The Bad SEO  Rep Thing

SEO as an industry has for a long time now suffered with a terrible rep. The web is littered with case after case of burnt individuals recounting stories of being mislead at best and defrauded at worst – An examination of a lot of these tales will often reveal a well trodden path of company promised one thing whilst delivering another, usually in the form of not very much at all, or in extreme cases a nice page 6 ranking penalty from the Google monster.

Top 10 is it then Len?

I think it’s interesting that this happens, despite the wealth of info out there.  Google even publishes a guide to SEO, which for the DIY brigade, is a good little reference point. Yet the reality is that whatever way you dice it, there’s only ever really 10 organic spots to be had and unless you’re above the fold, you might as well not be there.

Sure, there’s Local,  Universal and Social and all that blah blah blah but let’s face it, if you aren’t ranking at positions 1 to 5  in a clean non obfuscated SERP then…need I state the obvious?

The Good the Bad and the Ugly

Now of course, there are many reputable SEO practitioners and agencies out there – damn good ones in fact, who when asked to deliver come up with the goods or are honest enough to be clear and transparent setting realistic expectations and deliverables.  The flipside is, that there are also a good number who are at best mediocre and at worst chuffing rubbish. No, I’m not going to name names, that would be silly and harmful to my bank balance, and to be completely truthful  I don’t really know any SEO Cocks other than the few who occassionly follow me on Twitter promising wealth beyond my wildest dreams.

I do think it’s worth touching upon how such people get to proliferate ( low barriers to entry, lots of disinformation, lack of a recognised point of Industry authority, uninformed buyers, greed, unrealistic expectations of product etc ).

Everybody Wants to Rule the World, especially Business People

People with businesses in a particular niche quite often want to rule their little worlds. The mindset of most business people is one of make money, be profitable, grow, expand. The internet of course, is one such vehicle that offers an apparenteasy road to riches; who amongst you never heard of someone making money online? How many blogs out there are full of accounts that showed company X  increasing its bottom line by a 1000% or more!?

So the ground is ripe for virtually every business person out there, be they large Corp or SME to naturally want to grab a slice of that pie. We marketers are not short of an idea or two and will happily provide them with the rationale to succeed – we’ll put together fancy presentations with projections and volumes and trends and numbers and pound note signs, yet how many of us are completely and utterly frank?

Sure, you’ll all say, not me guv, we offer utter transparency in all of our dealings and would never ever lead anyone up the garden path. Well, ok , so sure, no one in their right mind is going to publicly come out and say ” Yep, we delude prospects, it’s a good way of getting sales”   because…well, that would be very silly indeed.

I do get around though, and I do talk to people, and I do hear stories that make me think hmmn, yep, I get that and I understand why it happens.

People Need Their Jobs and Often Do As They Are Told

Example: sales person in company X needs to hit targets. Get’s assigned a vertical, let’s just say it’s the finance vertical. He or she has a long list of prospects, leads etc sourced from email lists, or conference events attended by marketing bods or directors looking to get a hook in this SEO thing and make their company money.

Sales guy calls a lead up, its in the ‘Loans’ vertical let’s call it “Freds Exorbitant Loan Company’, the dialogue might go a little like this.

Sales guy: Hi I hear you are interested in our SEO services

Loans guy: Yes, very much so, we want to rank for loans in Google

Sales guy: You do huh, I think we can help you with that, it is very competitive though and might take some time and a considerable investment

Loans guy: Sure, we understand that, but can you get us to page one for loans

Sales guy: Sales patter, sales patter, anything to get the sale…

And on it goes.

Buyer Beware Do Your Homework

The reality is, that to compete or rank in the loans vertical for a run of the mill small time loan broker/money lender is just not realistic. It’s an industry full of big time players running into the 100′s of  thousands  who throw millions daily at PPC and organic, employing teams of people working on their rankings day in day out. ‘Freds Exorbitant Loan Company’ is very unlikely to have a USP, he won’t be a money supermarket, or a big bank, or radical new way of lending or anything else other than a tuppence ha’penny lead selling robbing bastard, yet greedy sales guy will often tell him what he wants to hear.

Does sales guy say:

‘look mate, don’t bother with SEO, you aren’t going to rank for loans in month of happy Sundays, go spend your money on PPC unless that is, you want to invest a million quid in a radical idea that will create buzz in the marketplace and with TV and newspaper ads will help put you on the map’

If he does PPC he might, but that isn’t what Loans guy wants to hear. He wants to believe he can get there and in some cases he’ll be helped to solidify that idea in his mind. he isn’t told that there are only a max of maybe 6 positions worth having and that in the game of catchup he is very very far behind. No, he is told what he wants to hear because the guy wants to make the sale.

