There is a SEO myth that there are secret strategies and methods employed by SEO experts that result in top SERPs (search engine result pages). Of course, this is bunkum although there are “consultants” who might like to suggest otherwise. There are rigorous methods and techniques that need to be followed but the information is widely available. “Secrets” tend to be used by “Black Hat” webmasters who by necessity need to maintain a wall of silence!
2. Keyword Density is critical
In the early days of “SEO” there was some truth in a magic keyword density formula. The search engines have evolved and are well aware of pages stuffed with keywords. Although it is essential to add keyword phrases to a page, there is no magic percentage. The page should be natural and be designed for the reader rather than the search engine.
3. Content, Content, Content
Although content is essential for a website, content alone will not achieve high SERPs. There are other factors at work that must be considered. Bear in mind that there are over 100 factors in the Google algorithm (and other search engines will also have equally complex formulae for working out rankings). ONE of the pre-requisites is good unique content – but NOT the ONLY factor.
4. Submitting Sites to Search Engines
This myth is probably a hangover from the past when this technique did have some effect. Do not bother to submit to search engines, instead concentrate on getting a good quality link(s) from a relevant website. This “recommendation” will not only alert the Search engines of the new site but also help in getting higher SERPs. Top Tip: Do not keep submitting your site to the search engines – this is unnecessary and some “gurus” suggest that you can get penalised.
5. Guaranteed Rankings / SERPs
“We can guarantee you top SERPs” – this is just not true for competitive keyword phrases. Yes, it is possible to suggest you can get top rankings for “large fat blue monkeys are rare” (on an exact match) as there is NO competition. It is important to choose keyword phrases that you want to rank for carefully – for example, will they bring the type of enquiries you want? Are they “info” related enquiries or “buy” enquiries? This is a topic on its own!
Whilst talking about this myth – also bear in mind it is impossible to guarantee that SERPs will remain constant. So a #1 ranking today cannot be guaranteed tomorrow!
Links WILL help but it is just ONE of those 100 factors. A link from any site may NOT be a good link. A link from what Google defines as a “bad neighborhood” can adversely affect your site. Google does not clarify a “bad neighborhood” but perhaps they are referring to adult, gambling, racist, etc. sites. Links should be from sites that share your theme; do not accept links from link or resource pages – they have little value especially if the external links on the page are to all different themes. Do you really think Google cannot spot a link or resource page?
Do NOT use services that will provide instant linking to 100s of sites. It will raise a flag with Google. Your linking strategy should be planned and be naturally progressive. Check all sites carefully before linking to them – remember your link is perceived as a recommendation. If you start recommending bad sites what does that say about YOUR site?
Concentrate on getting quality links from Authority sites on your theme!
7. WSC Validation required
In an ideal world it would be nice to have every page on your site validated by WSC. However, unless you have a very diligent webmaster it is an impossible task! It is not essential that every page is validated from a SEO perspective. However, what IS important is that the search engine robots can parse your page(s). If they cannot read a page, then the page will not be included in the index – worse still links on that page may not be followed. The Lynx viewer and search engine simulator are useful tools for checking what is seen by the search bots.
8. Search Engines prefer static to dynamic pages
In the bad old days dynamic pages that were accessed with urls such as www.mydomain.com/link.php?action=view&var=new&country=europe were bad news as the search spiders did not know how to follow these links with “?” in them. The result was that dynamic pages were not accessed and indexed. However, those days are gone. Google says “We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static.”
9. Meta Tags are important
Meta tags were used extensively in the past but again search engines have evolved. It is the content and structure of the page that is important for SEO purposes. A common technique was to stuff the “keyword” tag with an endless list of keywords and phrases – do this at your peril! The title is relatively important as Google uses it to display in their SERPs (and the description is often used too). So the “title” and “description” should sell your website. Get the user to click! Google likes your titles and descriptions to be unique. Use your main keywords in <title> and H1.
10. High Page Rank required for good SERPs
Google publishes a historic version (up to 3 to 4 months old typically) of your page rank for every page on your site. This is NOT necessarily the current page rank of the page – it is re-calculated on a frequent basis (daily?). It is perfectly possible for pages with low page rank to get top SERPs as there are other factors deciding the SERPs.
The Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in London was once again a great success and I've collected no less than 99 tips, ideas, statistics and memorable quotes from various speakers, panelists and a man in the bar.
These top takeaways are mostly from the sessions I attended myself but I’ve also drawn from others’ blog posts and give credit below where that is the case.
