Category: SEO Book

SEO Book Uncategorized

Historical Revisionism

November 1, 2013

A stopped clock is right two times a day.

There’s some amusing historical revisionism going on in SEO punditry world right now, which got me thinking about the history of SEO. I’d like to talk about some common themes of this historical revision, which goes along the lines of “what I predicted all those years ago came true – what a visionary I am! .” No naming names, as I don’t meant this to be anything personal – as the same theme has popped up in a number of places – just making some observations :)

See if you agree….

Divided We Fall

The SEO world has never been united. There are no industry standards and qualifications like you’d find in the professions, such as being a doctor, or lawyer or a builder. If you say you’re an SEO, then you’re an SEO.

Part of the reason for the lack of industry standard is that the search engines never came to the party. Sure, they talked at conferences, and still do. They offered webmasters helpful guidelines. They participated in search engine discussion forums. But this was mainly to do with risk management. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

In all these years, you won’t find one example of a representative from a major search engine saying “Hey, let’s all get together and form an SEO standard. It will help promote and legitimize the industry!”.

No, it has always been decrees from on high. “Don’t do this, don’t do that, and here are some things we’d like you to do”. Webmasters don’t get a say in it. They either do what the search engines say, or they go against them, but make no mistake, there was never any partnership, and the search engines didn’t seek one.

This didn’t stop some SEOs seeing it as a form of quasi-partnership, however.

Hey Partner

Some SEOs chose to align themselves with search engines and do their bidding. If the search engine reps said “do this”, they did it. If the search engines said “don’t do this”, they’d wrap themselves up in convoluted rhetorical knots pretending not to do it. This still goes on, of course.

In the early 2000’s, it turned, curiously, into a question of morality. There was “Ethical SEO”, although quite what it had to do with ethics remains unclear. Really, it was another way of saying “someone who follows the SEO guidelines”, presuming that whatever the search engines decree must be ethical, objectively good and have nothing to do self-interest. It’s strange how people kid themselves, sometimes.

What was even funnier was the search engine guidelines were kept deliberately vague and open to interpretation, which, of course, led to a lot of heated debate. Some people were “good” and some people were “bad”, even though the distinction was never clear. Sometimes it came down to where on the page someone puts a link. Or how many times someone repeats a keyword. And in what color.

It got funnier still when the search engines moved the goal posts, as they are prone to do. What was previously good – using ten keywords per page – suddenly became the height of evil, but using three was “good” and so all the arguments about who was good and who wasn’t could start afresh. It was the pot calling the kettle black, and I’m sure the search engines delighted in having the enemy warring amongst themselves over such trivial concerns. As far as the search engines were concerned, none of them were desirable, unless they became paying customers, or led paying customers to their door. Or perhaps that curious Google+ business.

It’s hard to keep up, sometimes.

Playing By The Rules

There’s nothing wrong with playing by the rules. It would have been nice to think there was a partnership, and so long as you followed the guidelines, high rankings would naturally follow, the bad actors would be relegated, and everyone would be happy.

But this has always been a fiction. A distortion of the environment SEOs were actually operating in.

Jason Calacanis, never one to miss an opportunity for controversy, fired some heat seekers at Google during his WebmasterWorld keynote address recently…..

Calacanis proceeded to describe Cutts and Google in terms like, “liar,” “evil,” and “a bad partner.” He cautioned the PubCon audience to not trust Google, and said they cooperate with partners until they learn the business and find a way to pick off the profits for themselves. The rant lasted a good five minutes….

He accused Google of doing many of the things SEOs are familiar with, like making abrupt algorithm changes without warning. They don’t consult, they just do it, and if people’s businesses get trashed as a result, then that’s just too bad. Now, if that’s a sting for someone who is already reasonable wealthy and successful like Calacanis, just imagine what it feels like for the much smaller web players who are just trying to make a living.

The search business is not a pleasant environment where all players have an input, and then standards, terms and play are generally agreed upon. It’s war. It’s characterized by a massive imbalance of power and wealth, and one party will use it to crush those who it determines stands in its way.

Of course, the ever pleasant Matt Cutts informs us it’s all about the users, and that’s a fair enough spin of the matter, too. There was, and is, a lot of junk in the SERPs, and Mahalo was not a partner of Google, so any expectation they’d have a say in what Google does is unfounded.

The take-away is that Google will set rules that work for Google, and if they happen to work for the webmaster community too, well that’s good, but only a fool would rely on it. Google care about their bottom line and their projects, not ours. If someone goes out of business due to Google’s behaviour, then that’s of no concern. Personally, I think the big technology companies do have a responsibility beyond themselves to society, because the amount of power they are now centralising means they’re not just any old company anymore, but great vortexes that can distort entire markets. For more on this idea, and where it’s all going, check out my review of “Who Owns The Future” by Jaron Lanier.

So, if you see SEO as a matter of playing by their rules, then fine, but keep in mind “those who can give you everything can also take everything away”. Those rules weren’t designed for your benefit.

Opportunity Cost

There was a massive opportunity cost by following so called ethical SEO during the 2000s.

For a long time, it was relatively easily to get high rankings by being grey. And if you got torched, you probably had many other sites with different link patterns good to go. This was against the webmaster guidelines, but given marketing could be characterized as war, one does not let the enemy define ones tactics. Some SEOs made millions doing it. Meanwhile, a lot of content-driven sites disappeared. That was, perhaps, my own “a stopped clock is right two times a day” moment. It’s not like I’m going to point you to all the stuff I’ve been wrong about, now is it :)

These days, a lot of SEO is about content and how that content is marketed, but more specifically it’s about the stature of the site on which that content appears. That’s the bit some pundits tend to gloss over. You can have great content, but that’s no guarantee of anything. You will likely remain invisible. However, put that exact same content on a Fortune 500 site, and that content will likely prosper. Ah, the rich get richer.

So, we can say SEO is about content, but that’s only half the picture. If you’re a small player, the content needs to appear in the right place, be very tightly targeted to your audiences needs so they don’t click back, and it should be pushed through various media channels.

Content, even from many of these “ethical SEOs”, used to be created for search engines in the hope of netting as many visitors as possible. These days, it’s probably a better strategy to get inside the audience’s heads and target it to their specific needs, as opposed to a keyword, then get that content out to wherever your audience happens to be. Unless, of course, you’re Fortune 500 or otherwise well connected, in which case you can just publish whatever you like and it will probably do well.

Fair? Not really, but no one ever said this game was fair.

Whatever Next?

Do I know what’s going to happen next? In ten years time? Nope. I could make a few guesses, and like many other pundits, some guesses will prove right, and some will be wrong, but that’s the nature of the future. It will soon make fools of us all.

Having said that, will you take a punt and tell us what you think will be the future of SEO? Does it have one? What will look like? If you’re right, then you can point back here in a few years time and say “Look, I told you so!”.

If you’re wrong, well, there’s always historical revisionism :)

Categories:

SEO Book Uncategorized

Optimizing The SEO Model

October 29, 2013

SEO has always been focused on acquisition.

The marketing strategy, based on high rankings against keyword terms, is about gaining a steady flow of new visitors. If a site ranks better than competing sites, this steady stream of new visitors will advantage the top sites to the disadvantage of those sites beneath it.

The selling point of SEO is a strong one. The client gets a constant flow of new visitors and enjoys competitive advantage, just so long as they maintain rank.

A close partner of SEO is PPC. Like SEO, PPC delivers a stream of new visitors, and if you bid well, and have relevant advertisements, then you enjoy a competitive advantage. Unlike PPC, SEO does not cost per click, or, to be more accurate, it should cost a lot less per click once the SEOs fees are taken into account, so SEO has enjoyed a stronger selling point. Also, the organic search results typically have a higher level of trust from search engine users.

91% prefer using natural search results when looking to buy a product or service online”.[Source: Tamar Search Attitudes Report, Tamar, July 2010]

Rain On The Parade

Either by coincidence or design, Google’s algorithm shifts have made SEO less of a sure proposition.

If you rank well, the upside is still there, but because the result is less certain than it used to be, and the work more involved than ever, the risk, and costs in general, have increased. The more risky SEO becomes in terms of getting results, the more Adwords looks attractive, as at least results are assured, so long as spend is sufficient.

Adwords is a brilliant system. For Google. It’s also a brilliant system for those advertisers who can find a niche that doesn’t suffer high levels of competition. The trouble is competition levels are typically high.

Because competition is high, and Adwords is an auction model, bid prices must rise. As bid prices rise, only those companies that can achieve ROI at high costs per click will be left bidding. The higher their ROI, the higher the bid prices can conceivably go. Their competitors, if they are to keep up, will do likewise.

So, the PPC advertiser focused on customer acquisition as a means of growing the company will be passing more and more of their profits to Google in the form of higher and higher click prices. If a company wants to grow by customer acquisition, via the search channel, then they’ll face higher and higher costs. It can be difficult to maintain ROI via PCC over time, which is why SEO is appealing. It’s little wonder Google has their guns pointed at SEO.

A fundamental problem with Adwords, and SEO in general, is that basing marketing success around customer acquisition alone is a poor long term strategy.

White-Hat SEO Is Dead

It’s surprising a term such as “white hat SEO” was ever taken seriously.

Any attempt to game a search engine’s algorithm, as far as the search engine is concerned, is going to be frowned upon by the search engine. What is gaming if it’s not reverse engineering the search engines ranking criteria and looking to gain a higher rank than a site would otherwise merit? Acquiring links, writing keyword-focused articles, for the purpose of gaining a higher rank in a search engine is an attempt at rank manipulation. The only thing that varies is the degree.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as far as marketers are concerned.

The search marketing industry line has been that so long as you avoided “bad behaviour”, your site stood a high chance of ranking well. Ask people for links. Find keywords with traffic. Publish pages focused on those topics. There used to more certainty of outcome.

If the outcome is not assured, then so long as a site is crawlable, why would you need an SEO? You just need to publish and see where Google ranks you. Unless the SEO is manipulating rank, then where is the value proposition over and above simply publishing crawlable content? Really, SEO is a polite way of saying “gaming the system”.

Those who let themselves be defined by Google can now be seen scrambling to redefine themselves. “Inbound marketers” is one term being used a lot. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, although you’d be hard pressed to call it Search Engine Optimization. It’s PR. It’s marketing. It’s content production. The side effect of such activity might be a high ranking in the search engines (wink, wink). It’s like Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is……

A few years back, we predicted that the last SEOs standing would be blackhat, and that’s turned out to be true. The term SEO has been successfully co-opted and marginalized. You can still successfully game the system with disposable domains, by aggressively targeting keywords, and buying lot of links and/or building link networks, but there’s no way that’s compliant with Google’s definitions of acceptable use. It would be very difficult to sell that to a client without full disclosure. Even with full disclosure, I’m sure it’s a hard sell.

But I digress….

Optimization In The New Environment

The blackhats will continue on as usual. They never took direction from search engines, anyway.

Many SEOs are looking to blend a number of initiatives together to take the emphasis off search. Some call it inbound. In practice, it blends marketing, content production and PR. It’s a lot less about algo hacking.

For it to work well, and to get great results in search, the SEO model needs to be turned on its head. It’s still about getting people to a site, but because the cost of getting people to a site has increased, every visitor must count. For this channel to maintain value, then more focus will go on what happens after the click.

If the offer is not right, and the path to that offer isn’t right, then it’s like having people turn up for a concert when the band hasn’t rehearsed. At the point the audience turns up, they must deliver what the audience wants, or the audience isn’t coming back. The bands popularity will quickly fade.

This didn’t really matter too much in the past when it was relatively cheap to position in the SERPs. If you received a lot of slightly off-topic traffic, big deal, it’s not like it cost anything. Or much. These days, because it’s growing ever more costly to position, we’re increasingly challenged by the “growth by acquisition” problem.

Consider optimizing in two areas, if you haven’t already.

1. Offer Optimization

We know that if searchers don’t find what they what, they click back. The click back presents two problems. One, you just wasted time and money getting that visitor to your site. Secondly, it’s likely that Google is measuring click-backs in order to help determine relevancy.