The Tip Of an Iceberg?

Ok, so I picked an extreme – but the principle holds true – the sales guy wants to convert, the marketing guy wants to believe that the SEO can deliver.

They both have a job to do. They all have someone somewhere who they need to bullshit. Marketing guy can’t really say to uninformed CEO of shitty offline company bringing nothing new to the party:

“Boss, our product is shit we need to do it better, we aren’t Barclays Bank or Moneysupermarket“

He should, but he’s often caught up in a wealth of other company politics that prevents him from doing so.

Sales guy conversely, might not really get what he does and won’t have the balls to say to his marketing director or CEO :

“Boss, why the effers are we even attempting to service these SME’s who don’t have a hats hoot in hells chance of ranking for their desired keywords, we are just taking their money and deluding them”

I’d imagine that there are 1000′s of examples  like this, where companies/individuals have been lead to believe in one thing, whilst getting another. Net effect is disgruntlement, suspicion and another poke in the eye for the SEO industry.

Get realistic, get Transparent

Transparency is the answer. Yet in reality, it is  clearly a difficult path for some to tread in a global marketplace of others who will say anything to get the sale . Buyers need to get savvy and ask the probing questions. If the company says it can get them there, then get it to put its money where its mouth is. Offer revenue shares, allow the promoting company to share in what it delivers.  If the company believes in what it is saying, then it shouldn’t really baulk at the idea, if it does then…time to look at a different pricing model or just wake up to the fact that it might take a whole lot longer than any 12 month contract suggests.

Maybe the Industry needs to agree to a benchmark of standards that say – if you want to rank for X whilst being the size of Y and only established for Z then you haven’t got a chance in hell.

Yet to say so, would be to consign to defeat the very notion that is clearly alive and well on the web, the view that anyone with a good idea, who is fleet of foot, adaptive, entrepreneurial, adds value etc can succeed and win against the odds, and there’ll always be someone who believes in that.

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Not just another social media monitoring tool

I’m writing this post on an iPhone whilst watching Arsenal trail 2-1 to Stoke, a testament to the interconnected world we inhabit today. A world where we can interact w/ our networks from virtually anywhere, a world where the old constraints of modems and hard wired cables in a phone socket are but a bemusing memory of a place left alone in the roadmap of time.

Back then we usually had to wait before reading a response to a post or a comment. Facebook and Twitter, the proliferation of other nkotb like foursquare, gowalla, brightkite et al were just twinkles in the eye of their respective founders. Today all are becoming a mainstay of the online world, acting as sharepoints for the herds that flock to the power of their distributive connectivity; full of people chattering and networking, discussing themes and topics of their everyday lives. Lets face it, it’s nothing short of a technological social revolution; the web how it should be, as envisaged by the technerd visionaries striving to push it all that little bit further.

As a result of all this, quite a few of us have got excited by the opportunities that this activity presents. Never before has it been so easy to connect w/ people in their ‘moment’ never before has it been possible to identify so very quickly, people who are talking about you, your brand or topics and products important to your interests. The whole proliferation of listening tools that have sprung up is testament to the hunger and appetite for finding new ways of measuring, interacting and building relationships w/ those of import.

In terms of the tools available we have a wide and awesome array. Some do a good job and some simply overwhelm. Of the hardcore tools I’ve used I must confess that some ( even for a tech head like me ) provided too much. There weren’t any that I knew of that enabled me to simplistically look at a couple of important web nodes ( the blogosphere and Twitter ) and not only listen and monitor, but respond to, and share internally, to identify and classify as a CRM or Sales opp, a Marketing or Crisis management issue. All did lots of things really well, but none offered the kind of things I was interested in at a one stop shop.

See for me, at a keyword brand or product conversation level, there usually exists a need. A need to find, a need to share, grow, love, hate, acquire, enquire, inspire even – people tend to talk about such things in blogs, social status updates or forums w/ niche followings or interests. Brands especially can no longer rely on traditional offline media to build brand, neither can they depend on law to silence vociferous detractors, the option of sitting back and allowing conversations to develop w/ no awareness of or engagement w/ is a recipe for soon to be disaster.

Yet honing all that down and acquiring meaningful insight into such events, in the absence of some uber web understanding was and for many still is incredibly difficult. Could crowd sourcing and the wisdom of the masses hold the key?