Improving Conversion Rates
1) Test absolutely everything, including page copy, images (do some convert better than others?) and navigation (do different sized or colored buttons convert better?) Jamie Smith via Targetstone
2) Don’t test everything. Conducting tests has an opportunity cost. Use a process to create what’s most likely to respond. Then test. Bryan Eisenberg
3) Establish trust by adding testimonials, awards and security images in prominent positions. Jamie Smith via Targetstone
4) Build a relationship and engage with your customers and don’t just try to make the hard sell. Bryan Eisenberg
5) Your website sucks because average conversion rate is 3% but some sites convert at 10% or higher. Bryan Eisenberg
6) Make your UVP (unique value propositions) and UCP (unique campaign proposition) clear. Easyjet’s 'Europe's leading low cost travel website' is a UVP. 'Free delivery' is a UCP (and a good one, as it happens). Bryan Eisenberg
7) 'Free delivery' can double response. Bryan Eisenberg
8) Make your offer (UCP) clear everywhere on the site, including (especially) on the checkout page. Bryan Eisenberg
9) ‘Scent’ is the concept of consistent message, look, feel, images and logos as a user passes through your site. Maintain scent from off-site promotion through landing pages, pages linked to from landing pages to buying page. Don’t let your BPU – Business Prevention Unit (i.e. your techies) – spoil scent. Bryan Eisenberg
10) First impressions count and you have 8 seconds to make a good one to a new visitor. Bryan Eisenberg
11) Use User Generated Content (UGC) to increase conversion. Figleaves.com increased conversion by 35% with user reviews and ratings. Bryan Eisenberg
12) Let users search by ‘most reviewed’ and ‘highest rated’. This can increase response by over 20%. Bryan Eisenberg
13) Use persuasion principles such as scarcity e.g. ‘Offer Ends Soon’. Bryan Eisenberg
14) Provide point-of-action assurances e.g. ‘Guaranteed response within 1 hour!’ Bryan Eisenberg
15) Appeal to these four personality types: Spontaneous, Methodical, Competitive, Humanistic. Bryan Eisenberg
16) Use UGC in promotions, e.g. in emails. Good for SEO too. Bryan Eisenberg
17) A new lead loses its effectiveness by six times for every hour that passes. So once you have their details, make your best offer to new leads immediately with the page you send them to. Bryan Eisenberg
18) Get cheap and quick user testing at usertesting.com Bryan Eisenberg
19) For images, place your products in a scene. Like a dinner set on a table in a room and not just a dinner set with a white background. Bryan Eisenberg
20) On checkout, show pictures of the products being bought. Bryan Eisenberg
21) Do not make buyers register before buying. Let them do it afterwards. Bryan Eisenberg
22) Let users see their shopping cart in a pop-up so they don’t leave the page. Bryan Eisenberg
23) Prioritize by resources (cost) and impact (return). Bryan Eisenberg
24) Learn to execute rapidly. E.g. two hours after Michael Jackson’s death, Amazon had revamped their MP3 site. Many competitors took a week. Bryan Eisenberg
25) Three words from Bryan made Dell over $25 million. “Learn more” was changed to “Help me choose”. Bryan Eisenberg
26) Navigation is paramount. Big menus with lots of categories in dropdowns reduce the number of clicks needed to find what’s wanted. Less clicks means more conversions. David Fairhurst
Analytics
27) Anyone who doesn’t feel frustrated that they’re not doing well enough is not doing their job properly. Avinash Kaushik
28) Advanced web metrics is about doing the basics well and applying it in a clever way. Avinash Kaushik
29) Break down data to discover hidden patterns and trends. New ‘custom filters’ on Google Analytics are an excellent way to reveal useful findings. Avinash Kaushik
30) Data analysis should always be the starting point for building an overall SEO strategy as well as individual tactics. Avinash Kaushik
31) The Keyword Tree from Juice Analytics turns your Google Analytics keyword reports into a visual ‘tree’ that shows relationships between keywords. See image below from Avinash’s presentation. Avinash Kaushik
32) Go beyond conversion to show the economic value of actions taken on your site. E.g. what is a collected email address worth? Measure ‘macro conversions’ (big things like sales) and micro conversions (smaller actions like ad clicks, report downloads, photo uploads). In your analytics packages, attach these values to tracked goals and report their worth not just numbers. Revenue = Good. Economic Value = God! Avinash Kaushik
33) Go beyond the top 10 rows of your analytics reports. But use tools to filter the thousands of rows of data. E.g. find your highest converting keywords. Avinash Kaushik
34) Look at the size of the long tail of keywords in search. E.g. Avinash’s own small blog has a long tail of over 20,000 keywords used to reach his site. Traffic and conversions from the tail should dominate that from your few most popular keywords. Avinash Kaushik
The image below, taken from a Google Analytics report shows what Avinash means (he showed a similar image from his own site). It takes 43,000 different keywords to get 92,000 visits.