How do you know if your offer is relevant to users?

The time-tested way is to examine a couple of the 4ps. Product, price, position, and place. Place doesn’t matter so much, as we’re talking about the internet, although if you’ve got some local-centric product or service, then it’s a good idea to focus on it. Promotion is what SEOs do. They get people over the threshold.

However, two areas worth paying attention to are product and price. In order to optimize product, we need to ask some fundamental questions:

Does the customer want this product or service?
What needs does it satisfy? Is this obvious within a few seconds of viewing the page?
What features does it have to meet these needs? Are these explained?
Are there any features you’ve missed out? Have you explained all the features that meet the need?
Are you including costly features that the customer won’t actually use?
How and where will the customer use it?
What does it look like? How will customers experience it?
What size(s), color(s) should it be?
What is it to be called?
How is it branded?
How is it differentiated versus your competitors?
What is the most it can cost to provide, and still be sold sufficiently profitably?

SEOs are only going to have so much control over these aspects, especially if they’re working for a client. However, it still pays to ask these questions, regardless. If the client can’t answer them, then you may be dealing with a client who has no strategic advantage over competitors. They are likely running a me-too site. Such sites are difficult to position from scratch.

Even older sites that were at one point highly differentiated have slid into an unprofitable me too status as large sites like Amazon & eBay offer a catalog which grows deeper by the day.

Unless you’re pretty aggressive, taking on me-too sites will make your life difficult in terms of SEO, so thinking about strategic advantage can be a good way to screen clients. If they have no underlying business advantage, ask yourself if you really want to be doing SEO for these people?

In terms of price:

What is the value of the product or service to the buyer?
Are there established price points for products or services in this area?
Is the customer price sensitive? Will a small decrease in price gain you extra market share? Or will a small increase be indiscernible, and so gain you extra profit margin?
What discounts should be offered to trade customers, or to other specific segments of your market?
How will your price compare with your competitors?

Again, even if you have little or no control over these aspects, then it still pays to ask the questions. You’re looking for underlying business advantage that you can leverage.

Once we’ve optimized the offer, we then look at conversion.

2. Conversion Optimization

There’s the obvious conversion most search marketers know about. People arrive at a landing page. Some people buy what’s on offer, and some leave. So, total conversions/number of views x 100 equals the conversion rate.

However, when it comes to SEO, it’s not just about the conversion rate of a landing page. Unlike PPC, you don’t have precise control over the entry page. So, optimizing for conversion is about looking at every single page on which people enter your site, and optimizing each page as if it were an entry point.

What do you want people to do when they land on your page?

Have a desired action in mind for every page. It might be a sign-up. It might be to encourage a bookmark. It might be to buy something. It might be to tweet. Whatever it is, we need to make the terms of engagement, for the visitor, clear for each page – with a big, yellow highlight on the term “engagement”! Remember, Google are likely looking at bounce-back rates. So, there is a conversion rate for every single page on your site, and they’re likely all different.

Think about the shopping cart process. Is a buyer, particularly a mobile buyer, going to wade through multiple forms? Or could the sale be made in as few clicks as possible? Would integrating Paypal or Amazon payments lift your conversion rates? What’s your site speed like? The faster, the better, obviously. A lot of conversion is about streamlining things – from processes, to navigation to site speed.

At this point, a lot of people will be wondering how to measure and quantify all this. How to track track conversion funnels across a big site. It’s true, it’s difficult. It many cases, it’s pretty much impossible to get adequate sample sizes.

However, that’s not a good reason to avoid conversion optimization. You can measure it in broad terms, and get more incremental as time goes on. A change across pages, a change in paths, can lead to small changes on those pages and paths, even changes that are difficult to spot, but there is sufficient evidence that companies who employ conversion optimization can enjoy significant gains, especially if they haven’t focused on these areas in the past.

While you could quantify every step of the way, and some companies certainly do, there’s probably a lot of easy wins that can be gained merely by following these two general concepts – optimizing the offer and then optimizing (streamlining) the pages and paths that lead to that offer. If something is obscure, make it obvious. If you want the visitor to do something, make sure the desired action is writ-large. If something is slow, make it faster.

Do it across every offer, page and path in your site and watch the results.

Categories:

SEO Book Uncategorized

How To Win In Local Internet Marketing: The Practical Guide For Small Businesses And Local Marketers

vedrantomic

October 15, 2013

Once a training ground for novice SEOs, local search has evolved into a complex, unpredictable ecosystem dominated by Google. Corporations and mom-and-pops shops alike are fighting for their place under the Sun. It’s everybody’s job to make best out of local Internet marketing because its importance will continue to grow.

This guide is geared towards helping you deepen your understanding of the local search ecosystem, as well as local Internet marketing in general.

I hope that, after you finish reading this guide, you will be able to make sense of local Internet marketing, use it to grow your business or help your clients do the same.

Objectives, Goals & Measurements Are Crucial

Websites exist to accomplish objectives. Regardless of company size, business models and market, your website needs to bring you closer to accomplishing one or more business objectives. These could be:

Customer Acquisition
Lead Generation
Branding
Lowering sales resistance
etc.

Although not exciting, this is a crucial step in building a local Internet strategy. It will determine the way you set your goals, largely shape the functionality of your website, guide you in deciding what your budget should be and so on.

Getting Specific With Measurement

Objectives are too broad to work with. They exist on a higher level and are something company executives/leadership need to set.

This is why we need specific goals, KPIs and targets. Without getting into too many details, goals could be defined as specific strategies geared towards accomplishing an objective.

For example, if your objective is to “grow your law firm,” a good goal derived from that would be to “generate client inquiries”. Another one would be to use the website to get client referrals.

When you have all this defined, you need to set KPIs. They are simply metrics that help you understand how are you doing against your objectives. For this imaginary law firm, a good KPI would be the number of potential client leads. After you set targets for your KPIs, you have completed your measurement framework. To learn more about measurement models, you can read this post by Avinash Kaushik.
These will be the numbers that you or your client should care about on a day to day basis.

Lifetime Customer Value And Cost Of Customer Acquisition

Regardless of size, every local business needs to know what is their average lifetime customer value and the cost of customer acquisition.

You need to know these numbers so you can set your marketing budget and be aware if you are on the path of going out of business despite acquiring lots of customers.

Lifetime customer value (LTV) is revenue you expect from a single customer during the lifetime of your business. If you are having trouble calculating this number for your or client’s business, use this neat calculator made by Harvard Business School.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the amount of money you spent to acquire a single customer. The formula is simple. Divide the sum of total costs of sales, marketing, your overhead, with the number of customers you acquired in any given period.

LTV & CAC are the magic numbers.

You can use them to sell Internet marketing services, as well as to demonstrate the value of investing heavily in Internet marketing.

Understanding and using these metrics will put you and your clients ahead of most competitors.

Stop – It’s Budget Time

Now when you have your business objectives, customer acquisition costs and other KPIs defined, and their targets set, it’s time to talk budgets. Budgets will determine what kind of local Internet marketing campaign you can run and how far it can essentially go.

Most companies don’t have a separate Internet marketing budget. It’s usually just a part of their marketing budget which can be anywhere from 2% to 20% of sales depending on a lot of factors including, but not limited to:

Business objectives
Company size
Profit margins
Industry
etc.

What does this mean to you?

If you are selling services, you will need to have as much of this data as possible.

Planning And Executing Your Campaign

Now when you know what business objectives your local Internet marketing campaign has to accomplish, your targets, and your budget – you can start developing a campaign. It’s easiest to think of this process if we break our campaign planning into small, but meaningful phases:

laying the groundwork,
building a website,
taking care of your data in the local search ecosystem,
citation building,
creating a great website,
building links,
setting up a review management system,
expanding on non-organic search channels
and taking care of web analytics.

Laying The Groundwork

Local search is about data. It’s about aggregation and distribution of data across different platforms and technologies. It’s also about accuracy and consistency.

This is the reason why you need to start with a NAP audit.

NAP stands for name, address and phone number. It’s the anchor business data and should remain accurate, consistent and up to date everywhere. In order to make it consistent, you first need to identify inaccurate data.

This is easier than it sounds.

You can use Yext.com or Getlisted.org to easily and quickly check your data accuracy and consistency in the local search eco system.

Start With Data Aggregators

Data aggregators or compilers are companies that build and maintain large databases of business data. In the US, the ones you should keep an eye on are Neustar/Localeze , Infogroup (former InfoUSA) and Axciom.

Why are data aggregators important?
They are upstream data providers. This means that they provide baseline and sometimes enhanced data to search engines (including Google), local and industry directories. If your data is wrong in one of their databases, it will be wrong all over the place.

Usually, your business data goes bad for one or more of these reasons:

You changed your phone number;
You moved to another location;
Used lots of tracking numbers
Made lots of IYP advertising deals where you wanted to target multiple towns/cities
etc.

If you or your client have a data inconsistency problem, the fix will start with the aggregators:

Before you embark on a data correction campaign, have in mind that data aggregators take their data seriously. You will need to have access to the phone number on the listing you are trying to claim and verify, an email on the domain of the site associated with the business, and sometimes even scans of official documents.

Remember – after you fix your data inaccuracies with the aggregators, it’s still a smart idea to claim and verify listings in major IYPs as data moves slowly from upstream data providers to
numerous local search platforms your business is listed in.

Building Citations Is Important

Simply put, citations are mentions of your business’s name, address and phone number (full citation) or name and phone or address (partial citation).

Just like links in “general” organic search, citations are used to determine the relative importance or prominence of your business listing. If Google notices an abundance of consistent citations, it makes them think that your business is legitimate and important and you get rewarded with higher search visibility.

The more citations your business has, the more important it will be in Google’s eyes. Oh, there is also a little matter of citation quality as not all citations are created equal. There are also different types of citations besides full and partial.

Depending on the source, citations can come from:

your website;
IYPs like YellowPages.com;
local business directories like Maine.com;
industry websites like ThomasNet.com;
event websites like Events.com;
etc.

We could group citations by how structured they are. This means that a citation on YellowBook.com is structured, but a mention on your uncle’s blog is not. Google prefers the first type. The bulk of your citation building will be covered by simply making sure that your data in major data aggregators is accurate and up-to-date. However, there’s more to citations than that.

What Makes Citations Strong?

Conventional wisdom tells us that citation strength depends mostly on the algorithmic trust that Google has in the source of the your citation. For example, if you are a manufacturer of industrial coatings, a mention on ThomasNet.com would help you significantly more than a mention on a blog from some guy that has visited your facility once.

You also want your citations to be structured, relevant and to have a link to your website for maximum benefit.

How To Build Citations?

You already started by claiming and verifying your listings with major data aggregators. Since you are very serious about local search, you will make sure to claim and verify listings with major IYPs, too.

Start with the most important ones:

Yellowpages.com;
Yelp.com;
local.yahoo.com;
SuperPages.com;
Citysearch.com;
Insiderpages.com;
Manta.com;
Yellowbook.com;
Yellowbot.com;
Local.com;
dexknows.com;
MerchantCircle.com;
Hotfrog.com;
Mojopages.com;
Foursquare.com;
etc.

You shouldn’t forget business and industry associations such as bbb.org or your local chamber of commerce. Here’s where you can find your local chamber of commerce.

Industry Directories Are An Excellent Source Of Citations

Industry directories such as Avvo.com for lawyers or ThomasNet.com for manufacturers are not just an excelent source of citations, but are great for your organic search visibility in the Penguin Apocalipse.

How do you find those ?

You can use a couple of tools:

Whitespark.com to mine citation sources.
Ahrefs.com to replicate industry links with structured data
Use a tool like soloseo.com

Want even more citations?

Then pay attention to daily deal and event sites. Don’t forget charity websites either. If you are one of those people that are obsessed with how everything about citations works, I recommend this (the one and only) book/guide about citations by Nyagoslav Zhekov.

Make Your Website Great

While it’s possible to achieve some success using just Google Places and other platforms to market a local business, it’s not possible to capture all the Web has to offer.

