SEO: What to Expect?
As Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) becomes more mainstream and a key part of the marketing mix, it is important to ensure client expectations are met. After all, it’s the clients who are paying for the SEO service with their hard earned dollars.
At Reload Media, we make sure we stick to a quality process to measure expectation management that includes:
- Clearly defining that a good quality SEO program is a long term process. We work over 12 month SEO programs as SEO needs this amount of time to meet keyword position targets and guarantees.
- Gain a clear understanding of the most important keywords to the client. Although we might optimise for numerous keywords as part of our SEO programs, there are always ones that the client really wants to get higher up the rankings. Sometimes however, these generic keywords they select may be too ambitious for the amount the client is paying per month. This is often due to their industry already being highly competitive on these generic terms.
- If in a given month a search engine bounces some keywords around, then clearly discussing this movement with the client is important. As often other sites will have experienced the same reshuffle of positions as things always don’t stay the same in search engine land.
- Discussing with the client that we need to access their website to make changes to the meta, footers and other key areas. Some clients haven’t understood that we actually need to change their web pages. Working with them is important to gain the required trust that we won’t crash their site!
- Finally, re-emphasising that it takes patience to be on the first page of the search engines.
If some or all of these areas are done on an ongoing basis, the expectation “bar” can be raised for everyone in the industry. And this will be a good thing for us all.
Popularity: 8%
Read MoreSEO Enters the Marketing Mix
Over the last few years, those in the digital marketing space have experienced a seismic shift in the way businesses approach the web.
Whereas once the Internet was seen as the realm of IT geeks, it is now common for marketing managers to be heavily involved in the planning and implementation of online marketing activities, even to the point of learning to speak the lingo.
However, one area of online advertising has always struggled to secure its share of the marketing mix; SEO.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has often been classified by businesses as being stuck somewhere between a website maintenance item and a legitimate marketing activity. That was, up until now.
Over the last six months, Reload Media has conducted a SEO Survey for business, and the results make for interesting reading.
79% of Queensland businesses surveyed now see SEO as part of their marketing mix, and only 14% of Queensland businesses have never undertaken any SEO in the past, down from 37% at the same time last year.
About this time last year, around 16% of businesses had no idea how they were positioned in the search engines, with that figure reduced to just 11% in 2009.
So whilst it appears that SEO has now become a legitimate part of the marketing mix, there’s still a way to go before it gets its fair share of the marketing budget, although the recent global economic meltdown may have helped its cause.
Popularity: 24%
Read MoreLink Building: Quality over Quantity
It’s fairly well acknowledged nowadays that link building is an important factor when it comes to SEO, and helps enable your website to rank for search terms in competitive niches. However, most fail to realise the importance of quality over quantity and this makes all the difference.
Inexperienced (and some “advanced”) search engine optimisers believe the more links pointing to your website, the better your website will perform in the SERPs (search engine results pages). However this isn’t always the case and can potentially damage your ranking opportunities if done incorrectly.
Search engines base their algorithm (sorting of results) by various factors, some of which are more important than others. Generally, the more important the factor, the harder or longer it can take to achieve. As link building is a necessity for all websites, it’s situated quite high on the list. Some terms like “credit” or “travel” can take years to achieve due to their competitive nature whereas terms such as “purple christmas tree” might only take a few months, depending on competition and amount of traffic.
The ultimate question thus becomes; “How do I build quality links?” From my experience, it is best to hire a professional, someone who understands SEO, the ins and outs and all-arounds. As with any topic, learning takes time, money and patience whereas investing in other’s time to do SEO may benefit you more in the long term. However, if you do have some time up your sleeve and wish to get started on building your website’s authority, there are a few simple steps you can take:
- Article Syndication: We aren’t all novelists nor have perfect grammar and punctuality, however if you have a flair for writing, article syndication is always a great step to improving your website’s authority. Writing articles relevant to your website and submitting them to well known websites can help you in the long run. Just remember to include a link to your website!
- Linking: Contact other related websites and see if they’re happy to place a link on their website to yours. They may ask for a “reciprocal link” (Website A links to Website B and vice versa). This is not as effective as it used to be, however still is beneficial. Having a one way link to your website will always be more beneficial to you, so keep your website informative!
In regards to the second tip, keep your website informative and people will ‘naturally’ link to it. The more people linking from authority websites, the more authority you accumulate. However, remember to keep everything you do at a steady and ‘natural’ rate so when you do hire SEO services from professionals, the transition will be smooth and benefit you much more.