35) Focus on the long tail keywords and not just the big phrases. Remember long tail visitors often convert better because they’re searching for something more specific. Avinash Kaushik
36) Be thoughtful, be skeptical, be objective. Avinash Kaushik
Link Building
37) When assessing a link prospect, look at the quality of the site’s own links. Avoid those using black-hat techniques to get their own links. Google’s trust in your site is affected not just by quality of the sites that link to you but also by the sites that link to them. Jim Boykin via State of Search
38) Use tools like Majestic, Yahoo and Linkscape to find the sites linking to your competitors and try to replicate those links for your own site. Jim Boykin via State of Search
39) Online press releases offer value but the power of each link is reduced because they are all coming from pages with duplicate content. Jim Boykin via State of Search
40) Assess authoritative websites (such as those ending in .gov and .edu) to see the kind of places they link to. This will help you develop your own ideas for content that attracts links from reputable sources. Jim Boykin via State of Search
41) A link from a blog post will often increase your site’s rankings initially, but the power will then fall away as the post drops off the homepage of the blog, so expect a drop in rankings. Jim Boykin via State of Search
42) Great content attracts great links. Dan Cohen via State of Search
Social Media
43) The first step of a social media campaign should be to determine the goal or objective. What do you want to achieve? Brand awareness? Traffic generation? Link generation? Conversions? Lisa Myers
44) The key to successful participation in social media is to listen first, sell later. Lisa Myers
45) Social networks provide an immediate audience and you don’t have to wait for search engines to find your content. Lisa Myers
46) #hashtags are great for sharing your Tweets with a wide, targeted audience. Lisa Myers
47) IM (Instant Messenger) is a social media tool, as is email. Mel Carson
48) Blogging is increasingly taking a backseat to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which offer greater opportunities for interacting with followers. Rand Fishkin
49) Gauging the success of a Twitter campaign by the number of ‘retweets’ you’ve received is foolish. Just because something is retweeted, doesn’t mean the message is consumed. Jim Sterne
50) Twitter is a cheap, effective method for handling customer service requests. Mike Lewis via Targetstone
51) Twitter is excellent for building customer relationships and securing repeat business. Mike Lewis via Targetstone
52) Handled incorrectly, Twitter can cause serious damage to a brand’s reputation (such as the Vodafone example). Mike Lewis via Targetstone
53) Twitter is great for finding and attracting new business leads. Mike Lewis via Targetstone
54) Don’t just create accounts on social networks, integrate Facebook and Twitter with your own site by using tools such as 'Facebook Connect' and Tweetmeme. Lisa Myers
SEO v PPC
55) PPC is something you can control. SEO is something you can affect. Matt Bailey
56) SEO is becoming more popular and will eventually overtake PPC and become the primary method of online marketing. Rand Fishkin
57) SEO is risky and there’s always a chance you can get banned or suffer a significant drop in your rankings. The same risks do not apply to PPC. Paul Mead
58) PPC is useful for testing e.g. the popularity of certain keywords, the conversion rates of certain keywords, etc. Rand Fishkin
59) The cost of PPC is rising and Google in particular is inflating prices. Dave Naylor
60) PPC is better for new domains as it guarantees immediate visibility. Brian Lewis
61) Whichever is most cost-effective there’s certainly a place for both PPC and SEO. Dave Naylor
International Search
62) Having a domain such as .co.uk or .fr will give you an advantage in those particular regions but isn’t the only significant factor in determining your ranking. Peter van der Graaf
63) Links from 'local sources' will allow you to rank in any country, even if you don’t have a regional domain. Peter van der Graaf
64) One way to get 'local links' without needing to know the language is to find local directories to submit to. Peter van der Graaf
65) Content is king. Ensure all content is translated properly and reads just as well in every language. Don’t just use Google Translate! Bill Hunt
66) Just because you’re getting traffic from a specific area, doesn’t necessarily mean you should move into that market. Andy Atkins-Kruger
67) Be wary of duplicate content in same language but different country sites, e.g. US and UK. Crispin Sheridan
68) Meta descriptions should be tailored to the market (country and language) they’re appearing in. Bill Hunt
Mobile
69) Applications from the iTunes store are beginning to rank in Google’s results. No original source but comes via Tug Search
70) In 2009, 240 million web-enabled phones were shipped and only 200 Million laptops. Tug Search
71) A major shift of ad spend from fixed to mobile platforms is expected by Google. Are you ready for that? Ken McGaffin
SEO
72) Google reportedly makes over 400 changes to their algorithm each year. Maile Ohye
73) Don’t even try to keep up with 400 changes.