Your website is the only web property you will fully control. You have the freedom to track and measure anything you want, and the freedom to use your website to accomplish any business objective.

Marry Keyword And Market Research

There’s nothing more tragic nor costly than targeting the wrong keywords and trying to appeal to demographics that don’t need your services/products.

To run a successful local Internet marketing campaign, you cannot just rely on quantitative data (keywords), you need to conduct qualitative market research. This is very important as it will reduce your risks, as well as acquisition costs if done right.

Let’s start with keyword research.

Getting local keyword data has always been a challenge. Google’s recent decision to withhold organic keyword data hasn’t made it any easier. However, Google itself has provided us with tools to get relatively reliable keyword data for any local search campaign.

Coupled with data from SEOBook Keyword Tool, Ubersuggest, and Bing’s Keyword Tool, you will have plenty of data to work with.

Of course, you shouldn’t forsake the market research of the equation.

You and/or your client can survey their customers to discover how exactly they describe your business, your services/products or your geographic area. For example, you’ll learn if there are any geographical nuances that you should be aware of, such as:

DFW (Dallas/Fort Worth)
PDX (Portland)
OBX (Outer Banks)

Use this data against keyword research tools. If you’re running AdWords, you can get an accurate idea of search volumes. To do that, click the Campaign tab, followed by the Keywords tab, then Details and then Search Terms. This data can be downloaded. The video below shows how you can get accurate search volume data if running AdWords.

Keep in mind that the quality of data using this method depends on your use of keyword matching options. This practically means that if you want to get exact match search volumes for a certain number of keywords, you have to make sure to have those keywords set as exact match.

If you’re not running AdWords, Google gives you a chance to get a good representation of your local search market using the Keyword Planning Tool as described in this post.

Content And Site Architecture

Largely, your content will depend on your business objectives, brand and the results of your keyword research. The time of local brochure type sites has long passed, at least for businesses that are serious about local Internet marketing.

Local websites are no different from corporate websites when it comes to technical aspects of SEO. Performance and crawlability are very important, as well as proper optimization of titles, headings, body text etc.

However, unlike corporate websites, local sites will have more benefit from:

“localization” of testimonials – it’s not only important to get testimonials, but it’s crucial to make sure that your visitors know where those testimonials came from.
“localization” of galleries, as well as “before and after” photos – similar to testimonials, you can leverage social proof the most if your website visitors can see how your services/products helped their neighbours.
location pages – pages about a specific city/town where you or your client have an office or service area. Before you go on a rampage creating hundreds of these pages, don’t forget that they need to add value to the users, and not just be copy/pasted from Wikipedia. The way to add value is to make them completely unique and useful to your visitors. For example, location pages can show the specific directions to one of your offices or store-fronts. You don’t have the “big brand luxury” of ranking local pages that have virtually all of their content behind a paid wall.

local blogging – use your blog to connect with local news organizations, charities and industry associations, as well as local bloggers. In addition, blog about your industry; this way, you will get the best of both worlds.
adopting structured data – using schema markup, you can increase click-through rates from the SERPs and get a few other SEO benefits. You can use the Schema Creator to save time.
adopting “mobile” – everyone knows that local search is increasingly mobile. Mobile websites are not a luxury but a necessity Luckily for you or your clients you don’t have to invest a lot of resources in developing a mobile site. You can use tools such as dudamobile.com or bmobilized.com to create a fully functional mobile website in hours.

Link Building For Brick And Mortar Businesses

Links are still important. They are still a foundation of high organic search visibility. They still demand your resources.

But a lot has changed – since Penguin. Building links has become a delicate endeavor even for local websites. But there is a way to triumph, all you need to do is change how you view local link building.

See link building as marketing campaigns that have links as a by-product.

What does that mean? It means that your are promoting your business as if Google doesn’t exist. Link and citation building overlap to a certain extent. They do so in a way that makes good links great citations, especially if they’re structured.

Join Business Associations

BBB.org has an enormus amount of algorithmic trust. It’s also an excellent citation. As a bonus – displaying the BBB badge prominently on your website you will likely receive a boost in conversion rates. Similar is true with your local chamber of commerce. Would you join those if Google was not around?

You probably would.

Join Industry Associations

Every industry has associations you or your client can join. You will get similar benefits to ones one can expect from BBB. However, being a member of trade associations will add an additional layer of value to your business in form of education or certifications.

Charity work

Every business should give back. Sometimes you will get a link sometimes you will not but you will always benefit from this type of community involvement.

Industry websites

There are plenty of industry websites and and directories in almost every industry. Sometimes these websites can refer significant traffic to you but they almost always make for a good link and a solid citation.

Organize Events

Events are good for business. If you organize them you should make sure that it’s reflected on the web. There are plenty of websites you can submit your event to. Google is not likely to start considering organizing offline events spam any time soon.

Find Local Directories

Every state has a few good ones. It’ likely that your town has an online business directory you can join. These types of links can make good citations too. They are usually easy to acquire.

Local Blogs

It pays to a friend of your “local blogosphere”. Try to include local bloggers in your community involvement, offer to contribute content or offer giveaways.

Truly Integrate Link Building Into Your Marketing Operations

Whenever possible, make sure your vendors link to you:

If you’re offering discounts to any organization, make sure it’s reflected on their website.
If you’re attending an industry show or an event, give a testimonial and get a link.
If you get press, remind a report to link to your website.

Review Management

In local search, customer reviews are bigger than life. Consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations while majority (52%) says that positive online reviews make them more likely to choose a local business. Influence reviews have on your local business go well beyond social proof. Good reviews can boost your local search visibility, while bad reviews can destroy your business.

Reviews – The Big Picture

Every organization that strives to get better at what it does should use consumer reviews to improve its business operations. Customer reviews should be treated as one of the most valuable pieces of qualitative data. You should be surveying your customers daily and use their feedback to improve your services, products, customer service etc..

This holds true for corporations, as well as mom and pops shops. It’s not complicated to ask your customers about specific aspects of their experience with your business and record their answers. It’s not expensive, either.

The benefits of taking reviews seriously are enormous:

More search visibility;
Less potential for online reputation management issues;
Increased Credibility;

What can you do to win at review management?

Since you need to get high rating positive reviews on different websites in a way that doesn’t break any guidelines and keeps you out of jail, your best bet would be to use reviews as a customer service survey tools.

This means that you should seek customer feedback systematically in order to improve your or your client’s business. You can ask your most ecstatic customers to share their experiences with your services/products on major local search platforms. Remember that you cannot provide any type of incentive for this behavior.

To save time, you can use a tool such as GetfiveStarts.com. This tool will do everything described above.

Think Beyond Organic Search

Internet marketers tend to be blindly focused on organic search. It’s understandable – organic traffic is relatively cheap (in most markets) and seemingly unlimited.

It’s also a mistake.

Organic search channel is getting increasingly more unstable. And with that, more expensive to acquire. Since you’re aware of your customer acquisition cost and have a measurement framework, it’s easy to know how affordable traffic from other sources is for your business.

Paid Search Traffic

Paid search advertising works, especially if you did a good job gearing your site for conversion. You shouldn’t leave your PPC budget to Google, though. Bing/Yahoo! are a more affordable source of paid traffic with similar conversion rates.

If you’re planning to run a local paid campaign, don’t forget to:

target geographically;
use negative keywords and
be fanatical about acquisition cost.

You can also read this post by PPC Hero on what you should keep in mind when running local search advertising campaigns. You can also check out this post on Search Engine Land about managing and measuring local PPC campaigns.

Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) Sites

Sites like YellowPages.com or SuperPages.com don’t have the traffic Google or even Bing get, but they do have a significant amount of traffic. They also have traffic that’s at the very end of the buying cycle. This is the reason one should be serious about IYPs.

What does that mean?

It means that you should have most of the big IYP listings claimed, verified and optimized to the best of your ability. So use every element of your listing to sell your products/services. In a lot of markets, it’s wise to explore advertising opportunities, as well.

If you want to take an extra step, or simply lack the time, you can sign up with a service such as Yext.com and control the major IYP listings from a single dashboard.

Keep in mind, though, that Yext.com doesn’t come for free, and you will have to pay a few hundreds dollars for a year of service.

Another avenue to take would be to outsource this process. In this scenario, you will most likely pay a one-time fee for verification and optimization of a predetermined number of listings. However, if you would like to change some of your business information somewhere down the road (such as name and phone number), you will have to go through this process from the beginning.

Social Media

These days, social media means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Local businesses should use social media platforms to connect with customers that love them. Empowering these customers and giving them an incentive to recommend you to their family and friends.

You should automate as much of your social media efforts as possible. You can use tools like HooteSuite or SocialOomph.

Always try to add value in your interactions and never spam your follower base.

Classified Sites

It’s amazing how many businesses miss to build their presence on classified sites like Craigslist.org. Even though Craigslist audience the type of audience that is always on the lookout for a great deal, the buying intent is very strong.

If you’d like to get the most out of Craigslist and other classified sites, remember to make your ads count. You need:

persuasive copy;
targeted ads;
special deals;
etc.

Other sources of non-search traffic you should explore are local newspaper advertising, ads on big industry websites, local blogs and others.

Tracking And Web Analytics

If there’s only one thing local businesses should care about, it’s tracking. As we established in the beginning of this guide, everyone needs to know how much they can afford to spend in order to acquire a customer.

Proper tracking ensures that you don’t make a mistake of spending too much on customer acquisition or spending anything on acquiring a wrong type of customer.

You can use a number of free or low cost web analytics solutions, including Clicky, KissMetrics, Woopra and Google Analytics.

If you’re like most people and don’t care if Google has access to your data, you can use Google Analytics. Take advantage of custom reporting and advanced segmentation.

In order to make the most out the traffic you get, and to get more of the traffic that is right for your business, you should create custom reports. They will enable you to know how you’re doing against your targets.

To create a custom report, click the “Customization” tab in Analytics and then click the “New Custom Report” tab.

Pick your metrics first (I recommend a Unique Visitors and Conversion Rates and couple that with the geographic dimension)

Tracking Offline Conversions

This step is crucial for local businesses that want to measure performance. Fortunately, this is not as complicated as it sounds. Depending on the type of your campaign, you can use tracking phone numbers, web-only discount codes as well as campaign-specific URLs.

Avinash Kaushik has written extensively on best ways to track offline conversions. I highly recommend this post.

Tying It All Together

Focus on improving the quality of products you sell and/or services you provide. Remember that every Internet marketing campaign works better if you’re able to provide a remarkable experience for your customers.

Build your brand and make your customers fall in love with your business. That would make every aspect of your marketing, especially Internet marketing, work better.

Vedran Tomic is a member of SEOBook and founder of Local Ants LLC, a local internet marketing agency.

Categories:

local search

SEO Book Uncategorized

Productizing Your SEO Business

October 11, 2013

If you service clients, it’s quite likely that you’ve faced some of the same pain points I have when trying to design a “product” out of your “service”. The words product and service in our industry tend to be interchangeable as our products are digital products.

Pricing for SEO, or any type of digital marketing service, has been written about quite a few times and there’s never been a real clear answer as to what the sweet spot is for pricing.

I actually do not believe there is a clear or semi-clear answer to pricing but what I do believe is that there is a clear path you can set for your company which makes many aspects of your business easier to automate and easier to manage. I refer to it here as “productizing” the business.

Where to Start

Some products can be priced more easily than others. If you are selling just your time (consulting) then you can do it by hour, obviously. I think the “future” of the SEO consultant has been here for awhile anyways. Many have already evolved into the broader areas of digital marketing like:

Technical SEO
CRO
Competitive Research
Analytics
Broader Online Marketing Strategy and Execution

There are other areas like paid search, email marketing, and so on but the above covers a good chunk of what many of us having been doing on our own properties for awhile and client sites as well. As more and more of us service clients and perhaps start agencies it’s important to start from the beginning.

This will differ in analysis if you have a much larger agency, but here we are focusing on the more common freelancer and small agency. The steps I would recommend are as follows (this is in relation to pricing/products only, I’m assuming you’ve already identified your market, brand messaging, etc):

Determine a sustainable net profit. What do I want to earn as a baseline number?
Determine acceptable margins based on desired size of staff and potential cost of contractor work.
Determine the required gross revenue needed to achieve your net profit.

