The 2 Kinds of SEO Company Customers

If you work in SEO you will have noticed that you could divide your customer base into two big categories: Those who don't want to be involved at all in what you do to rank them and those who will work with you to achieve maximum results. The following article from seo.com talks exactly about that and I would say it pictures perfectly the situation. Check this out:

Some clients come to SEO.com wanting to be pushed up the rankings. They view search engine optimization as a ticket to a bigger return on investment and need the whole process to take place pretty quickly. I’m not sure these clients really know what SEO is. They might have been told they need SEO to make more money on their website and called us because we are the first SEO company they saw in the rankings. To be honest, I don’t really know a lot about these clients because they don’t like to talk to us. They consider us their SEO company, nothing more and nothing less. We are in charge of getting them to the first page and they really don’t care how we do it.

More often than not we do achieve first page results for these clients (an accomplishment I am sure must confirm to them they don’t need to be involved to see results). Nevertheless, it can at times seem like an uphill battle, often taking longer than it should to see results. The main problem with a client like this is that they only care about one thing: rankings. If their rankings look good, we are met with praise. If they are taking longer than expected, we are scorned. Yes, we will work with you if you are a client like this, but there is a better way and I will show it to you.

The Client Who Wants To Be Guided

These are the clients we love and have the most fun with. These clients have three great things going for them.

1. A unique value proposition. They have a great business model combined with a great product or service. They know they deserve to be No. 1 for their keywords.
2. They have a great website. This isn’t to say their website is perfectly optimized, since we can work on that together. Instead, their website is well designed, has lots of great content and will convert once they start seeing traffic.
3. They view us as part of their marketing efforts and business strategy, not just SEO. These clients realize that SEO is much more than building links. They want us to work with them to achieve lasting results and increase brand awareness.

 The main thing that sets this type of client apart is the level of involvement. Instead of a “set it and forget it” attitude, we become more of consultants, combining SEO best practices with their current marketing efforts.

Now the question is: who do you want your customer base to be?

~ 

Mike

Marketing Wins

Allow me today to focus on a non-technical subject but very much related to the purpose of SEO

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

In other words:

If nobody knows about your product/service who cares if it's the best?

That's actually my "twisted interpretation" for this post but I hope I made my point across :)

The purpose of SEO is to make your site more visible (ie. popular) so more customers know about your product. Then marketing takes over to convert that visitor into a customer.

So if you focus only on getting a better product/service than your competition I would say that you are setup for failure.Actually marketing is as important (if not more) than the product itself.

In this day and age, quality is expected. So focus only on quality products or services are not going to drive sales. Therefore you have to work in getting the word out. For example:

Watch this video:

I do like rap and R&B but I really do not see much quality on this particular song. So what could you do to promote it?

What about piggybacking on a celebrity to work with your song, remix it and promote it in mainstream areas?

Interestingly enough I found this new version to be better. In fact this new version is even more popular than the original.

And what has this to do with SEO you wonder. Translated into Search Engine terms:

When you want to promote your piece of content, try to give it a twist, add some related content, try to link it with recent popular events that can make your content viral and SEO the whole thing.

Who knew that Mr. Snoop Dogg would teach me SEO?? ;)

All the best,

~ Mike

How Good Is To Rank on Page #1 on Google?

If you wonder how important is to rank of Google's first result page, let me give you two anwers:

Short answer: VERY important

Long answer: According to the latest Optify report about organic click thru rate (you can download the report here: http://www.optify.net/guides/organic-click-through-rate-curve?page=3) almost 37% of all searches go to the first result, 60% go to the top 3 results and almost 90% go to the top 10 results.
What that means for your business is that if you rely on SEO to drive traffic and are in position 10 and below you are probably not receiving almost any traffic coming from that keyword.

With this information you are able now to take informed decision to move in the right direction.

~ Mike

How To Acquire Links For Your Website

Links. You know you need them to rank higher on the search engines. But getting quality links can be easier said than done. I always like to recommend the following video from SEOmoz as a very good resource on the subject. Happy linking!

What's More Important than SEO For Your Website?

If you are a bit into SEO you will have surely heard about the latest "Panda" update.
Although this update is just one among the 500 tweaks Google makes to his algorithm during the year, a couple of factors have made, in my opinion, this one particularly popular:

1. It filters out plenty of content-scrapped sites. Site with full automatically generated/scrapped content may have noticed a heavy impact or their rankings.
2. This update has a name. A silly as it may sound having a name helps people identify that event and they tend to think that all subsequent ranking changes are due to that particular update (even when is not the case)

If you are worried about the "algo" change and you are thinking about how to adapt to this new situation and how to get your site more SEO'd why don't you step back a bit and think about the real reason your site should be ranking? In other words: Does your website provide enough quality to rank high?