You betcha! I didn’t know the stats to hand but I took a punt and said if anything of import is happening in the world today then it’s likely to appear in a blog a forum or in Twitter somewhere. With a little pipery and Tommy Cooper jush like thatery I was pretty sure that I could build something that not only allowed people to do the traditional response thing, but to also begin to understand some of the DNA beneath. The ability to identify friends and foes, the ability to extract positive or negative external references, the ability to measure the relative power and importance of what those referenced nodes were about. The ability to segment and take snapshots in time. Actionable insights into cause and effect. How f*#^%in cool to be able to say, right – we launched product x or initiative y and this is how the world/continent/country/region/town responded. These are the people who influenced things, these are the places where it happened and this is where we need to do better.

Of course in terms of the whole GEO thing it’s still early days but, wow, what an exciting time for both marketers and consumers. Anyone who even half gets this stuff who fails to feel the power needs to pack it in tomorrow.

Ok, so yes – it isn’t oauth yet ( I got this thing called a day job) it isn’t beautiful on the eye, it needs a bit more ajaxification, it needs a little negative matching and a few more reporting options (pretty PDFs anyone) but it’s getting there. I hope you give it a try and if you find it useful, support the effort

Cheers

Rob

Sent from an iPhone

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Online PR or off site SEO?

I was talking w/ a colleague the other day about Online PR versus Off site SEO. Whilst chatting it became clear that in the minds of some people out there that a degree of confusion exists around the terminologies due in the main, to the many cross overs of both.

I thought it might be useful therefore,  to layout the benefits of each, and highlight what they do, and show the commonalities and differences of each, showing both how they may be perceived and the benefits of each of their respective approaches.

The table below shows a set of typical aims for each of the respective terms

The table below shows benefits and risks for general methods used by each

When you look at the tables like this, it is clear that are many crossovers and that in terms of interpretation the two are very similar indeed, both offering obvious opportunities for each other with the  reality  being that in many cases, neither constituencies (PR Agencies) and (SEO’s) are getting it and are still doing things in a woefully backward manner.

Woeful PR – Woeful SEO

How many times as an SEO have you seen a non optimised press release and thought, silly sods, why did they do it that way? As a PR practitioner how many times have you stumbled across a piece of awful content and thought, OMG, how rubbish is that message?

It has to be said that what may be obvious to some, may not be so to others. If you are a practitioner of  ‘Online PR’ working in a traditional PR Agency, and you believe that your remit is to simply improve perceptions and raise awareness, then you are missing a big trick by ignoring traditional ‘off site SEO’ methods. Through engaging with a search specialist you’ll be able to dramatically improve the benefits that you bring to your clients, helping to improve their site performance in the search engines.

It simply isn’t good enough to bang out press releases to news wires and miss the masses of easy win opportunities that are there for the taking, you need to wake up and start delivering or you’ll find yourselves over run by others that do.

Conversely, if you are selling SEO Services then it really is about time  (if you aren’t already) that you woke up and smelt the coffee and took steps to ensure that your mindset shifts away from old school traditional perceptions, taking a more holistic view around how all the various spaces can be used to enhance the profile of a domain, not only from a search perspective but from a PR one too.

If you are an ‘SEO’ then I don’t have to remind you around the potential pitfalls of too aggressive a link acquisition strategy, be that through a bought link or other automated approach. I’m not going to get into the intricacies of whether link buying is a good or a bad thing as the debate on that has been had – Google won it, if you do it and get caught and they feel like dinging you, then they will. What I wanted to look at was the whole social thing, as that is where the crowds hang out and where you are likely to garner most attention.  Social retards are about as welcome in the online world as they are in the off. Lets look at that for a minute.

Behaving in a Socially Responsible Way

No one likes a thief or a liberty taker – most of us work hard to earn our livings and do the right thing in our lives. Some of us take shortcuts which may well carry a degree of risk, but hurt no one if we happen to fall – from a service delivery angle, so long as a client is apprised of the risk, then ultimately it’s their call to take it and ours to decide if what is being asked is acceptable to our policies.  I think it’s useful too to consider that it isn’t always about search rankings either . In fact I’m pretty sure that what is often overlooked is that too aggressive an approach will often have symptoms of anti social behaviour and may long term, do a whole lot more harm than good.

Automated comment spamming,  twamming and the general exploitation of websites may seem like a short cut smart route today, but lest not forget that they may come back and bite us in the future. Responsible practitioners will of course know this already and will appreciate the nuances of good netiquette.

Search engines aren’t the easy touch that they once were, especially in some of the more competitive spaces. Rapid spikes or radical changes in link patterns are very easy to identify. Whilst exceptions to the rule aren’t rare, it’s good sense to consider that those which are monitored and show results with huge change maybe expected to be  associated with a valid buzz generation hook. It might also be a good idea to consider too, that if an  algo doesn’t nab you, then  a competitor probably will.

