A lot of SEO companies seem to have a very clearly defined, five step marketing strategy.

1. Sign the client, even if it means over-promising
2. Get the client to sign a non-disclosure agreement
3. Keep the client in the dark
4. Show the client all his #1 rankings for non-competitive search terms
5. Call it a day

Not that this is bad, but I have a few suggestions nonetheles. They are fivefold.

1. Guarantee Something

Today my staff and I talked about SEO companies. One of our Ivy Leagers (we have two, and I’m very proud of the fact), Geoff, asked how SEO companies determine pricing and what they sell. I responded that they usually do not sell anything other than SEO consulting. They make some changes to the pages, they perhaps make some URL’s friendlier, and perhaps add some content. Geoff was shocked by the non-quantitative and intangibility of this business model. When he asked about guarantees, I had to inform him that most SEO’s do not guarantee anything, and they are proud of it.

Well, I don’t like to ruffle anybody’s feathers. After all these years in the field, I have never once offended an SEO and I wouldn’t want to start now. But I have to say, non-guarantee is crap. I recently read one so-called SEO’s site.

In our experience, it is simply not possible to guarantee results.

Huh? What the huh?

People, it is easy to guarantee results. You simply guarantee them. If you don’t deliver, you refund the client’s money. When a so-called SEO says “it is simply not possible to guarantee results“, what they really mean is “it is simply not possible for us to deliver results“. In which case you shouldn’t be doing SEO.

2. Be Honest

I’m not saying you should tell your wife that she needs to lose weight. I’m suggesting that SEO companies should be honest with their clients from the beginning. Anybody who has done SEO at all knows the dirty little secret of the SEO industry, that SEO companies are over-promising and under-delivering. Those big well known SEO companies have ex-clients, and those ex-clients, when shopping for a new SEO, tell their stories. They were promised, but not guaranteed, rankings. They paid $30,000 for SEO, and they got squat.

The SEO company should have been honest from the beginning and told the client, We cannot get you a top five position on Google for web hosting, for $30,000.

Of course that would mean that you don’t get the contract, but hey that’s life. You are better off focusing your resources on contracts that you can honor, and making happy clients. Just because you had your client sign a non-disclosure agreement doesn’t mean that your client isn’t telling his sob story to every other SEO on the Internet.

Under-promise and over-deliver. It’s just good business.

3. Get a large Retainer

Somewhat repeating what I just said, but I’ll say it anyway. Honesty requires that your client is honest with you and you are honest with your client. Some clients cannot afford $20,000 ~ $50,000 in SEO, but they will pretend that they can just to get the work done. Here’s where you should think like an attorney. Attorneys are smart, they get large retainers up front. So should SEO’s.

4. Explain the Timeframe

Most often when I hear complaints about SEO companies, the problem is not ineffective SEO, but the fact that the SEO did not explain the timeframe. I guess SEO’s aren’t explaining the timeframe because they don’t want to scare off customers. They would be wise to put it in H1 tags on every page of their sites: YOU WILL NOT SEE RESULTS IN UNDER A MONTH.

5. Maintain Resources

People seem to think that SEO is best done by one-man shops. I don’t know what possible benefit there could be, but the big SEO companies often get maligned.

I know small SEO companies and I know big ones. I know of no small SEO companies that own hundreds of established high traffic web sites. I do know of a few large SEO companies that own hundreds of established web sites. I know of one that has several thousand sites. Having hundreds of web sites at your disposal comes in handy when it’s time to build links.

A large staff also comes in handy. Think about it. My staff of 14 is small compared to some of the larger SEO firms, but even I can do the math and see the huge savings I’m realizing by having low cost staff - $10 per hour - doing simple tasks that were previously done by staff who earn $20 per hour. Simply stated, I get twice as many links for my money.

Moving Forward

The SEO industry is regarded by many with suspicion. As it should be. The Internet as a whole is full of liars entirely un-credible businesses.

Perhaps someday in the near future we can stop bickering amongst ourselves long enough to establish a Better Business Bureau for SEO firms.

Danny has written a great overview of PageRank.

Too much reading?

Here’s a nice summary in terms of SEO link building strategy:

“If you really want to know what are the most important, relevant pages to get links from, forget PageRank. Think search rank. Search for the words you’d like to rank for. See what pages come up tops in Google. Those are the most important and relevant pages you want to seek links from. That’s because Google is explicitly telling you that on the topic you searched for, these are the best“

Mike “Make Mine a Merlot” Grehan:

Q: Why does Google have a supplemental index?

A: Well it has to take a dump somewhere!

“Supplemental”. Might as well read “a page that is temporarily banned due to quality issues”

The answer is: not really.

In German.

Explanation here.

This post title may also get flagged as offensive by our friends at ScanSafe, depending on their level of purity (see my previous post)

I’ll take that risk…

Anyway, world-famous blackhat SEO, Stephen Colbert, has succeeded in getting ranked #1 for “giant brass balls” after asking viewers to link to him using that term.

Wasn’t Google’s anti-Googlebomb algo supposed to prevent this type of thing? Why didn’t it in this case? Was the”new Googlebomb algo” merely a hand-job?