To help you in this taks here you have some guidelines from Google itself:

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking." 

• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Get all the guidelines here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#3

And for a more updated discussion about what is considered quality, I would recommend you this fine post from seo.moz that highlists questions like:

• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?

~
Mike

Your Customers Are Online. Can They Find You?

If you are interested in Search Engine Optimization and you live near Toronto or are able to go there on June 13th,  you have the opportunity to go to SES Toronto, the major event on its class in the area:

Now in its 8th year, SES Toronto is organized and programmed by the SES Advisory Board and SearchEngineWatch.com, the leading authority on Search Engine Marketing (SEM), including SEO and PPC. The event will be packed with sessions covering topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more while offering high-level strategy, big picture, keynotes, an exhibit floor with companies that can help you grow your business, networking events, parties and more.

These are some of the major points that will be discussed there:

• Learn how search engines rank web pages and optimize yours to out-rank competitors
• Discover new methods of link building to keep your brand in front of your customers
• Increase traffic via organic listings and avoid "spam" penalties
• Optimize and rank better with pay-per-click campaigns
• Improve user experience and increase conversions by testing and tuning landing pages
• Track performance and maximize ROI using free and paid analytics software
• Network with peers and experts to learn the latest tips and trends

Read the full news here: http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/toronto/

Social Factors in SEO

If you are trying to grow your website audience using search engine optimization it is very much advisable to take also a look at the social media factors that can make your site more popular.

Last month, Gareth Owen published an interesting post about the Top 13 Social Media Ranking Factors (you can read the full post here). You can see the list below:

1. Number of Followers (Twitter)
2. Quality of Followers (Twitter)
3. Relevance of Followers (Twitter)
4. Number of Retweets (Twitter) 
5. Number of Fans (Facebook)
6. Number of Comments (Facebook)
7. Number of Views (YouTube)
8. User Comments (YouTube)
9. References From Independent Profiles (YouTube)
10. Title of Video (YouTube)
11. Percent of Likes vs. Dislikes (YouTube)
12. Positive vs. Negative Brand Mentions (All Social Media)
13. Number of Social Mentions (All Potential Media) 

These are all important factors and in a post I found today from Nick Stamoulis he ellaborates further about
points 2, 4, 6 and 12 (which I tend to agree quite a bit, although I would also include point 10 (Title of Video in Youtube) because is something very quick and easy to do yet very important to attract qualified visitors to your site). Here is a snippet of the blog post below :

1. Quality of followers

Some would say that the more followers a brand/company/person has on Twitter, the better. While quantity is important, I would argue that the quality of those followers is going to be more heavily weighed than the quantity. Just like anything else deemed important for SEO, once the search engines started looking at Twitter as a part of their algorithms, the black hat SEO practitioners and spammers are quick to try and game the system by creating dozens (if not hundreds) of fake profiles in order to boost their follower numbers. These profiles exist solely to reTweet the parent profile.

I would argue that having real, human followers (especially social media influencers) connected with your Twitter profile is worth much more in the long run then a bunch of ghost profiles.

2. Number of reTweets

The number of reTweets ties into content relevancy and authority. When search engines see that a link has been reTweeted by hundreds of different users, it’s the social community announcing to the search engines that “Yes, this is good information and deserves to be treated as such.” Ever since Google incorporated social search into the main body of search results, the more reTweets a company has, the more times their name is going to show up in the social search results. This kind of activity is a great way to increase brand recognition.

3. Number of Facebook comments

Having 5,000 fans is awesome! Having 5,000 fans that care enough to interact on your Facebook Fan page and leave comments is better. As Owen said, “A large number of likes, but little engagement, is a sure sign of someone gaming the system.” More interaction on your Facebook Fan page let’s you know that you are doing something right, that what you are doing with your brand is encouraging consumers to get involved.

4. Negative vs. Positive Brand Mentions

This is why it is important to brands to actively be monitoring the social networks, as social media ties directly into online brand reputation management. Bad reviews on any social network are shared in a matter of seconds and can spread like wildfire unless appropriately handled. Good reviews are a sure sign that you are doing something right. While not perfect, search engines have already taken steps to measure the good and bad comments about brands in the social networking universe.

If you liked the post you can read the full article here: http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2011/05/16/social-search-factors/