Why Do it This Way?

I do it this way because net margin is very important to me. I don’t want to become the Walmart of digital marketing where our margins become paper thin as volume goes up.

Here is an example of what I mean. Consider the following scenario:

I’m leaving my job as a dairy farmer here in rural Rhode Island and I want to make $1,500,000 per year.

So, you’re going to pay a little bit more assuming you are a single member LLC versus a traditional W-2 “employee” (again, keeping it very simple) because of the self-employment tax. Your CPA can go over the different options based on your business set up and such but the base calculations are the same as far as determining the core numbers go.

If you just look at just “earnings” you are missing the bigger picture. What you should want to achieve for short, mid, and long term viability are healthy margins. Here’s an example:

Jack’s SEO Shop had a net income of $1,000,000 dollars in 2011. Their overall sales were $5,000,000. In 2012 they had $1,500,000 in net income with $10,000,000 in sales.

Jill’s SEO Shop had net income of $500,000 dollars in 2011. Their overall sales were $2,000,000. In 2012 they had $1,500,000 in net income with $4,000,000 in sales.

In this case we look at a basic calculation of profit margin (net income/gross sales) and see that:

Jacks’ 2011 profit margin was 20%
Jack’s 2012 profit margin 15%
Jill’s 2011 profit margin 25%
Jill’s 2012 profit margin 38% (same net income as Jack)

Certainly 15% on 10 million isn’t something to necessarily sneeze at but I’d much rather be Jill in the current state of web marketing. A 38% profit margin does so much more for your overall viability as a company when you take into account being able to respond to competition, algorithmic changes, increased cost of quality labor, and so on.

In this example a conversation about simply “making” 1.5 million per year is quite misleading. Once we have these numbers figured out we can begin to “design” our “products and/or services” to somewhat fit a pricing model by backdooring it via preferred margins.

Setting Up Your Products

Many folks in the industry have had exposure and direct experience with a number of disciplines. At the very least, a lot of us know enough about “how” to execute a particular type of service without maybe the specific knowledge of how to go in and “push the buttons”.

There’s a tendency to do all types of service but a good way to start is to look at your core competencies and determine what makes the most sense to offer as a product. If you are just starting out you can start this from a blank slate, there’s not a big difference either way.

You will run across a couple different types of costs, direct and indirect. Let’s assume for the sake of simplicity you are a freelancer or just a solo operation. In terms of selling a service you will have 2 core types of cost:

Direct (utilization of outside contractors to accomplish a task)
Indirect (your time and any other overhead like office costs, insurance, tools, marketing costs)

There’s some debate as to whether you should include the estimated cost of your marketing as part of a per project cost to accurately determine your margins. I say why not, using it only makes it more accurate in terms of hard numbers.

Perhaps you whittled down your offerings to:

Technical SEO Audits
SEO Competitive Analysis Audits
Conversion Optimization
Content Marketing

We can assume that you might have the following tools in your toolbelt:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider (roughly 158$ per year if you are in the US)
Majestic SEO subscription (roughly $588 per year for the Silver plan)
Ahrefs subscription (roughly $948 per year for the Pro subscription)
Visual Website Optimizer subscription ($588 per year for the Small Business Plan)
Raven SEO Tools for competitive research, content marketing strategy and execution, SEO audit work ($1,188 per year)
Buzzstream for outreach and additional link prospecting ($1,188 per year)

There are more tools we could add but at a baseline level you would be able to produce quality products with these tools. Total cost is $4,658 per year or $389 (rounded up, per month).

The same formula (annual and monthly amounts) would be used for any other overhead you deem necessary but for the sake of simplicity let’s say you are spending $389 per month on “stuff”.

Knowledge + Tools = Win

Tools are only 1 part of a 2 part equation. Tools without knowledge are useless. There are a variety of costs one could associate with knowledge acquisition:

Building your own test sites
Going to conferences
Participating in online membership sites

The costs for knowledge acquisition can vary from person to person. You might be at a point where all three make sense or at a level where only 1 or 2 make sense. I would recommend looking at these options relative to your skill set and determining the cost, annually, of what makes sense for you. Take that number and just add it to the example cost I gave for tools I recommended earlier.

Breaking Out a Product List

The next step would be to look at each type of service you are offering and productize it. The first 2 areas are more likely to be your time only versus your time + outside contractor help. Conversion Optimization and Content Marketing will probably incur additional costs outside of your time for things like:

User testing
Content writing
Content design
Promotion help
Programming for interactive content

When setting up products I use this:

GI is Gross Income
Tax is GI * (whatever your total tax percentage is)
NI is Net Income
GM is Gross Margin (E2/B2)
NM is Net Margin (G2/B2)

In that example I used $150 as my hourly rate and assumed 40 hours for an audit. Now I can play around with the direct cost and price to arrive at the margins I am looking for.

One thing to keep in mind with indirect cost is usually it’s something that can be divided amongst your current projects.

So I might revisit my pricing table from time to time to revamp the indirect cost based on my current client list. In this example I assume no clients are currently onboard and no income for my own properties so this audit eats up all the indirect cost against its margins.

You can design your products however it works for you but I usually try to find some type of baseline that works for me. In the areas I assumed earlier I would try to make sub-products out of each section:

Audit based on size and scope of site (total pages, ecommerce, dynamic, etc)
Conversion Rate Optimization based on total hours for ongoing work and a few different prices for the initial audit and feedback
Content Marketing based on the scale needed broken out into different asset types for easier pricing (videos, interactive content, infographics, whitepapers, and so on
SEO Competitive Analysis based on total hours needed for ongoing work and different prices based on the scope of the initial research (or just a one-off overview)

There are so many variables to each service that it is impossible to list them here but the general ideas remain the same. Start with a market and break them out into “things” that can be sold which cover “most” of your target market.

Manage Your Workloads More Efficiently

One of the reasons I mentioned direct cost as being your hourly rate is so you can set a baseline of how many hours you want to work per month to achieve the amount you’d like to earn. Combining what you want to earn with the hours you want to work will help you work out a minimum hourly rate which you can adjust up or down, along with desired revenue, to hit your pricing sweet spot.

Using your hourly rate in conjunction with designing specific products makes it pretty easy to assign hours required to a specific product. When you assign hours to each product you can do a few things that will help in managing your workload:

When a new project is being quoted you can quickly gauge whether, based on current projects in process, you have availability for the project
If you know ahead of time you are stretched out a bit and need to bring in outside help you can add those additional costs to your proposal and get outside help ready ahead of time
If you take on projects and you find your assumed hours are over or under the amount really necessary you can adjust that for future projects

Assigning your required hours to each product you sell will help you manage your workload better and give you more fluidity during peak times. Inevitably there will be periods of peaks and valleys in the demand for your service so if you are able to manage the peaks in a less stressful and more profitable manner the valleys might not be as deep for your financially.

Other Areas Where Productizing Helps

Custom quoting everything that comes through the door is a pain point for me.

Post-quoting you have things like contracts that have to get signed, billing that has to get set up, and task processes that have to get accomplished.

When you have specific products you are selling, it becomes much easier to automate:

Proposal templates that get sent out
Contract documents
Billing setup
New client onboarding into a CRM/PM system
Tasks that need to be completed and assigned
Setting up classes and jobs in Quickbooks to track financials per client or per job

It can be a pretty lengthy process but making your services into products really helps your business in a number of areas

Categories:

business

SEO Book Uncategorized

Time For A Content Audit

October 2, 2013

“Content is king” is one of those “truthy” things some marketers preach. However, in most businesses the bottom line is king, attention is queen, and content can be used as a means to get both, but it depends.

The problem is that content is easy to produce. Machines can produce content. They can tirelessly churn out screeds of content every second. Even if they didn’t, billions of people on the internet are perfectly capable of adding to the monolithic content pile at similar rates.

Low barriers to content production and distribution mean the internet has turned a lot of content into near worthless commodity. Getting and maintaining attention is the tricky part, and once a business has that, then the benefits can flow through to the bottom line.

Some content is valuable, of course. Producing valuable content can earn attention. The content that gets the most attention is typically something for which an audience has a strong need, yet can’t easily get elsewhere, and is published in a place they’re likely to see. Or someone they know is likely to see. An article on title tags will likely get buried. An article on the secret code to cracking Google’s Hummingbird algorithms will likely crash your server.

Up until the point everyone else has worked out how to crack them, too, of course.

What Content Does The User Want?

Content can become King if the audience bestows favor upon it. Content producers need to figure out what content the audience wants. Perversely, Google have chosen to make this task even more difficult than it was before by withholding keyword data. Between Google’s supposed “privacy” drive, Hummingbird supposedly using semantic analysis, and Penguin/Panda supposedly using engagement metrics, page level and path level optimization are worth focusing upon going forward.

If you haven’t done one for a while, now is probably a good time to take stock and undertake a content audit.

You Have Valuable Historical Information

If you’ve got historical keyword data, archive it now. It will give you an advantage over those who follow you from this point on. Going forward, it will be much more expensive to acquire this data.

Run an audit on your existing content. What content works best? What type of content is it? Video? Text? What’s the content about? What keywords did people use to find it previously? Match content against your historical keyword data.

Here’s a useful list of site and content audit tools and resources.

If keywords can no longer suggest content demand, then how do we know what the visitor wants in terms of content? We must seek to understand the audience at a deeper level. Take a more fuzzy approach.

Watch Activity Signals

Analytics can get pretty addictive and many tools let you watch what visitors do in real time. Monitor engagement levels on your pages. What is a user doing on that page? Are they reading? Contributing? Clicking back and forward looking for something else?

Ensure pages with high engagement are featured prominently in your information architecture. Relegate or fix low-engagement pages. Segment out your content so you know which is the most popular, in terms of landings, and link that information back to ranking reports. This way, you can approximate keywords and stay focused on the content users find most relevant and engaging. Segment out your audience, too. Different visitors respond to different things. Do you know which group favours what? What do older people go for? What do younger people go for? Here are a few ideas on how to segment users.

User behavior is getting increasingly complex. It takes multiple visits to purchase, from multiple channels/influences. Hence the addition of user segmentation allows us to focus on people. (For these exact reasons multi-channel funnels analysis and attribution modeling are so important!)
At the moment in web analytics solutions, people are defined by the first party cookie stored on their browser. Less than ideal, but 100x better then what we had previously. Over-time as we all expand to Universal Analytics perhaps we will have more options to track the same person, after explicitly asking for permission, across browsers, channels and devices

In-Site Search

If Google won’t give you keywords, build your own keyword database. Think about ways you can encourage people to use your in-site search. Watch the content they search for and consume the most. Another way of looking at site search is to provide navigation links that emphasize different keywords terms. For example, you could place these high up on your page, with each offering a different option relating to related keyword terms. Take a note of which keyword terms visitors favour over others.

In the good old days, people dutifully used site navigation at the left, right, or top of a website. But, two websites have fundamentally altered how we navigate the web: Amazon, because the site is so big, sells so many things, and is so complicated that many of us go directly to the site search box on arrival. And Google, which has trained us to show up, type what we want, and hit the search button. Now when people show up at a website, many of them ignore our lovingly crafted navigational elements and jump to the site search box. The increased use of site search as a core navigation method makes it very important to understand the data that site search generates

Distribution

Where does attention flow from? Social media? A mention is great, but if no attention flows over that link to your content, then it might be a misleading metric. Are people sharing your content? What topics and content gets shared the most?

Again, this comes back to understanding the audience, both what they’re talking about and what actions they take as a result. In “Digital Marketing Analytics: Making Sense Of Consumer Data”the authors recommend creating a “learning agenda”. Rather than just looking for mentions and volume of mentions, focus on specific brand or service attributes. Think about the specific questions you want answered by visitors as if they those visitors were sitting in front of you.

For example, how are consumers reacting to prices in your niche? What are their complaints? What do they wish would happen? Are people talking negatively about something? Are they talking positively about something? Who are the new competitors in this space?