Remember, quality websites (more authoritative) will always be 10x more beneficial than non-authoritative. Keep focused on quality links from quality websites combined with great SEO from professionals and you will have one quality high-ranking website yourself.
Popularity: 12%
Read MoreSmall Business SEO – The Great Equaliser
One of the reasons small business can’t live without SEO is that fact that it is one of the only marketing channels available where the smaller players can compete with, and even trump big business.
Consider the marketing alternatives to SEO and the costs associated with achieving global exposure on TV, Radio or Newspaper?
So how exactly can small business utilise search marketing to compete and even thrive on the web while big business can’t?
1. Focus on the Longtail
The basic premise of the Longtail is that our culture and economy is shifting away from mainstream products and markets to a number of small, specific niches. Many of the typical constraints such as production, distribution and marketing (SEO) are changing and being alleviated by technology and the internet.
Take a big site like Amazon, they must cover all their bases and sell a large number of unique items in smaller quantity. However, when consumers are faced with unlimited choice, shopping around to get exactly what you’re after becomes much easier. Niches are so successful because they allow people to satisfy and fulfill their specific interests.
With SEO and SEM it is easy to measure exactly how profitable your different niches are so that you can focus on the highest performing ones.
2. Unlimited Ad Budget
Traditional marketing tells us that we need to ‘set a budget’ for our marketing costs. When you can measure the exact cost of a conversion, why not simply keep purchasing ads while it’s profitable? As long as every ad click is costing you less than you’re making from that click (accounting for overheads), then there’s no reason to threshold your budget.
In big business, how often have you heard a marketer tell you ‘we don’t have the budget for that at the moment‘?
As a small business, armed with the tangible information of digital ads, you can now say ‘we have an unlimited budget for ads that work‘.
3. Create Valuable Alliances
Unburdened by bureaucracy, small business can easily align with other business’ when it mutually beneficial. Big business can often be slow to change because of procedures and legal issues making it take much longer to create strategic partnerships.
Ask your strategic partners to link to you and they will do your marketing for you. Make it easy and beneficial for them to talk about you and they won’t be able to help themselves.
4. The Personal Touch
How often have you phoned a call centre, only to be greeted by a faceless voice that tells you they can’t help because ‘it’s not standard procedure‘?
Small business has the luxury of taking the time to add that personal touch. If it makes sense to both the business and the customer, why not break the rules? When you can give people something they don’t expect you’re giving them a reason to remember and talk about you.
Rather than trying to disguise it, emphasise the fact that you’re small. Shout out the advantages to the customer; lower overheads, faster responses and savings passed onto the customer.
5. Change Often, and Quickly
With so many freely available research tools, it’s easy to stay on top of trends and discover new niches. When there is a shift in direction in a market, how long does it take a big business to react?
Small business has the advantage of flexibility. If it makes sense to change, you can do something totally different tomorrow. If it doesn’t work out, change again. That’s where the beauty of SEO comes out.
photo by fisserman
Popularity: 5%
Read MoreThe Battle Against Spammers – NoFollow Tag
One of the major problems that faces search engines is spammers trying to manipulate their ranks using black-hat search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques. One of the ways they do this is by posting their links on blogs and in forums, hoping that search engine spiders will pick up the links.
This practice was causing such a problem that Google introduced a new attrbute for hyperlinks; nofollow. The nofollow tag can be added by webmasters to their pages to show that they do not endorse the outbound link. When a search engine spider reads the hyperlink, if it detects the nofollow attribute it will ignore the link.
It is important to note however, that all search engines treat nofollow differently. The 3 big players, Google, Yahoo! and MSN all discount links with the nofollow attribute, but in different ways. Most importantly however, is that nofollow links are not counted as part of Google PageRank.
Despite this, spammers continue to post keyword-flooded hyperlinks into blogs and forum posts. Why do they do this?
The answer is simple, they don’t get penalised.
Google have come out and said on many occasions that they don’t penalise sites for anything that your competitors could do to harm your rankings.
Let’s imagine for a second that Google and the other search engines penalised sites for putting their links all over blogs and forums. This would certainly stop spammers placing their links all over the place, but would open up a new market; link sabotage.
This would mean that your competitor’s could go around putting your link all over blogs and forums and as a result, you would be punished.
For this reason, Google don’t punish you for putting links everywhere, but through the use of the nofollow attribute have found a way to simply not count the link.
This is currently the fairest system, but is not providing any disincentive to spammers spreading their links. Having said that, it’s still the best way to solve the spamming problem.