Get real Rob, it’s a competitive landscape

Hey, many of us are pressured daily to deliver, I know that – business wants and requires results – empty trust me promises of we’ll get there in the end are meaningless to a marketing director with targets to deliver. Staff will often rely on these, peoples jobs and livelihoods can live or die on the back of a first page result. Which I guess is a reason why search engines like Google with such massive market share are happy to create the double edged sword that SEO can be. Build a good site they say, do the right things they say, yet the reality is that their SERPs are often riven with results of participants who have all broken the rules to get there.

Coming from that perspective, then most might be forgiven for being a little confused. Either SEO is good or isn’t. The answer to which of course is absolutely it is, provided that it is delivered in a way that is clever and innovative. Too many SEO companies are old school, they believe that the old methods will continue to work – I don’t agree, I think they are doomed to failure and almost stupid to continue with, especially when you consider the wealth of other perspectives that unite an effective strategy.That’s a post for another day though.

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Holistic Search Marketing

It’s been ages since I wrote anything anywhere near interesting or controversial so I thought I’d sit down and have a go and see where it leads me.

We often hear the word ‘holistic’ bounded about these days. Increasingly (and rightly so) companies are looking to connect the dots and put together the various pieces of their marketing puzzles.

The challenge for many is that they aren’t quite sure themselves, they are looking for people and companies who can sit down and explain to them what fits where and why.

How Does PPC affect Organic CTR’s?

Just recently I was having a discussion about PPC and it’s relationship with SEO in the SERPs, specifically, does a PPC listing help organic clickthrough (CTR).

It was very late and I’d had quite a few beers and was very stuffed with Chinese food but even so, we managed to get to a point whereby we discussed a variety of other questions which such a question begged, namely that it depends on the vertical, the user, the PPC position, the Organic position, the brand, the creative etc.

In other words, there is no simple answer other than yes, quite probably. PPC helps organic CTR.

The Pie is big with lots of flavours

I used this example because it’s relatively fresh in my mind and has a natural segue to the core question. SEO and PPC are indeed just a part of the online marketing pie – there’s also Online PR, Social, Affiliate and Display too – All are related, very few large corps can do one without any of the others as there are lots of inevitable overlaps and blur lines – It’s right today in these frugal times that marketing managers looking to maximise the impacts of their budgets, should be asking probing questions like – Should you do one w/ out the other? What aspects of each inform the other? Where should they target their budget to get the most bang for their buck? How will you track ROI for them? Which piece of the pie will deliver the most? Yet answers to these aren’t always as clear cut or as straightforward as we’d like. Many of them require scrutiny and analyses of the pieces used and the pieces that are likely to come into play. Not many big corps still really *get* online. Many struggle with the idea of a unified strategy, preferring to go with the segment that’s the most tried and tested.

No surprise there either, why would they direct positive ROI spend anywhere else – it’s all about ROI after all Rob you dummy!

Well yes and no. Yes because absolutely, if company X invests 100k and gets 300k of sales from a single Channel then the jobs a winner, it’s a no brainer, right? Yet no, because to do so is to take ones eye off of the ever shifting fluidity of the other channels out there. 2k On PR could deliver 50k worth of Organic Serp positions, as could 10k invested into Affiliate, Display or PPC. Whilst it’ll usually be on a case by case basis, there will be very few scenarios where wholesale investment in one channel would be a sensible online strategy.

Some of you reading this might be asking, “yeah ok, but what about offline” and of course you’d be right to ask too! Why wouldn’t a good agency consider offline, they’d be mad to ignore the impact of a good TV, Radio or Paper Media campaign. Your agency or individual (if they were any good) should be falling over themselves to get access to your analytics package to advise upon strategy or to demonstrate past impacts through retrospective analyses.

Yet how many today do? How many companies can actually sit down and give a coherent definitive overview and strategy and deliver on budget? My guess is not too many. It’s a good reason why that on many projects, you’ll find quarterly or monthly inter agency reviews, whereby agency A will sit down with client and agency B, C and D and all attempt to discuss the strategy w/ out giving away too much IP to probable or likely competitors. Yet for the companies who can provide that full 360 overview, who can clearly demonstrate how and why doing X will deliver Y to the bottom line, who can clearly show how aspect XXX strengthens the position of strategy component Z, the benefits and potentials to win new business is huge.

To state the obvious, it’ll be the companies who are demonstrating these traits and abilities who’ll grab the most market share – companies who invest in their people and think outside of the box with experience and insights are the ones who forward thinking businesses will want to trade with. Businesses that recognise that having six or seven different relationships to manage is a whole lot more time consuming and draining than one.

Companies like the one I work for (plug plug) who can step up and deliver, should do really well as a result.

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