Those are pretty rich signals. We can then link this back to content by addressing those issues within our content.

Categories:

SEO Book Uncategorized

Google Keyword (Not Provided)

September 25, 2013

Just a follow up on the prior (not provided) post, as Google has shot the moon since our last post on this. Here’s a quick YouTube video.

The above video references the following:

Matt Cutts when secured search first rolled out:

Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who’s been involved with the privacy changes, wouldn’t give an exact figure but told me he estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com.

This Week in Google (TWIG) show 211, where Matt mentioned the inspiration for encrypted search:

we actually started doing encrypted.google.com in 2008 and one of the guys who did a lot of heavy lifting on that, his name is Evan, and he actually reports to me. And we started that after I read Little Brother, and we said “we’ve got to encrypt the web.”

The integration of organic search performance data inside AdWords.

When asked about the recent increase in (not provided), a Google representative stated the following:

We want to provide SSL protection to as many users as we can, in as many regions as we can — we added non-signed-in Chrome omnibox searches earlier this year, and more recently other users who aren’t signed in. We’re going to continue expanding our use of SSL in our services because we believe it’s a good thing for users….

The motivation here is not to drive the ads side — it’s for our search users.

What an excellent time for Google to block paid search referrals as well.

If the move is important for user safety then it should apply to the ads as well.

Categories:

SEO Book Uncategorized

How To Think About Your Next SEO Project

September 23, 2013

The independent webmaster has taken a beating over the last couple of years. Risk has become harder to spread, labor costs have gone up, outreach has become more difficult and more expensive as Google’s webspam team and the growing ranks of the Search …

SEO Book Uncategorized

Design Thinking

September 16, 2013

One of the problems with analysing data is the potential to get trapped in the past, when we could be imagining the future. Past performance can be no indication of future success, especially when it comes to Google’s shifting whims.

We see problems, we devise a solution. But projecting forward by measuring the past, and coming up with “the best solution” may lead to missing some obvious opportunities.

Design Thinking

In 1972, psychologist, architect and design researcher Bryan Lawson created an empirical study to understand the difference between problem-based solvers and solution-based solvers. He took two groups of students – final year students in architecture and post-graduate science students – and asked them to create one-story structures from a set of colored blocks. The perimeter of the building was to optimize either the red or the blue color, however, there were unspecified rules governing the placement and relationship of some of the blocks.
Lawson found that:

The scientists adopted a technique of trying out a series of designs which used as many different blocks and combinations of blocks as possible as quickly as possible. Thus they tried to maximize the information available to them about the allowed combinations. If they could discover the rule governing which combinations of blocks were allowed they could then search for an arrangement which would optimize the required color around the design. By contrast, the architects selected their blocks in order to achieve the appropriately colored perimeter. If this proved not to be an acceptable combination, then the next most favorably colored block combination would be substituted and so on until an acceptable solution was discovered.

Nigel Cross concludes from Lawson’s studies that “scientific problem solving is done by analysis, while designers problem solve through synthesis”

Design thinking tends to start with the solution, rather than the problem. A lot of problem based-thinking focuses on finding the one correct solution to a problem, whereas design thinking tends to offer a variety of solutions around a common theme. It’s a different mindset.

One of the criticisms of Google, made by Google’s former design leader Douglas Bowman, was that Google were too data centric in their decision making:

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data…that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions…

There’s nothing wrong with being data-driven, of course. It’s essential. However, if companies only think in those terms, then they may be missing opportunities. If we imagine “what could be”, rather than looking at “what was”, opportunities present themselves. Google realise this, too, which is why they have Google X, a division devoted to imagining the future.

What search terms might people use that don’t necessarily show up on keyword mining tools? What search terms will people use six months from now in our vertical? Will customers contact us more often if we target them this way, rather than that way? Does our copy connect with our customers, of just search engines? Given Google is withholding more search referral data, which is making it harder to target keywords, adding some design thinking to the mix, if you don’t already, might prove useful.

Tools For Design Thinking

In the book, Designing For Growth, authors Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie outline some tools for thinking about opportunities and business in ways that aren’t data-driven. One famous proponent of the intuitive, design-led approach was, of course, Steve Jobs.

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them

The iphone or iPad couldn’t have been designed by looking solely at the past. They mostly came about because Jobs had an innate understanding of what people wanted. He was proven right by the resulting sales volume.

Design starts with empathy. It forces you to put yourself in the customers shoes. It means identifying real people with real problems.

In order to do this, we need to put past data aside and watch people, listen to people, and talk with people. The simple act of doing this is a rich source of keyword and business ideas because people often frame a problem in ways you may not expect.

For example, a lot of people see stopping smoking as a goal-setting issue, like a fitness regime, rather than a medical issue. Advertising copy based around medical terminology and keywords might not work as well as copy oriented around goal setting and achieving physical fitness. This shift in the frame of reference certainly conjures up an entirely different world of ad copy, and possibly keywords, too. That different frame might be difficult to determine from analytics and keyword trends alone, but might be relatively easy to spot simply by talking to potential customers.

Four Questions

Designing For Growth is worth a read if you’re feeling bogged down in data and looking for new ways to tackle problems and develop new opportunities. I don’t think there’s anything particularly new in it, and it can come across as “the shiny new buzzword” at times, but the fundamental ideas are strong. I think there is value in applying some of these ideas directly to current SEO issues.

Designing For Growth recommends asking the following questions.

What is?

What is the current reality? What is the problem your customers are trying to solve? Xerox solved a problem customers didn’t even know that had when Xerox invented the fax machine. Same goes for the Polaroid camera. And the microwave oven. Customers probably couldn’t describe those things until they saw and understood them, but the problem would have been evident had someone looked closely at the problems they faced i.e. people really wanted faster, easier ways of completing common tasks.

What do your customers most dislike about the current state of affairs? About your industry? How often do you ask them?

One way of representing this information is with a flowchart. Map the current user experience from when they have a problem, to imagining keywords, to searching, to seeing the results, to clicking on one of those results, to finding your site, interacting to your site, to taking desired action. Could any of the results or steps be better?

Usability tests use the same method. It’s good to watch actual customers as they do this, if possible. Conduct a few interviews. Ask questions. Listen to the language people use. We can glean some of this information from data mining, but there’s a lot more we can get by direct observation, especially when people don’t click on something, as non-activity seldom registers in a meaningful way in analytics.

What if?

What would “something better” look like?

Rather than think in terms of what is practical and the constraints that might prevent you from doing something, imagine what an ideal solution would look like if it weren’t for those practicalities and constraints.

Perhaps draw pictures. Make mock-ups. Tell a story. Anything that fires the imagination. Use emotion. Intuition. Feeling. Just going through such a process will lead to making connections that are difficult to make by staring at a spreadsheet.

A lot of usability testers create personas. These are fictional characters based on real or potential customers and are used try to gain an understanding of what they might search for, what problems they are trying to solve, and what they expect to see on our site. Is this persona a busy person? Well educated? Do they use the internet a lot? Are they buying for themselves, or on behalf of others? Do they tend to react emotionally, or are they logical? What incentives would this persona respond to?

Personas tend to work best when they’re based on actual people. Watch and observe. Read up on relevant case studies. Trawl back through your emails from customers. Make use of story-boards to capture their potential actions and thoughts. Stories are great ways to understand motivations and thoughts.

What are those things your competition does, and how could they be better? What would those things look like in the best possible world, a world free of constraints?

What wows?

“What wows” is especially important for social media and SEO going forward.

Consider Matt Cutts statement about frogs:

Those other sites are not bringing additional value. While they’re not duplicates they bring nothing new to the table. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with what these people have done, but they should not expect this type of content to rank.
Google would seek to detect that there is no real differentiation between these results and show only one of them so we could offer users different types of sites in the other search results

Cutts talks about the creation of new value. If one site is saying pretty much the same as another site, then those sites may not be duplicates, but one is not adding much in the way of value, either. The new site may be relegated simply for being “too samey”.

It’s the opposite of the Zygna path:

“I don’t fucking want innovation,” an anonymous ex-employee recalls Pincus saying in 2010, according to the SF Weekly. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”

Generally speaking, up-and-coming sites should focus on wowing their audience with added depth and/or a new perspective. This, in turn, means having something worth remarking upon, which then attracts mentions across social media, and generates more links.

Is this certain to happen? Nothing is certain as far as Google is concerned. They could still bury you on a whim, but wowing an audience is a better bet than simply imitating long-established players using similar content and link structures. At some point, those long-established players had to wow their audience to get the attention and rankings they enjoy today. They did something remarkably different at some point. Instead of digging the same hole deeper, dig a new hole.

In SEO, change tends to be experimental. It’s iterative. We’re not quite sure what works ahead of time, and no amount of measuring the past tells us all we want to know, but we try a few things and see what works. If a site is not ranking well, we try something else, until it does.

Which leads us to….

What works?

Do searchers go for it? Do they do that thing we want them to do, which is click on an ad, or sign up, or buy something?

SEOs are pretty accomplished at this step. Experimentation in areas that are difficult to quantify – the algorithms – have been an intrinsic part of SEO.

The tricky part is not all things work the same everywhere & much like modern health pathologies, Google has clever delays in their algorithms:

Many modern public health pathologies – obesity, substance abuse, smoking – share a common trait: the people affected by them are failing to manage something whose cause and effect are separated by a huge amount of time and space. If every drag on a cigarette brought up a tumour, it would be much harder to start smoking and much easier to quit.

One site’s rankings are more stable because another person can’t get around the sandbox or their links get them penalized. The same strategy and those same links might work great for another site.

Changes in user behavior are more directly & immediately measurable than SEO.

Consider using change experiments as an opportunity to open up a conversation with potential users. “Do you like our changes? Tell us”. Perhaps use a prompt asking people to initiate a chat, or participate on a poll. Engagement that has many benefits. It will likely prevent a fast click back, you get to see the words people use and how they frame their problems, and you learn more about them. You become more responsive and empathetic sympathetic to their needs.

Beyond Design Thinking

There’s more detail to design thinking, but, really, it’s mostly just common sense. Another framework to add, especially if you feel you’re getting stuck in faceless data.

Design thinking is not a panacea. It is a process, just as Six Sigma is a process. Both have their place in the modern enterprise. The quest for efficiency hasn’t gone away and in fact, in our economically straitened times, it’s sensible to search for ever more rigorous savings anywhere you can

What’s best about it, I feel, is this type of thinking helps break strategy and data problems down and give it a human face.

In this world, designers can continue to create extraordinary value. They are the people who have, or could have, the laterality needed to solve problems, the sensing skills needed to hear what the world wants, and the databases required to build for the long haul and the big trajectories. Designers can be definers, making the world more intelligible, more habitable

Categories:

SEO Book Uncategorized

Jim Boykin Interview

September 4, 2013

Jim Boykin has been a longtime friend & was one of the early SEOs who was ahead of the game back in the day. While many people have came and went, Jim remains as relevant as ever today. We interviewed him about SEO, including scaling his company, disavow & how Google has changed the landscape over the past couple years.

Aaron: How did you get into the field of SEO?

Jim: In 1999 I started We Build Pages as a one man show designing and marketing websites…I never really became much of a designer, but luckily I had much more success in the marketing side. Somehow that little one man show grew to about 100 ninjas, and includes some communities and forums I grew up on (WebmasterWorld, SEOChat, Cre8asiteForums), and I get to work with people like Kris Jones, Ann Smarty, Chris Boggs, Joe Hall, Kim Krause Berg, and so many others at Ninjas who aren’t as famous but are just as valuable to me, and Ninjas has really become a family over the years. I still wonder at times how this all happened, but I feel lucky with where we’re at.

Aaron: When I got started in SEO some folks considered all link building to be spam. I looked at what worked, and it appeared to be link building. Whenever I thought I came up with a new clever way to hound for links & would hunted around, most the times it seems you got there first. Who were some of the people you looked to for ideas when you first got into SEO?