74) Quality content is the most important thing for SEO. Maile Ohye and Dan Cohen
75) Don’t just link down your (flat) site hierarchy, also link across it to related pages. This avoids link power getting siloed inside your site structure, e.g. continent > country > region > town. Richard Baxter
77) Google likes SEOs. The new ‘server response time’ algo factor and feature in Webmaster Tools came from feedback at SES London last year. Maile Ohye
PPC
78) Use the Google Search Query Tool to see the exact keyword search your ad appeared for rather than the keyword in your account that it broad matched you to. How did they respond? If well, consider adding the keyword as exact match. If bad, consider for new negative keyword. This will increase reach but will also drive lower CPCs. Jon Myers
79) 20% of all search queries each day are new in a 90-day period. You can’t reach these searchers with exact match as you can’t second guess. Broad match accounts for one third of worldwide clicks and conversions. Successful Broad match bids need accompanying negative keywords (find them with the Query Tool). Jon Myers
80) Use AdWords local search placements to target local searches. Simple! Jon Myers
81) Use Sales (conversion) figures and CPA (cost per acquisition) to optimize AdWords. Not just CTR (clickthrough rate). Good CTR does not mean good conversion to sale. Jon Myers
82) Schedule your ads for the days and times that respond. E.g. do your response rates change at the weekend? At night? Friday evening? Lunch times? Jon Myers
Email marketing
83) Drop your fear and self-loathing about sending emails. Those on your list chose to receive your emails and they can opt-out if they don’t like them. Trust your audience – they know you are not spam. Dela Quist
84) When scanning our inbox, we are using our highest cognitive abilities to quickly choose between spam and wanted emails. Those on your list will know you are not spam. Also, your email may not have been opened but it was seen. (See 86 and 87 below.) Dela Quist
85) Everyone can send one more email a month and response will increase. Dela Quist
86) Email response is seen in more than open rates and clickthroughs. You’ll see it in brand searches, PPC clicks, later response when users are on your site. Even unopened emails can sell. It’s the ‘nudge effect’ – influencing behavior without specific instructions. Dela Quist
87) Use your brand and a message in your email’s from and subject line. Dela Quist
88) Research: long subject lines – less opens, more response; short – more opens, less response. You’re going to have to do your own tests for your list. Dela Quist
89) Before segmentation, the pot (your list) is big. After segmentation it is small. Do the math: response = numbers x response rate. Response is more important than response rate. Dela Quist
90) Beware of some much-quoted research on segmentation. One Forrester report showing increased response (from increased response rates) as mailings were segmented assumed that segmented lists were the same size as the original non-segmented. In practice this doesn’t happen. Dela Quist
Google news
91) Google’s universal results might show news, local, product, music, images, videos and now real-time results on the first page. There’s often not much room left for a standard listing. Each type of listing has its own algo. Brent D. Payne
92) When assessing your site, Google considers hundreds of factors that can be grouped into Popularity, Authority and Relevance. Brent D. Payne
93) For news sites, the following become more important than on other sites: social media buzz, clickthrough rates, link structure, freshness, content expertise, authority, newsrank, local coverage, domain mentions. Brent D. Payne
94) Google has slowed down the speed with which ranking factors are transferred with a 301 redirect. Brent D. Payne
This doesn’t always happen as, for example, we’ve recently done 301 redirects for large sites and had an instant transfer of ranking factors.
95) Canonical tag is working well when on-page factors like title tag and h-tags match. Brent D. Payne
96) Google follows nofollow links if they are on any of the following: 1. powerful social media profiles; 2. heavily retweeted tweets about topical subjects; 3. high PageRank sites with topical and high-volume (on the day) search queries in the link. Brent D. Payne
97) Keep your first paragraph close to your h1 tag. Don’t break up code within that paragraph with other HTML. All pages must have at least a paragraph of text. Brent D. Payne
98) Social and search are merging. For example, see Google’s social circle search which searches your personal social network. Brent D. Payne
Quote of the show
99) Despite competition from expert communicators like Bryan Eisenberg, Avinash, Dela and Brent, my quote of SES London goes to Lisa Myers who, looking for volunteers, asked: "I'm sure I can find a PR Horny SEO".
Addendum: Even more takeaways
100) (On job sites) Allow your job search results pages to index, but only to the point where you have a min of 5 jobs per category. Allan Stewart
101) Load 150 items into site search results pages but use CSS/Java Script to cater for pagination and number of items the user sees. This is fast for users as they only load the page once and great for getting vacancies indexed. Allan Stewart
102) Add current and relevant microformats to your build markup to inprove CTR in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Allan Stewart
Source:http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/ses-london-takeaways - Mike Nunney
The rights to one of the most notorious adult sites on the internet are up for sale just four years after they changed hands for a record $14m (NZ$20m), with auctioneers hoping that sex can sell all over again.