He’s also #1 for “greatest living American“.

Matt Cutts on Googlebombs:

“Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs“.

Tip: Inside Google

Hot topics in SEO circles. Seems every SEO I come across these days is also a closet domaineer.

To those new to the terms, domaining refers to the practice of buying and trading in domains.

“As of December 2006 there are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 individuals globally who make buying and selling domain names a part of their business. USA Today reported that many Domainers prefer to remain anonymous due to the highly competitive nature of their business“

The intersection with SEO comes in buying domains for their type-in value, then placing advertising on the landing pages. While the traffic, in many cases, might be minimal, domain names are cheap. If you have thousand domains, in some cases - hundreds of thousands of domains - all receiving a few type-ins per day, then the revenue soon adds up.

Subdomaining is adding a third-level domain onto an existing second-level domain. i.e. http://seo.v7n.com.

Here’s a great article, first of the series of two, looking into domaining and subdomaining, and explores ways in which you can profit.

Interesting argument entitled “A Market for Lemons, a Nobel Prize, and Snake Oil SEO“.

“I see mis-information as a core problem for the SEO industry. There is so much so-called SEO out there, mostly outdated, baseless, or downright wrong, that the accessible information is more wrong than right. A Google or Yahoo! search on SEO topics is ridiculous, for many reasons. Often accurate SEO information is considered trade secret by knowledge consultants, and thus is not very accessible. What appears in front of the inquisitive SEO consumer is mostly junk.“

“I already see that tech-savvy seekers of SEO skip right past the fluff and ask for short term or no term engagements, performance metrics, and accountability.“

Growing pains.

Many SEO firms that traded on supposed “secret knowledge” have already been weeded out, and many more will follow. As clients get more accustomed to this area, they’ll be demanding traditional advertising and marketing metrics, which will help separate fact from fiction. The black hat/white hat debate is long dead - the only thing that really matters now is the value add.

Conversely, this is an area where search has a key advantage. Search is more measureable than most marketing channels. The agencies who offer measureable services should be better positioned to match their supply with client demand. Todd Friesen shows how.

That still leaves the problem, for smaller outfits, of finding a sustainable SEO business model.

Tough call.

Many, many folks who talk about SEO love to parrot the old line, “Content is King”. It’s a concept I’ve addressed many times in the past.

The common approach to SEO seems to be to throw tons of pages up on a website and hope that it will result in some random traffic.

I do not agree with that approach, mainly because I do not think that random content creates conversions like some people think it does. Branding and trust create conversions. But here’s another reason to remove all those random pages - they are bring down your search engine rankings.

Some folks have noticed a sudden spike in v7n’s Alexa rank from the circa 2,000 to circa 700. This spike is due mostly to search engine referrals. It’s the result of a little experiment of mine.

Folks say content is king. They suggest that adding more and more content to a website can only be good. I disagree. I figure that adding non-performing content to a website will actually hurt your search engine visibility by diluting and wasting link weight on non-performing pages. By removing tens of thousands of non-performing pages, you conserve and direct that link weight and focus it on performing pages, and by doing so increase the ranking of performing pages in SERPs.

It’s a bit of a risky experiment - truly one that requires you to put your money where your mouth is.

About a month or so ago, I committed myself, removed pages from v7n that were xxx number of days old, had less than xxx number of page views, and less than xxx number of responses. Just to be sure that I didn’t remove any worthwhile discussions, I went through the list and checked anything that might be remotely worthwhile.

And I did not delete the threads - I simply moved them to a private, hidden, admin-access-only forum.

Within a couple weeks, I started to see the remaining pages performing much better. Within two weeks, search engine referrals were up 7,000 per day.

Content (marketing copy, etc) may be king when it comes to converting visitors, but for search engine rankings, link weight, domain authority and intelligent distribution of link weight appears to be much more effective, even when it means removing content.

Aaron Wall, author of the popular SEOBook, is wondering if he should change his business model:

“As the field of SEO has grown and my share of voice has grown I have attracted far too many wankers….“

More specifically:

  “The people buying PPC stuff are already looking to spend money, but many of the people who are attracted to SEO are attracted to it because they are lazy, want a free ride, and refuse to add any value to the world around them. This is exactly why the target market for a PPC book is so much nicer than the target market for an SEO Book.“

Hit the nail on the head there, Aaron.

SEO does need a budget, and does need to be thought of within a sales/marketing framework in order to work well, but too often, SEO is perceived as a free quick fix.

It’s neither, of course, but that perception is widespread.
I, for one, would like to see Aaron do a regularly updated book on PPC.

Linkbait if I ever saw it, but what the hey:

“SEO folks are going wild–as expected. 90% of SEO (yes, I made that % up) is going to end soon as a practice because Google/Yahoo/MSN and the other search engines are going to need to eliminate it in order to maintain the integrity of their indexes. This is just the first step“

Meh.

They’ve been trying that for years. The changes the search engines make tend to take out the lightweights, but it’s impossible, and not cost effective, to stop the determined. The harder they push, the more stealth SEO becomes.

The search engines also can’t risk going in too hard, as  many SEO firms convince clients to spend up large on PPC.