Jim: Well, I remember going to my first SEO conference in 2002 and meeting people like Danny Sullivan, Jill Whalen, and Bruce Clay. I also remember Bob Massa being the first person “dinged” by google for selling links…that was back in 2002 I think…I grew up on Webmasterworld and I learned a ton from the people in there like: Tedster, Todd Friesen, Greg Boser, Brett Tabke, Shak, Bill, Rae Hoffman, Roger Montti, and so many others in there over the years…they were some of my first influencers….I also used to hang around with Morgan Carey, and Patrick Gavin a lot too. Then this guy selling an SEO Book kept showing up on all my high PR pages where I was getting my links….hehe…

Aaron: One of the phrases in search that engineers may use is “in an ideal world…”. There is always some amount of gap between what is advocated & what actually works. With all the algorithmic changes that have happened in the past few years, how would you describe that “gap” between what works & what is advocated?

Jim: I feel there’s really been a tipping point with the Google Penguin updates. Maybe it should be “What works best short term” and “What works best long term”….anything that is not natural may work great in the short term, but your odds of getting zinged by Google go way up. If you’re doing “natural things” to get citations and links, then it may tend to take a bit longer to see results (in conjunction with all you’re doing), but at least you can sleep at night doing natural things (and not worrying about Google Penalties). It’s not like years ago when getting exact targeted anchor text for the phrases you want to rank on was the way to go if you wanted to compete for search rankings. Today it’s much more involved to send natural signals to a clients website. To send in natural signals you must do things like work up the brand signals, trusted citations, return visitors, good user experience, community, authors, social, yada yada….SEO is becming less a “link thing”…and more a “great signals from many trusted people”, as well as it’s a branding game now. I really like how SEO is evolving….for years Google used to say things like “Think of the users” when talking of the algorthym, but we all laughed and said “Yea, yea, we all know that it’s all about the Backlinks”….but today, I think Google has crossed a tipping point where yes, to do great SEO, you must focus on the users, and not the links….the best SEO is getting as many citations and trusted signals to your site than your competitors…and there’s a lot of trusted signals which we, as internet marketers, can be working on….it’s more complicated, and some SEO’s won’t survive this game…they’ll continue to aim for short term gains on short tail keyword phrases…and they’ll do things in bulk….and their network will be filtered, and possibly penalized.

Every website owner has to measure the risks, and the time involved, and the expected ROI….it’s not a cheap game any more….doing real marketing involves brains and not buttons…if you can’t invest in really building something “special” (ideally many special things), on your site to get signals (links/social), then you’re going to find it pretty hard to get links that look natural and don’t run a risk of getting penalized. The SEO game has really matured, the other option is to take a high risk of penalization.

Aaron: In terms of disavow, how deep does one has to cut there?

Jim: as deep as it needs to be to remove every unantural link. If you have 1000 backlinks and 900 are on pages that were created for “unnatural purposes (to give links)” then all 900 have to be disavowed…if you have 1000 backlinks, and only 100 are not “natural” then only 100 need to be disavowed… what percent has to be disavowed to untrip an algorthymitic filter? I’m not sure…but almost always the links which I disavow have zero value (in my opinion) anyways. Rip the band-aid off, get over it, take your marketing department and start doing real things to attract attention, and to keep it.

Aaron: In terms of recoveries, are most penalized sites “recoverable”? What does the typical recovery period look like in terms of duration & restoration?

Jim: oh…this is a bee’s nest you’re asking me….. are sites recoverable….yes, most….if a site has 1000 domains that link to it, and 900 of those are artificial and I disavow them, there might not be much of a recovery depending on what that 100 links left are….ie, if I disavow all link text of “green widgets” that goes to your site, and you used to rank #1 for “green widgets” prior to being hit by a Penguin update, then I wouldn’t expect to “recover” on the first page for that phrase….. where you recover seems to depend on “what do you have for natural links that are left after the disavow?”….the time period….well…. we’ve seen some partial recoveries in as soon as 1 month, and some 3 months after the disavow…and some we’re still waiting on….

To explain, Google says that when you add links to the disavow document, then way it works is that the next time Google crawls any page that links to you, they will assign a “no follow” to the link at that time…..so you have to wait until enough of the links have been recrawled, and now assigned the no follow, to untrip the filter….but one of the big problems I see is that many of the pages Google shows as linking to you, well, they’re not cached in Google!….I see some really spammy pages where Google was there (they record your link), but it’s like Google has tossed the page out of the index even though they show the page as linking to you…so I have to ask myself, when will Google return to those pages?…will Google ever return to those pages??? It looks like if you had a ton of backlinks that were on pages that were so bad in the eyes of Google that they don’t even show those pages in their index anymore…we might be waiting a long long time for google to return to those pages to crawl them again….unless you do something to get Google to go back to those pages sooner (I won’t elaborate on that one).

Aaron: I notice you launched a link disavow tool & earlier tonight you were showing me a few other cool private tools you have for working on disavow analysis, are you going to make any of those other tools live to the public?

Jim: Well, we have about 12 internal private disavow analysis tools, and only 1 public disavow tool….we are looking to have a few more public tools for analyzing links for disavow analysis in the coming weeks, and in a few months we’ll release our Ultimate Disavow Tool…but for the moment, they’re not ready for the public, some of those are fairly expensive to run and very database intensive…but I’m pretty sure I’m looking at more link patterns than anyone else in the world when I’m analyzing backlinks for doing disavows. When I’m tired of doing disavows maybe I’ll sell access to some of these.

Aaron: Do you see Google folding in the aggregate disavow data at some point? How might they use it?

Jim: um…..I guess if 50,000 disavow documents have spammywebsite.com listed in their disavows, then Google could consider that spammywebsite.com might be a spammy website…..but then again, with people disavowing links who don’t know what they’re doing, I’m sure their’s a ton of great sites getting listed in Disavow documents in Webmaster Tools.

Aaron: When approaching link building after recovering from a penalty, how does the approach differ from link building for a site that has never been penalized?

Jim: it doesn’t really matter….unless you were getting unnatural/artificial links or things in bulk in the past, then, yes, you have to stop doing that now…that game is over if you’ve been hit…that game is over even if you haven’t been hit….Stop doing the artificial link building stuff. Get real citations from real people (and often “by accident”) and you should be ok.

Aaron: You mentioned “natural” links. Recently Google has hinted that infographics, press releases & other sorts of links should use nofollow by default. Does Google aim to take some “natural” link sources off the table after they are widely used? Or are those links they never really wanted to count anyhow (and perhaps sometimes didn’t) & they are just now reflecting that.

Jim: I think ~most of these didn’t count for years anyways….but it’s been impossible for Google to nail every directory, or every article syndication site, or every Press Release site, or everything that people can do in bulk..and it’s harder to get all occurances of widgets and mentions of infographics…so it’s probably just a “Google Scare….ie, Google says, “Don’t do it, No Follow them” (and I think they say that because it often works), and the less of a pattern there is, the harder for Google to catch it (ie, widgets and infographics) …I think too much of any 1 thing (be it a “type of link”) can be a bad signal….as well as things like “too many links from pages that get no traffic”, or “no clicks from links to your site”. In most cases, because of keyword abuse, Google doesn’t want to count them…links like this may be fine (and ok to follow) in moderation…but if you have 1000 widgets links, and they all have commercial keywords as link text, then you’re treading on what could certainly turn into a negative signal, and so then you might want to consider no following those.

Aaron: There is a bit of a paradox in terms of scaling effective quality SEO services for clients while doing things that are not seen as scalable (and thus future friendly & effective). Can you discuss some of the biggest challenges you faced when scaling IMN? How were you able to scale to your current size without watering things down the way that most larger SEO companies do?

Jim: Scaling and keep quality has certainly been a challenge in the past. I know that scaling content was an issue for us for a while….how can you scale quality content?….Well, we’ve found that by connecting real people, the real writers, the people with real social influence…and by taking these people and connecting them to the brands we work with…..so these real people then become “Brand Evangelist”…and getting these real people who know what they’re talking about to then write for our clients, well, when we did that we found that we could scale the content issue. We can scale things like link building by merging with the other “mentions”, and specifically targeting industries and people and working on building up associations and relations with others has helped to scale…plus we’re always building tools to help us scale while keeping quality. It’s always a challenge, but we’ve been pretty good at solving many of those issues.

I think we’ve been really good at scaling in house….many content marketers are now more like community managers and content managers….we’ve been close to 100 employees for a few years now..so it’s more how can we do more with the existing people we have…and we’ve been able to do that by connecting real people to the clients so we can actually have better content and better marketing around that content….I’m really happy that the # of employees has been roughly the same for past few years, but we’re doing more business, and the quality keeps getting better….there’s not as many content marketers today as there was a few years ago, but there’s many more people working on helping authors build up their authorship value and produce more “great marketing” campaigns where as a bi-product, we happen to get some links and social citations.

Aaron: One of the things I noticed with your site over the past couple years is the sales copy has promoted the fusion of branding and SEO. I looked at your old site in Archive.org over the years & have seen quite an amazing shift in terms of sales approach. Has Google squeezed out most of the smaller players for good & does effective sustainable SEO typically require working for larger trusted entities? How would you contrast approach/strategy in working with bigger and smaller clients?When I first got into SEO about 80%+ of the hands in the audiences at conferences were smaller independent players. At the last conference I was at it seemed that about 80% of the hands in the audience worked for big companies (or provided services to big companies). Is this shift in the market irreversible? How would you compare/contrast approach in working with smaller & larger clients?

Jim: Today it’s down to “Who really can afford to invest in their Brand?” and “Who can do real things to get real citations from the web?”….and who can think way beyond “links”…if you can’t do those things, then you can’t have an effective sustainable online marketing program…. we once were a “link building company” for many, many years…. but for the past 3 years we’ve moved into full service, offering way more than what was “link building services”…. yea, SEO was about “links” for years, and it still is to a large degree….but unless you want to get penalized, you have to take the “it’s way more than links” approach… in order for SEO to work (w/o fear of getting penalized) today, you have to look at sending in natural signals…so thus, you must do “natural” things…things that will get others “talking” about it, and about you….SEO has evolved a lot over the years….Google used to recommend 1 thing (create a great site and create great things), but for years we all knew that SEO was about links and anchor text….today, …today, I think Google has caught up with (to some degree) with the user, and with “real signals”…yesterday is was “gaming” the system….today it’s about doing real things…real marketing…and getting you name out to the community via creating great things that spread, and that get people to come back to your site….those SEO’s and businesses who don’t realize that the game has changed, will probably be doing a lot of disavowing at some time in the future, and many SEO’s will be out of business if they think it’s a game where you can do “fake things” to “get links” in bulk….in a few years we’ll see who’s still around for internet marketing companies…those who are still around will be those who do real marketing using real people and promoting to other real people…the link game itself has changes…in the past we looked a link graphs…today we look at people graphs….who is talking about you, what are they saying….it’s way more than “who links to me, and how do they link to me”….Google is turning it into a “everyone gets a vote”, and “everyone has a value”…and in order to rank, you’ll need real people of value talking about your site…and you’ll need a great user experience when they get there, and you’ll need loyal people who continue to return to your site, and you’ll need to continue to do great things that get mentions….

SEO is no longer a game of some linking algorithm, it’s now really a game of “how can you create a great user experience and get a buzz around your pages and brand”.

Aaron: With as much as SEO has changed over the years, it is easy to get tripped up at some point, particularly if one is primarily focused on the short term. One of the more impressive bits about you is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen you unhappy. The “I’m feeling lucky” bit seems to be more than just a motto. How do you manage to maintain that worldview no matter what’s changing & how things are going?

Jim: Well, I don’t always feel lucky…I know in 2008 when Google hit a few of our clients because we were buying links for them I didn’t feel lucky (though the day before, when they ranked #1, I felt lucky)….but I’m in this industry for the long term…I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years….and yes, we’ve had to constantly change over the year, and continue to grow, and growing isn’t always easy…but it is exciting to me, and I do feel lucky for what I have…I have a job I love, I get to work with people whom I love, in an industry I love, I get to travel around the world and meet wonderful people and see cool places…and employee 100 people and win “Best Places to work” awards, and I’m able to give back to the community and to society, and to the earth…those things make me feel lucky…SEO has always been like a fun game of chess to me…I’m trying to do the best I can with any move, but I’m also trying to think a few steps ahead, and trying to think what Google is thinking on the other side of the table…..ok…yea, I do feel lucky….maybe it’s the old hippy in me…I always see the glass half full, and I’m always dreaming of a better tomorrow….