Sex.com, the most expensive domain name on the internet and the subject of two books, is set to go under the hammer after its owner Escom was unable to pay its debts.
The domain name of the site, which has been described as the "jewel in the internet's crown", is to go under the hammer on 18 March.
Details of the process were posted on the website of auctioneer David R Maltz & Co about a week ago, which has since received a slew of enquiries. The event will be held at law firm Windels Marx Lane & Mittendorf in New York.
The domain name will not come cheap. Interested parties will have to bring a certified cheque for $1m just to be allowed to participate.
However, a source close to the sale said the site was "unlikely to bring in what it did in 2006, although it really depends on how much someone wants it".
The forced sale came after Escom defaulted on its debts to Dom Partners, according to the notice of foreclosure sale posted by Dom's lawyers. It marks the latest in a series of twists in the site's extraordinary 16-year history.
The tale spawned Sex.com: One Domain, Two Men, Twelve Years and the Brutal Battle for the Jewel in the Internet's Crown by journalist Kieren McCarthy in 2007, and The Sex.com Chronicles: A White-Hat Lawyer's Journey to the Dark Side of the Internet by Charles Carreon the following year.
For the first five years, Sex.com had five million hits a day and generated $100m a year. It was, as McCarthy said, the "most valuable piece of virtual real-estate on the planet".
The domain name was registered in 1994 by Gary Kremen, a scholar from Stanford University and the founder of dating site Match.com.
Two years later, through an elaborate scam, the ownership was transferred to Stephen Cohen, who was The rights to one of the most notorious adult sites on the internet are up for sale just four years after they changed hands for a record $14m (NZ$20m), with auctioneers hoping that sex can sell all over again.
Sex.com, the most expensive domain name on the internet and the subject of two books, is set to go under the hammer after its owner Escom was unable to pay its debts.
The domain name of the site, which has been described as the "jewel in the internet's crown", is to go under the hammer on 18 March.
Details of the process were posted on the website of auctioneer David R Maltz & Co about a week ago, which has since received a slew of enquiries. The event will be held at law firm Windels Marx Lane & Mittendorf in New York.
The domain name will not come cheap. Interested parties will have to bring a certified cheque for $1m just to be allowed to participate.
However, a source close to the sale said the site was "unlikely to bring in what it did in 2006, although it really depends on how much someone wants it".
The forced sale came after Escom defaulted on its debts to Dom Partners, according to the notice of foreclosure sale posted by Dom's lawyers. It marks the latest in a series of twists in the site's extraordinary 16-year history.
The tale spawned Sex.com: One Domain, Two Men, Twelve Years and the Brutal Battle for the Jewel in the Internet's Crown by journalist Kieren McCarthy in 2007, and The Sex.com Chronicles: A White-Hat Lawyer's Journey to the Dark Side of the Internet by Charles Carreon the following year.
For the first five years, Sex.com had five million hits a day and generated $100m a year. It was, as McCarthy said, the "most valuable piece of virtual real-estate on the planet".
The domain name was registered in 1994 by Gary Kremen, a scholar from Stanford University and the founder of dating site Match.com.
Two years later, through an elaborate scam, the ownership was transferred to Stephen Cohen, who was described by McCarthy as "an uneducated con man with a genius IQ and an unnatural gift for persuasion".
A bitter court battle followed, and was still dragging on a decade later. The case was to prove a landmark in how the law views internet domain name ownership.
A Californian judge awarded $65m in damages to Mr Kremen and returned him the rights to Sex.com, but the lawsuits continued and Cohen eventually fled the country. He was later jailed after Mexican authorities handed him over at the border.
Mr Kremen put the site on the market in 2006, and according to reports at the time, Escom paid $14m for the rights.
Domain Capital, which partly financed the acquisition, said at the time: "It is believed to be among the most significant domain sale transactions in history."
The new owners of Sex.com said they planned to revolutionise the online adult industry, and set about signing numerous content deals including a distribution agreement with Playboy.
Mr Kremen, who was kept on as an adviser after the deal, said he was "excited to see how the revolutionary new business plan evolves".
Sadly for the site's owners, they were to discover that sex does not always sell enough.
One of the great things about SEO is that it allows you to see many lenses on business that you can't normally see with most other professions (outside of perhaps something in high finance or management consulting anyhow). One day you are building a bootstrapped business from scratch wondering when it will make its first Dollar, and the next day your on the phone with McKinsey consultants or an executive from a fortune 500 company talking strategy.
