's Search and Social Media Marketing course.

David has always had a keen interest in technology and put his first website online in 2000. David stumbled into SEO while doing an internship in online marketing in 2005 and having responsibility for the paid search, posing the question why pay for clicks when it's possible to get to the top of Google without paying for each click?

PPC accounts for just 6% of total search clicks [infographic]

Paid search only accounts for 6% of total clicks from search engines versus natural search at 94% of clicks, according to research from GroupM UK carried out with Nielsen.

Also, women are slightly more prone to clicking on paid search results than males, and, as age increases, so does the likelihood of clicking on paid search results.

The research, based on 28m people in the UK, making a total of 1.4bn search queries during June 2011, is the first in the UK to reveal click through rate (CTR) by natural search position for both brand and non-brand search terms and how these CTRs change by vertical.

Geo-rankings: an SEO KPI game changer

MEC has contributed to a white paper which will be published by Linkdex that reveals ground-breaking findings about how the location a search is made from affects Google rankings.