If I can have lots of happy clients, and happy employees, and do things to make the world a little better along the way, then I’m happy…sometimes I’m a little stressed, but that comes with life….in the end, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than what I currently do….and I always have big dreams of tomorrow that always make the trials of today seem worth it for the goals of what I want to achieve for tomorrow.

Aaron: Thanks Jim!

Jim Boykin is the CEO of the Internet Marketing Ninjas company, and a Blogger and public speaker. You can find Jim on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Categories:

interviews

SEO Book Uncategorized

Finding the Perfect Project Management & CRM Tools

August 27, 2013

Picking the right tools for project management and CRM functions can feel like an impossible task. I’ve gone through a number of applications in recent years (just about all of them actually). What makes choosing (or building) the right systems so dif…

SEO Book Uncategorized

The Benefits Of Thinking Like Google

August 27, 2013

Shadows are the color of the sky.

It’s one of those truths that is difficult to see, until you look closely at what’s really there.

To see something as it really is, we should try to identify our own bias, and then let it go.

“Unnatural” Links

This article tries to make sense of Google’s latest moves regarding links.

It’s a reaction to Google’s update of their Link Schemes policy. Google’s policy states “Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.” I wrote on this topic, too.

Those with a vested interest in the link building industry – which is pretty much all of us – might spot the problem.

Google’s negative emphasis, of late, has been about links. Their message is not new, just the emphasis. The new emphasis could pretty much be summarized thus:”any link you build for the purpose of manipulating rank is outside the guidelines.” Google have never encouraged activity that could manipulate rankings, which is precisely what those link building, for the purpose of SEO, attempt to do. Building links for the purposes of higher rank AND staying within Google’s guidelines will not be easy.

Some SEOs may kid themselves that they are link building “for the traffic”, but if that were the case, they’d have no problem insisting those links were scripted so they could monitor traffic statistics, or at very least, no-followed, so there could be no confusion about intent.

How many do?

Think Like Google

Ralph Tegtmeier: In response to Eric’s assertion “I applaud Google for being more and more transparent with their guidelines”, Ralph writes- “man, Eric: isn’t the whole point of your piece that this is exactly what they’re NOT doing, becoming “more transparent”?

Indeed.

In order to understand what Google is doing, it can be useful to downplay any SEO bias i.e. what we may like to see from an SEO standpoint, rather try to look at the world from Google’s point of view.

I ask myself “if I were Google, what would I do?”

Clearly I’m not Google, so these are just my guesses, but if I were Google, I’d see all SEO as a potential competitive threat to my click advertising business. The more effective the SEO, the more of a threat it is. SEOs can’t be eliminated, but they can been corralled and managed in order to reduce the level of competitive threat. Partly, this is achieved by algorithmic means. Partly, this is achieved using public relations. If I were Google, I would think SEOs are potentially useful if they could be encouraged to provide high quality content and make sites easier to crawl, as this suits my business case.

I’d want commercial webmasters paying me for click traffic. I’d want users to be happy with the results they are getting, so they keep using my search engine. I’d consider webmasters to be unpaid content providers.

Do I (Google) need content? Yes, I do. Do I need any content? No, I don’t. If anything, there is too much content, and lot of it is junk. In fact, I’m getting more and more selective about the content I do show. So selective, in fact, that a lot of what I show above the fold content is controlled and “published”, in the broadest sense of the word, by me (Google) in the form of the Knowledge Graph.

It is useful to put ourselves in someone else’s position to understand their truth. If you do, you’ll soon realise that Google aren’t the webmasters friend if your aim, as a webmaster, is to do anything that “artificially” enhances your rank.

So why are so many SEOs listening to Google’s directives?

Rewind

A year or two ago, it would be madness to suggest webmasters would pay to remove links, but that’s exactly what’s happening. Not only that, webmasters are doing Google link quality control. For free. They’re pointing out the links they see as being “bad” – links Google’s algorithms may have missed.

Check out this discussion. One exasperated SEO tells Google that she tries hard to get links removed, but doesn’t hear back from site owners. The few who do respond want money to take the links down.

It is understandable site owners don’t spend much time removing links. From a site owners perspective, taking links down involves a time cost, so there is no benefit to the site owner in doing so, especially if they receive numerous requests. Secondly, taking down links may be perceived as being an admission of guilt. Why would a webmaster admit their links are “bad”?

The answer to this problem, from Google’s John Mueller is telling.

A shrug of the shoulders.

It’s a non-problem. For Google. If you were Google, would you care if a site you may have relegated for ranking manipulation gets to rank again in future? Plenty more where they came from, as there are thousands more sites just like it, and many of them owned by people who don’t engage in ranking manipulation.

Does anyone really think their rankings are going to return once they’ve been flagged?

Jenny Halasz then hinted at the root of the problem. Why can’t Google simply not count the links they don’t like? Why make webmasters jump through arbitrary hoops? The question was side-stepped.

If you were Google, why would you make webmasters jump through hoops? Is it because you want to make webmasters lives easier? Well, that obviously isn’t the case. Removing links is a tedious, futile process. Google suggest using the disavow links tool, but the twist is you can’t just put up a list of links you want to disavow.

Say what?

No, you need to show you’ve made some effort to remove them.

Why?

If I were Google, I’d see this information supplied by webmasters as being potentially useful. They provide me with a list of links that the algorithm missed, or considered borderline, but the webmaster has reviewed and thinks look bad enough to affect their ranking. If the webmaster simply provided a list of links dumped from a link tool, it’s probably not telling Google much Google doesn’t already know. There’s been no manual link review.

So, what webmasters are doing is helping Google by manually reviewing links and reporting bad links. How does this help webmasters?

It doesn’t.

It just increases the temperature of the water in the pot. Is the SEO frog just going to stay there, or is he going to jump?

A Better Use Of Your Time

Does anyone believe rankings are going to return to their previous positions after such an exercise? A lot of webmasters aren’t seeing changes. Will you?

Maybe.

But I think it’s the wrong question.

It’s the wrong question because it’s just another example of letting Google define the game. What are you going to do when Google define you right out of the game? If your service or strategy involves links right now, then in order to remain snow white, any links you place, for the purposes of achieving higher rank, are going to need to be no-followed in order to be clear about intent. Extreme? What’s going to be the emphasis in six months time? Next year? How do you know what you’re doing now is not going to be frowned upon, then need to be undone, next year?

A couple of years it would be unthinkable webmasters would report and remove their own links, even paying for them to be removed, but that’s exactly what’s happening. So, what is next year’s unthinkable scenario?

You could re-examine the relationship and figure what you do on your site is absolutely none of Google’s business. They can issue as many guidelines as they like, but they do not own your website, or the link graph, and therefore don’t have authority over you unless you allow it. Can they ban your site because you’re not compliant with their guidelines? Sure, they can. It’s their index. That is the risk. How do you choose to manage this risk?

It strikes me you can lose your rankings at anytime whether you follow the current guidelines or not, especially when the goal-posts keep moving. So, the risk of not following the guidelines, and following the guidelines but not ranking well is pretty much the same – no traffic. Do you have a plan to address the “no traffic from Google” risk, however that may come about?

Your plan might involve advertising on other sites that do rank well. It might involve, in part, a move to PPC. It might be to run multiple domains, some well within the guidelines, and some way outside them. Test, see what happens. It might involve beefing up other marketing channels. It might be to buy competitor sites. Your plan could be to jump through Google’s hoops if you do receive a penalty, see if your site returns, and if it does – great – until next time, that is.

What’s your long term “traffic from Google” strategy?

If all you do is “follow Google’s Guidelines”, I’d say that’s now a high risk SEO strategy.

Categories:

SEO Book Uncategorized

Winning Strategies to Lose Money With Infographics

August 26, 2013

Google is getting a bit absurd with suggesting that any form of content creation that drives links should include rel=nofollow. Certainly some techniques may be abused, but if you follow the suggested advice, you are almost guaranteed to have a negative ROI on each investment – until your company goes under.

Some will ascribe such advice as taking a “sustainable” and “low-risk” approach, but such strategies are only “sustainable” and “low-risk” so long as ROI doesn’t matter & you are spending someone else’s money.

The advice on infographics in the above video suggests that embed code by default should include nofollow links.

Companies can easily spend at least $2,000 to research, create, revise & promote an infographic. And something like 9 out of 10 infographics will go nowhere. That means you are spending about $20,000 for each successful viral infographic. And this presumes that you know what you are doing. Mix in a lack of experience, poor strategy, poor market fit, or poor timing and that cost only goes up from there.

If you run smaller & lesser known websites, quite often Google will rank a larger site that syndicates the infographic above the original source. They do that even when the links are followed. Mix in nofollow on the links and it is virtually guaranteed that you will get outranked by someone syndicating your infographic.

So if you get to count as duplicate content for your own featured premium content that you dropped 4 or 5 figures on AND you don’t get links out of it, how exactly does the investment ever have any chance of backing out?

Sales?

Not a snowball’s chance in hell.

An infographic created around “the 10 best ways you can give me your money” won’t spread. And if it does spread, it will be people laughing at you.

I also find it a bit disingenuous the claim that people putting something that is 20,000 pixels large on their site are not actively vouching for it. If something was crap and people still felt like burning 20,000 pixels on syndicating it, surely they could add nofollow on their end to express their dissatisfaction and disgust with the piece.

Many dullards in the SEO industry give Google a free pass on any & all of their advice, as though it is always reasonable & should never be questioned. And each time it goes unquestioned, the ability to exist in the ecosystem as an independent player diminishes as the entire industry moves toward being classified as some form of spam & getting hit or not depends far more on who than what.

Does Google’s recent automated infographic generator give users embed codes with nofollow on the links? Not at all. Instead they give you the URL without nofollow & those URLs are canonicalized behind the scenes to flow the link equity into the associated core page.

No cost cut-n-paste mix-n-match = direct links. Expensive custom research & artwork = better use nofollow, just to be safe.

If Google actively adds arbitrary risks to some players while subsidizing others then they shift the behaviors of markets. And shift the markets they do!

Years ago Twitter allowed people who built their platform to receive credit links in their bio. Matt Cutts tipped off Ev Williams that the profile links should be nofollowed & that flow of link equity was blocked.

It was revealed in the WSJ that in 2009 Twitter’s internal metrics showed an 11% spammy Tweet rate & Twitter had a grand total of 2 “spam science” programmers on staff in 2012.

With smaller sites, they need to default everything to nofollow just in case anything could potentially be construed (or misconstrued) to have the intent to perhaps maybe sorta be aligned potentially with the intent to maybe sorta be something that could maybe have some risk of potentially maybe being spammy or maybe potentially have some small risk that it could potentially have the potential to impact rank in some search engine at some point in time, potentially.

A larger site can have over 10% of their site be spam (based on their own internal metrics) & set up their embed code so that the embeds directly link – and they can do so with zero risk.

@phillian Like all empires, ultimately Google will be the root of its own demise.— Cygnus SEO (@CygnusSEO) August 13, 2013

I just linked to Twitter twice in the above embed. If those links were directly to Cygnus it may have been presumed that either he or I are spammers, but put the content on Twitter with 143,199 Tweets in a second & those links are legit & clean. Meanwhile, fake Twitter accounts have grown to such a scale that even Twitter is now buying them to try to stop them.

Typically there is no presumed intent to spam so long as the links are going into a large site (sure there are a handful of token counter-examples shills can point at). By and large it is only when the links flow out to smaller players that they are spam. And when they do, they are presumed to be spam even if they point into featured content that cost thousands of Dollars. You better use nofollow, just to play it safe!

