Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

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Ever see one of those movies where some secret government agency has a super high-tech office in an old, dilapidated building in some rundown part of town? The camera starts on the outside, looking over a ghetto as it moves down the street. It zeros in on a rundown building that a squatter would be embarrassed to live in. Then, as the camera moves inside we are shown a state-of-the art facility worthy of a Manhattan high-rise office in the 22nd century.

Sometimes SEO is just like that, but the opposite. A lot of time and energy is spent on the “exterior” (search engine rankings) while ignoring the interior (building a great website.)

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Over the past few months I’ve been working on a personal hobby site. I have to say, it’s been a lot of work. It’s been a while since I’ve built a new site, I’ve spent most of my time over the years working on my main business site and already-built client sites. Even when we are brought in for consulting in new site planning, it’s someone else that does the work, not me.

After spending dozens of my free-time hours just getting this new site set-up, I can totally see why people would just rather pay someone else to do it for them.

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One of the things I like to tell my clients when I’m trying to get them involved in the SEO process is that they know their business better than I do. This is true. What do I know about flow meters, motorcycle batteries, baby diapers, ski jackets or cost segregation?

An argument can be made that as soon as I take on these clients I need to learn everything I can about their industry so I can market it properly. This is also true. But no matter what, I’ll never be an expert at cost segregation. Nor do I believe my clients want me to be. They want me to be an expert in SEO and that takes enough of my time as it is.

And this is why clients need to be involved. I can do the keyword research, weed out the junk, and help them organize them into strongly optimization groups. But I still need the client’s help telling me what’s good and what’s not. How am I to know that “net present value equation” is a good keyword while “net present value annuity” isn’t. The client, that’s how.

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Once a site has been fully optimized, there is still a lot work still to be done. The first pass at keyword optimization isn’t always the best, making further edits necessary. After making the big, site-wide optimization edits to your site its often beneficial to go back and review things on a more granular level. You can find the areas that are up against more competition than others and explore further improvements that will be needed for even more improved success.

Unfortunately you can’t know how well your SEO’d title tags will perform until you make the edits, wait for the search engine to index the page, and check the results. Depending on how deep your site is and the frequency of the search spiders coming back, even the most basic changes can take several days to a week to show in the search results.

When dealing with ecommerce sites you don’t often get the luxury of making changes on a page by page level because everything is pulled from a database into templates. Generally it is counter productive to implement site-wide changes until you know how those changes will work. The last thing you want is for all your pages to drop in rankings at one time because you tweeked the global template for a new title or description.

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Many small businesses are at a financial disadvantage when it comes to marketing their website. Too often they don’t have the funds, time, or resources needed to engage in as much marketing as they would like. Unlike larger businesses with deep pockets, small business often have to rely on do-it-yourself strategies built upon free advice gathered from blogs, forums, and social networking sites.

This gives them a lot to worry about, making sure they are doing it right and that the results will be all they had hoped for. And hoping it doesn’t break their budget in the process.

Every small business owner wants to get the most value for the money they spend on their marketing efforts. Simply put, the ROI must be there. But even with a good SEO and a good campaign outline, you can still break your budget–or render your SEO campaign ineffective–when you let your worries get the best of you. Worrying about smart things is smart. Worrying about the other stuff, well, that just sets you up for failure.

Here are five things you should stop worrying about if you don’t want to blow your SEO budget over the top:

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Small businesses are often seen fumbling around in the dark when it comes to figuring out which SEO strategies really work and which don’t. There is an onslaught of information freely available online, much of it contradictory or confusing. Small business owners who attempt to perform SEO for themselves don’t often know which strategies are more important than others, which are worthwhile and which are worthless, or how do you tell the difference.

Slogging through SEO forums, blogs and article sites can provide a great deal of good information, but it can also leave the small business owner confused on what—or what not—to do.

Those that choose to hire an SEO provider can push some of their SEO decision-making burdens off onto someone else, but some then open the door to a whole new set of worries that can circumvent their online success, even with a successful SEO working for them.

Spending nights worrying about your SEO campaign can eat up a lot of energy that is better applied to other, more important matters. While every business owner needs to be fully aware of the progress being made by their SEO’s efforts, they also need to trust that the SEO knows what is needed for them to succeed. For that to happen, here are a few things the business owner need to stop worry about. Failure to do so can kill an SEO campaign in its tracks.

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Many people think that SEO is a set-it and forget it endeavor. The theory is that once you optimize the site then there really isn’t much more to do after that. This is something that many penny pinchers like to espouse so they can try to “save money”. Others just don’t like the idea that online marketing is a never ending process. We like to have goals and want to see things through a conclusion.

There are certain SEO strategies that are certainly goal oriented where you can get to a definitive end-point, but SEO as a whole is a constant ongoing process. Just like brushing your teeth, you do it ever day so you can keep yourself out from under the dentist’s drill and not walk around with obvious stank breath.

But SEO also isn’t about changing things for the sake of change. We don’t brush our teeth just for the heck of it. Those who think that you always have to be changing your content, titles, and pages in order to keep it “fresh” for the search engines are pursuing a pot of gold on the other side of a rainbow. The truth about SEO is somewhere in between these two elementary schools of thought.

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“There will be fat years and there will be lean years. But it is going to rain.”
–Don Draper, Creative Director, Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency

The fictional character on the TV show Mad Men, when speaking to the executives of London Fog, makers of rain coats, made this very astute assessment of their business. In the age of the web, this could easily be reworded, “There will be fat years and there will be lean years. But people are going to search.”

We are currently in a lean economy, and many businesses are feeling the crunch. But millions of people continue to flock to search engines every day to find, learn and purchase. The question then becomes, who will they find, what will they learn, and will they purchase from you or your competition?

Boil that down and you get one glaring question that every small business needs to answer: Can you afford SEO? Or to put it in even starker terms:

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The idea for this post has two sources. The first was a post on SEOmoz about someone’s failed attempt to get quotes for SEO. In light of that firestorm, I was asked if I would write a blog post about how potential clients should approach SEO companies they are looking to do business with. A few days later, while reading David Ogilvy’s classic Ogilvy on Advertising, I came across the chapter which is an “open letter to a client in search of an agency.” This post is modeled after (stolen from?) that.

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There are clients SEOs love to have… and then there are those other kind. Every SEO has them and very few SEOs can be so selective as to weed out every client that isn’t the “perfect client” (and those that do generally work only for themselves.)

Being the perfect client may not be attainable, but you can certainly avoid being the bad client nobody wants. Here are seven things bad SEO clients do:

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