Zeta Interactive's Hugo Guzman is one of the the folks in the SEO industry who has a broad experience set which perhaps eclipses my own, as he has done virtually everything. And so I recently interviewed him...
You run some of your own sites, have done some private SEO consulting, I believe you may have done some in house SEO for a while, and are now deep into the bowels of the SEO agency world. What are the best and worst parts of each role?
Great question! Here’s my take based on personal experience in each role.
Running your own site(s)
Best Thing: That feeling of unbridled entrepreneurism. I’ve always felt that website building is sort of like the new real estate development, only anybody can do it and it costs less than $100 to get started (if you know what you’re doing). The other great thing about running your own site(s) is the ability to cut out on time wasting and bureaucracy. There’s no need for filling out corporate approval paperwork or sitting through useless meetings or conference calls, so you can focus in on building content, building links, building databases, and building relationships.
Worst Thing: The cold hard reality of monetization. There used to be a day when paid links could easily bankroll early development until you got other revenue streams to a point of sustainability, but that well has dried up to a certain extent. Affiliate revenue and Adsense are both viable but take time to develop, especially if SEO is the main source of traffic, so like you, I believe that the best option is to cut out the middle man and develop a product/service of your own that fills a specific niche need at a fair price. I think that the emergence of FourSquare and Twitter localization suggests a strong opportunity for hyper-niche, location-based website development. You don’t have to be the best in the world at a specific thing in order to be successful. Just be the best in your locale or region.
SEO consulting
Best Thing: Being able to do SEO “The Right Way” (or at least “your own way”). It feels good to execute an SEO program that way you see fit, especially when it works! It makes for a very rewarding experience. It’s fun to build out the list of deliverables, the timeline for implementation, and the success metrics and KPIs that will be the foundation of your client programs.
Worst Thing: Dealing with the sales grind, chasing after clients that don’t pay on time (or at all) not getting the hourly bill rate you know you deserve, etc…basically all the business stuff that has little or nothing to do with pure SEO. Unfortunately, many of the SEOs that go this route get caught up in the grind by failing or refusing to fire bad clients, so that they can focus on building revenue by offering more granular or expanded services for their good clients.
In-house SEO
Best Thing: Being embedded in so many different aspects of a business and learning about marketing and biz dev elements outside the pure SEO realm. I spent several years working with CBS Interactive and I learned a ton about so many things and worked with some really intelligent people.
For example, I learned how C-level executives frame marketing channels like SEO. The main success metric that I was measured on was percentage of overall referring traffic (well under 10% when I first started). Even though I was able to exponentially grow natural search referrals, especially for key niches like fantasy football and March Madness – both of which are huge moneymakers for CBS – the cumulative effect on overall traffic was minimal (never reached 20%). The reason was simple; CBS owns their major television network as well as a myriad of local television affiliates, radio stations, billboards, email addresses, etc, which literally drove millions and millions of unique referrals.
This introduction to mass media metrics helped me gain perspective on the role SEO plays within the larger scheme of things (brand building and management, push/interruption marketing, email marketing, etc). And it was this perspective that would help me connect with marketing executives when I made the move to agency SEO, because I finally understood that while SEO is arguably the most cost-effective marketing channel, it was only one piece of a much larger puzzle.
Worst Thing: It’s hard to move up the corporate ladder and earn big dollars. Because SEO is typically straddled between marketing and IT, it’s tough to move up into upper-management positions. Some companies (like the Tribune Company) are starting to wake up, but for the most part, it’s still tough to move on up.
SEO Agency
Best Thing: It’s sort of like the Peace Corps in that it’s the hardest job you’ll ever love. Granted, you’re not really helping the world be a better place (just helping companies become more profitable) but getting to work with so many different verticals, marketing philosophies, business executives, and web environments is incredibly rewarding. Agency SEO (if you work at a good agency) will undoubtedly make you a better SEO, and a better business person in general.
Interestingly enough, it’s the seemingly unconquerable workload that proves to be the catalyst for professional growth. Dealing with multiple clients, each of which has impossible deadlines and unrealistic ROI expectations, forces you to prioritize your efforts and focus on the strategies and tactics that will deliver the most bang for their marketing buck. SEO’s that fail to grasp this are quickly burned out and leave the agency life (and usually return after a year or two after realizing that they can’t make much money in-house). SEO’s that “get it” quickly make an impact for clients – and the agency’s bottom line – catapulting them into management and executive roles.
Worst Thing: It’s sort of like the Post Office. The work just keeps coming and coming. It’s extremely stressful, demanding, and demoralizing at times. But hey, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger right?