Popularity: 2%
Read MoreGoogle is Search – But Can Anyone Topple the Giant?
Just as coca-cola was “it” in the 1980’s, in the 21st century Google is the king of search. Their command of both search queries (at somewhere around 65%) and search revenue (around 77% – BRW Magazine) is simply staggering and means that when it comes to search, they are conservatively doubling the performance of all their competitors combined. According to Google’s own promotional material, their advertising network alone reaches 80% of the world’s 1.4 billion internet user’s every month.
So the question then becomes, can anyone topple Google? In the late 90’s Yahoo! was the number one, but Google looked at Yahoo’s weaknesses and created a cleaner search engine that supposedly delivered better search results. But can anyone do it again?
Google continue to go from strength to strength, and their reach is unrivalled. Their advertising network includes AOL, Ask.com and now Yahoo and their recent acquisitions of DoubleClick and Youtube have only broadened their market.
With the much-hyped Yahoo! and Microsoft deal falling through, and Yahoo’s subsequent search marketing deal with Google, who is left to take on the giant of search? Let’s go through the main competitors:
Yahoo!
Currently sitting in a distant second in terms of both advertising and search query share, many claim that Yahoo’s search algorithm is actually superior to Google’s. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant, as the vast majority of users have spoken with their clicks and head to Google for its clean feel. The big thing that Google has over Yahoo is the way Google is able to separate out each of its products to keep that clean feel. Yahoo pack everything they offer into one homepage, which can make it hard to identify what their primary focus is. As a result, many users wonder whether Yahoo’s search is being given the focus it deserves. Yahoo will certainly remain profitable, as they have a loyal fan base that swear by it, but I just can’t see them storming the Google fortress, particularly now they are relying on their ad network.
MSN/Live
If Yahoo is a distant second, then Microsoft’s Live Search is back an eternity in third place. Again, however, there are those out there who believe Microsoft’s search to be better, but I am a definite sceptic on this one. For Microsoft to really succeed in search they need a massive overhaul, and massive overhauls are not really Microsoft’s style. More than likely Microsoft will just let Live run its course, as it doesn’t really seem to have the desire to be number one in search, or else it probably would have put more emphasis on it’s deal with Yahoo rather than letting it slip by the wayside.
AOL, Ask, etc
The old players in the market. Most of these engines still get a decent run of traffic, but most are also relying on Google advertising deals to keep them profitable. These guys are not real challengers for the crown.
Mahalo
Mahalo is an interesting one. Mahalo is Hawaiian for thank you, and the premise behind this start-up is that it is the web’s only human-powered search engine. That is, its search results are not driven by algorithm’s but by human generated results pages. To me it seems like Wikipedia and Dogpile rolled into one, as the user is able to search all the various other engines if Mahalo does not have a page created. I don’t think the concept of a human-powered search engine can work, particularly when it comes to updating it constantly at the speed of web. Wikipedia works but I don’t see Mahalo taking off. It is useful however, if you want to search all the major search engines (and Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr) all in one go. Other than that I don’t see it ever matching Google. Google’s algorithm’s refresh daily, which is almost impossible for a human-powered search engine to match.
Clusty
Another meta approach to search. Just like Dogpile, Clusty attempts to rank results by aggregating results from other search engines. Once generated however, Clusty clusters results together into categories of results. This is a useful tool but won’t have Google shaking.
Other Small Start-ups
Quintura, Blinkx, Powerset, Kosmix, the list goes on. All these players however, are only targeting tiny market niches, market niches that Google could quite easily swat away with one extra feature to their own search results. The other problem most of these smaller players have is they lack the resources to operate their own search algorithm’s and many of the newcomers rely on refining a Google search.
The Verdict
Here’s the problem as I see it for the other players attempting to usurp Google; all of them either rely on Google’s search is some way or are targeting niche markets that Google could themselves cover by throwing a few million at a new Google product.
Google have already done this with email. Google took a search-based approach to internet-based email and eroded Microsoft’s Hotmail monopoly in a flash, so these small niche players had better watch their back. If Microsoft can be beaten so easily, where does that leave the little guy?
But all the big players (including Yahoo thanks to this new deal) are relying on Google in some way either for search results or search advertising. All, that is, except Microsoft. Microsoft’s Live is the one major search engine out there not dependent on Google’s algorithms or advertising dollars.
Over the last few years Google has continually stripped away Microsoft’s stranglehold on all things digital, and maybe the time is right for the old dog to get angry and strike back.
Alas, however, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen…
Popularity: 2%
Read More