From which of the 4 roles do you see the greatest profit potential?
That’s a tough one. In-house probably has the least profit potential, followed by agency work. Although it’s worth pointing out that some of the better agencies out there take extraordinary steps to keep talented individuals happy and give them a true stake in the company’s success. My agency definitely falls in that category.
Consulting has very solid profit potential but building your own site(s) is definitely king in my book because if you pick the right niche and truly devote yourself on all levels the potential is limitless.
You (Aaron Wall) write about this topic quite a bit, but it’s important to re-emphasize. If an enterprising SEO is looking to start their own site(s) the first thing to take into consideration is the level of passion they have for the topic/theme that the site(s) will encompass, because if the passion isn’t there, it’s unlikely that said SEO will have the motivation to work through the inevitable plateaus that await his/her new business. Also, as most of us know, building the right kind of content is what often leads to the inbound links that will serve as the foundation of a solid search presence, and that’s much easier to do when you truly love the topic/theme you’re dealing with.
When you guys take on new clients are you knee deep in the SEO projects? Or do you focus more on training your team?
Truthfully, I’m no longer involved in day-to-day management of SEO projects. I do touch almost every single account, but usually it’s as an advisor to the SEO specialist that’s assigned to the account or because the client needs to tap into my historical knowledge of the account (I’ve been working with some of our clients for several years now and know more about their history than some of their employees). Basically, I keep tabs on each account and come in to deal with really tough and/or complex scenarios that junior team members have never encountered. That said, I do spend a considerable amount of time testing specific hypotheses, either on client sites or on test sites that are owned and managed by my agency.
One of the most memorable tests we performed was for a major insurance and financial services brand (one of the biggest in the world) that was having a ton of trouble getting their agent profile pages indexed (they had thousands of them). They were convinced that simply adding these pages to their XML sitemap would do the trick, despite the fact that Google explicitly states that submitting an XML sitemap does not replace override their normal indexing and ranking methodology. In order to convince them to take an alternate route (focusing on internal linkage that helped eliminate orphaned agent pages) we simply tested their hypothesis by taking a baseline measurement on the number of indexed agent pages, then adding all of the agent pages to their XML sitemap en masse and then measuring the impact on indexing for those pages (the impact was nil). We then convinced them to implement our recommendations and subsequently measured their impact on indexing of agent pages (over 80% of those pages were subsequently indexed). The result? An interesting conclusion that helps guide our recommendations for other clients as well as an incredibly happy Insurance brand that has now been with us for going on three years!
As for the rest of my time, it is spent training our team of specialists (and the sales folks and the account management folks) supporting sales across the US, leading sales efforts in the Southeastern United States, and working with our product development team to build tools that help facilitate SEO. Oh and I try to help promote the agency when I find some spare time ; )
It wasn’t always like that by the way. I started my agency life as a specialist and have gradually moved up the ladder.
Many of the bigger agency-styled companies sell watered down services of limited value. For example keyword ranking / websourced / marketsmart interactive went from the largest SEO company to closed almost overnight. How do you scale SEO within an agency while preventing the watering down effect that is common at most?
This is an extremely tough problem to overcome, but one of the things that we’ve focused on is product development that helps automate certain facets of the SEO process, so that our specialists can spend their time being truly strategic.
For example, back in 2008, I figured out that our specialists (including myself) were spending an inordinate amount of time formatting and filling out the Excel templates that are used to deliver page-level code recommendations to clients (more or less a staple of agency life). This included copying and pasting the existing code side-by-side with our recommended code, so that the client’s IT/dev folks could use it as a point of reference when implementing. This was essentially data entry work that was extremely tedious and took up a tremendous amount of time.
Working with our tremendous product development and digital services team based in Hyderabad, India, we were able to develop a web application that automatically scraped the designated code for a particular client web page and populated in the correct fields within our Excel template. Now, all our specialists have to do is fill in the recommendations in the appropriate fields, cutting delivery time in half. It’s tremendous productivity booster and also a tremendous morale booster for our specialists.
If you’re on the client side and are interviewing perspective SEO providers, make sure that they have some sort of technology platform in place that will help automate or at least facilitate some of the non-strategic facets. Otherwise, you’re going to spend a ton of money on what essentially amounts to data entry.
From a consumer perspective, a lot of the agencies are long on sales but short on results. What are some of the key signals consumers should pick up on when determining if an agency is the real deal or one that is selling watered down water?
That’s easy.
Ask them if they can help with direct implementation via CMS and/or hard coding. Ask them to go into excruciating detail in terms of how they handle link building (most agencies claim they do link-building, but it usually just boils down to directory submissions and paid links). Ask them to explain how content influences link-building and social media efforts. Ask them to go into excruciating detail in terms of how social media and SEO dovetail. Ask them to go into excruciating detail in terms of how they leverage analytics as it pertains to SEO. Ask them if they’re accustomed to working with senior (even C-level) executives to facilitate approval and implementation of recommendations.
If they’re worth their weight, they’ll jump at the chance to give deep answers to each and every one of these questions.
As an ad agency you guys are also involved in other marketing elements from companies. Does search ever become a key consideration when it comes to product naming, product positioning, and other advertising formats? If yes, could you share some examples?
My agency was arguably the first to truly embrace the cross-channel interactive agency model, so we definitely work with clients across a variety of marketing channels, and as a matter of fact, we offer a variety of services beyond search (we just made the Forrester Wave for email service providers).
I can’t get into specific clients and URLs due to confidentiality agreements, but I would say that well over 50% of the clients we work with take search into consideration when naming products, positioning products, and even picking vanity domains. I would say that about 25% of our clients make search their top priority when considering these types of things. Those are our favorites, because they really “get it” and work SEO into everything they do.
One example that I can give you (without revealing specific client names) is the purchasing of vanity domains to drive SEO for specific product/service offerings. I’ve seen companies drop anywhere from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands in order to secure domains that have large, authoritative link profiles and already rank for high volume keywords. In fact, I recently did some consulting on behalf of one of the largest VC firms in the world, helping one of their clients (we’ll call them “Company A”) essentially put a price tag on a the value of a domain that was owned by a smaller firm that “Company A” was looking to acquire. I actually think that this type of work could become a nice hyper niche for me in the future (until Google and others finally accomplish their goal of eliminating domains from the search equation…but that’s a story for another day).
What strategies do you use to help clients provide adequate resources for a large or complex SEO assignment when the results might take many months to materialize?
We’ve gone as far as to help clients screen potential hires or contractors in order to help them staff up for large initiatives. In addition, we’ve embedded our employees at a client’s office for large stretches of time in what you could call a “dedicated resource” type of arrangement. Lastly, we’ve helped coordinate cross-division committees and/or multi-agency collaboration in order to help get large initiatives off the ground.
Basically, I’ve always preached to the team that they have to do anything and everything to make things happen. Often times, it’s this extra effort that ends up become the primary measure of success in the client’s eyes, especially if there are some solid metrics to go along with it.
What success metrics are used along the way to help clients appreciate the returns on the SEO efforts?
I find that year-over-year trending is extremely valuable because it takes seasonality into account, and we’ll deliver that type of trending both at the aggregate level and focused on specific “big money” keywords. Incidentally, our agency doesn’t shy away from extremely competitive keywords. We go after everything that fits the client’s vertical but just make sure to set expectations early on. Clients deserve to rank for the biggest money terms, but they also need to understand that in certain cases it could take years to achieve above-the-fold placement.
Also, I believe that it’s critical to drill down and measure non-branded keywords as opposed to just looking at raw aggregate referral data, especially when you’re working with big brands that drive mammoth amounts of brand queries. If you don’t strip out the branded search referrals, then you’re not really measuring SEO (99% of the time, branded keywords have and always will rank No. 1 so the traffic they drive are a function of brand awareness, not search engine optimization).
Google is known for letting bigger brands get away with being a bit spammy. Do you ever suggest to clients that they have the opportunity to push the window?
The short answer is “Yes”.
We conform to “White Hat” SEO (whatever that means) but we also believe that it’s our job to educate clients on techniques that may or may be deemed as “spammy” by search engines like Google. They deserve to understand the entire SEO landscape, not just the vision created by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Also, for clients that are already relatively SEO savvy and were already dabbling in techniques deemed unsavory by Google, we will gladly provide a third-party opinion and consulting on those activities. We believe that they deserve that level of service for the premium they’re paying.
Within a company internal politics often end up kicking SEO into the back seat. When doing agency work, who are the key individuals from within the companies you service that you consider it a must to loop in on the project?
Start with the CEO (seriously). And by the way, this also applies to social media initiatives.
The goal is to find a way to move the needle for a client, even if we are faced with a tough situation in terms of marketing approval, legal approval, or IT implementation (this is more or less par for the course in verticals like Pharma and Financial Services). If we can move that needle, then we’ll immediately push to get in front of upper-level executives, so that we can help them understand what we’re trying to accomplish in the long term (and that we won’t accomplish it at the expense of their brand affinity or legal standing).
If you’re not getting face time with a senior director, VP, or C-level executive, then you’re probably not doing a very good job.
Monday, March 8, 2010 at 4:30PM 