That duality is what makes blind unquestioning adherence to Google scripture so unpalatable. A number of people are getting disgusted enough by it that they can’t help but comment on it: David Naylor, Martin Macdonald & many others DennisG highlighted.

Oh, and here’s an infographic for your pleasurings.

Categories:

SEO Book Uncategorized

Google: Press Release Links

August 7, 2013

So, Google have updated their Webmaster Guidelines.

Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that violate our guidelines:….Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.

For example: There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.

In particular, they have focused on links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites. Google being Google, these rules are somewhat ambiguous. “Optimized anchor text”? The example they provide includes keywords in the anchor text, so keywords in the anchor text is “optimized” and therefore a violation of Google’s guidelines.

Ambiguously speaking, of course.

To put the press release change in context, Google’s guidelines state:

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site

So, links gained, for SEO purposes – intended to manipulate ranking – are against Google Guidelines.

Google vs Webmasters

Here’s a chat…

In this chat, Google’s John Muller says that, if the webmaster initiated it, then it isn’t a natural link. If you want to be on the safe side, John suggests to use no-follow on links.

Google are being consistent, but what’s amusing is the complete disconnect on display from a few of the webmasters. Google have no problem with press releases, but if a webmaster wants to be on the safe side in terms of Google’s guidelines, the webmaster should no-follow the link.

Simple, right. If it really is a press release, and not an attempt to link build for SEO purposes, then why would a webmaster have any issue with adding a no-follow to a link?

He/she wouldn’t.

But because some webmasters appear to lack self-awareness about what it is they are actually doing, they persist with their line of questioning. I suspect what they really want to hear is “keyword links in press releases are okay.” Then, webmasters can continue to issue pretend press releases as a link building exercise.

They’re missing the point.

Am I Taking Google’s Side?

Not taking sides.

Just hoping to shine some light on a wider issue.

If webmasters continue to let themselves be defined by Google, they are going to get defined out of the game entirely. It should be an obvious truth – but sadly lacking in much SEO punditry – that Google is not on the webmasters side. Google is on Google’s side. Google often say they are on the users side, and there is certainly some truth in that.

However,when it comes to the webmaster, the webmaster is a dime-a-dozen content supplier who must be managed, weeded out, sorted and categorized. When it comes to the more “aggressive” webmasters, Google’s behaviour could be characterized as “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”.

This is because some webmasters, namely SEOs, don’t just publish content for users, they compete with Google’s revenue stream. SEOs offer a competing service to click based advertising that provides exactly the same benefit as Google’s golden goose, namely qualified click traffic.

If SEOs get too good at what they do, then why would people pay Google so much money per click? They wouldn’t – they would pay it to SEOs, instead. So, if I were Google, I would see SEO as a business threat, and manage it – down – accordingly. In practice, I’d be trying to redefine SEO as “quality content provision”.

Why don’t Google simply ignore press release links? Easy enough to do. Why go this route of making it public? After all, Google are typically very secret about algorithmic topics, unless the topic is something they want you to hear. And why do they want you to hear this? An obvious guess would be that it is done to undermine link building, and SEOs.

Big missiles heading your way.

Guideline Followers

The problem in letting Google define the rules of engagement is they can define you out of the SEO game, if you let them.

If an SEO is not following the guidelines – guidelines that are always shifting – yet claim they do, then they may be opening themselves up to legal liability. In one recent example, a case is underway alleging lack of performance:

Last week, the legal marketing industry was aTwitter (and aFacebook and even aPlus) with news that law firm Seikaly & Stewart had filed a lawsuit against The Rainmaker Institute seeking a return of their $49,000 in SEO fees and punitive damages under civil RICO

…..but it’s not unreasonable to expect a somewhat easier route for litigants in the future might be “not complying with Google’s guidelines”, unless the SEO agency disclosed it.

SEO is not the easiest career choice, huh.

One group that is likely to be happy about this latest Google push is legitimate PR agencies, media-relations departments, and publicists. As a commenter on WMW pointed out:

I suspect that most legitimate PR agencies, media-relations departments, and publicists will be happy to comply with Google’s guidelines. Why? Because, if the term “press release” becomes a synonym for “SEO spam,” one of the important tools in their toolboxes will become useless.

Just as real advertisers don’t expect their ads to pass PageRank, real PR people don’t expect their press releases to pass PageRank. Public relations is about planting a message in the media, not about manipulating search results

However, I’m not sure that will mean press releases are seen as any more credible, as press releases have never enjoyed a stellar reputation pre-SEO, but it may thin the crowd somewhat, which increases an agencies chances of getting their client seen.

Guidelines Honing In On Target

One resource referred to in the video above was this article, written by Amit Singhal, who is head of Google’s core ranking team. Note that it was written in 2011, so it’s nothing new. Here’s how Google say they determine quality:

we aren’t disclosing the actual ranking signals used in our algorithms because we don’t want folks to game our search results; but if you want to step into Google’s mindset, the questions below provide some guidance on how we’ve been looking at the issue:

Would you trust the information presented in this article?

Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?

Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?

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?

Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

How much quality control is done on content?

….and so on. Google’s rhetoric is almost always about “producing high quality content”, because this is what Google’s users want, and what Google’s users want, Google’s shareholders want.

It’s not a bad thing to want, of course. Who would want poor quality content? But as most of us know, producing high quality content is no guarantee of anything. Great for Google, great for users, but often not so good for publishers as the publisher carries all the risk.

Take a look at the Boston Globe, sold along with a boatload of content for a 93% decline. Quality content sure, but is it a profitable business? Emphasis on content without adequate marketing is not a sure-fire strategy. Bezos has just bought the Washington Post, of course, and we’re pretty sure that isn’t a content play, either.

High quality content often has a high upfront production cost attached to it, and given measly web advertising rates, the high possibility of invisibility, getting content scrapped and ripped off, then it is no wonder webmasters also push their high quality content in order to ensure it ranks. What other choice have they got?

To not do so is also risky.

Even eHow, well known for cheap factory line content, is moving toward subscription membership revenues.

The Somewhat Bigger Question

Google can move the goal- posts whenever they like. What you’re doing today might be frowned upon tomorrow. One day, your content may be made invisible, and there will be nothing you can do about it, other than start again.

Do you have a contingency plan for such an eventuality?

Johnon puts it well:

The only thing that matters is how much traffic you are getting from search engines today, and how prepared you are for when some (insert adjective here) Googler shuts off that flow of traffic”

To ask about the minuate of Google’s policies and guidelines is to miss the point. The real question is how prepared are you when Google shuts off you flow of traffic because they’ve reset the goal posts?

Focusing on the minuate of Google’s policies is, indeed, to miss the point.

This is a question of risk management. What happens if your main site, or your clients site, runs foul of a Google policy change and gets trashed? Do you run multiple sites? Run one site with no SEO strategy at all, whilst you run other sites that push hard? Do you stay well within the guidelines and trust that will always be good enough? If you stay well within the guidelines, but don’t rank, isn’t that effectively the same as a ban i.e. you’re invisible? Do you treat search traffic as a bonus, rather than the main course?

Be careful about putting Google’s needs before your own. And manage your risk, on your own terms.

Categories:

SEO Book Uncategorized

Google Keyword(Not Provided) Now Over 50%

August 3, 2013

Most Organic Search Data is Now Hidden

Over the past couple years since its launch, Google’s keyword (not provided) has received quite a bit of exposure, with people discussing all sorts of tips on estimating its impact & finding alternate sources of data (like competitive research tools & webmaster tools).

What hasn’t received anywhere near enough exposure (and should be discussed daily) is that the sole purpose of the change was anti-competitive abuse from the market monopoly in search.

The site which provided a count for (not provided) recently displayed over 40% of queries as (not provided), but that percentage didn’t include the large percent of mobile search users that were showing no referrals at all & were showing up as direct website visitors. On July 30, Google started showing referrals for many of those mobile searchers, using keyword (not provided).

According to research by RKG, mobile click prices are nearly 60% of desktop click prices, while mobile search click values are only 22% of desktop click prices. Until Google launched enhanced AdWords campaigns they understated the size of mobile search by showing many mobile searchers as direct visitors. But now that AdWords advertisers can’t opt out of mobile ads, Google has every incentive to promote what a big growth channel mobile search is for their business.

Looking at the analytics data for some non-SEO websites over the past 4 days I get Google referring an average of 86% of the 26,233 search visitors, with 13,413 being displayed as keyword (not provided).

Hiding The Value of SEO

Google is not only hiding half of their own keyword referral data, but they are hiding so much more than half that even when you mix in Bing and Yahoo! you still get over 50% of the total hidden.

Google’s 86% of the 26,233 searches is 22,560 searches.

Keyword (not provided) being shown for 13,413 is 59% of 22,560. That means Google is hiding at least 59% of the keyword data for organic search. While they are passing a significant share of mobile search referrers, there is still a decent chunk that is not accounted for in the change this past week.

Not passing keywords is just another way for Google to increase the perceived risk & friction of SEO, while making SEO seem less necessary, which has been part of “the plan” for years now.

When one digs into keyword referral data & ad blocking, there is a bad odor emitting from the GooglePlex.

Buy AdWords ads and the data gets sent. Rank organically and most the data is hidden.

Subsidizing Scammers Ripping People Off

A number of the low end “solutions” providers scamming small businesses looking for SEOs are taking advantage of the opportunity that keyword (not provided) offers them. A buddy of mine took over SEO for a site that had showed absolutely zero sales growth after a year of 15% monthly increase in search traffic. Looking at the on-site changes, the prior SEOs did nothing over the time period. Looking at the backlinks, nothing there either.

So what happened?

Well, when keyword data isn’t shown, it is pretty easy for someone to run a clickbot to show keyword (not provided) Google visitors & claim that they were “doing SEO.”

And searchers looking for SEO will see those same scammers selling bogus solutions in AdWords. Since they are selling a non-product / non-service, their margins are pretty high. Endorsed by Google as the best, they must be good.

Or something like that:

Google does prefer some types of SEO over others, but their preference isn’t cast along the black/white divide you imagine. It has nothing to do with spam or the integrity of their search results. Google simply prefers ineffective SEO over SEO that works. No question about it. They abhor any strategies that allow guys like you and me to walk into a business and offer a significantly better ROI than AdWords.

This is no different than the YouTube videos “recommended for you” that teach you how to make money on AdWords by promoting Clickbank products which are likely to get your account flagged and banned. Ooops.

Anti-competitive Funding Blocking Competing Ad Networks

John Andrews pointed to Google’s blocking (then funding) of AdBlock Plus as an example of their monopolistic inhibiting of innovation.

sponsoring Adblock is changing the market conditions. Adblock can use the money provided by Google to make sure any non-Google ad is blocked more efficiently. They can also advertise their addon better, provide better support, etc. Google sponsoring Adblock directly affects Adblock’s ability to block the adverts of other companies around the world. – RyanZAG

Turn AdBlock Plus on & search for credit cards on Google and get ads.

Do that same search over at Bing & get no ads.

How does a smaller search engine or a smaller ad network compete with Google on buying awareness, building a network AND paying the other kickback expenses Google forces into the marketplace?

They can’t.

Which is part of the reason a monopoly in search can be used to control the rest of the online ecosystem.

Buying Browser Marketshare

Already the #1 web browser, Google Chrome buys marketshare with shady one-click bundling in software security installs.

If you do that stuff in organic search or AdWords, you might be called a spammer employing deceptive business practices.

When Google does it, it’s “good for the user.”

Vampire Sucking The Lifeblood Out of SEO

Google tells Chrome users “not signed in to Chrome (You’re missing out – sign in).” Login to Chrome & searchers don’t pass referral information. Google also promotes Firefox blocking the passage of keyword referral data in search, but when it comes to their own cookies being at risk, that is unacceptable: “Google is pulling out all the stops in its campaign to drive Chrome installs, which is understandable given Microsoft and Mozilla’s stance on third-party cookies, the lifeblood of Google’s display-ad business.”

What do we call an entity that considers something “its lifeblood” while sucking it out of others?

Categories:

SEO Book Uncategorized

What Is Your SEO Strategy?

July 31, 2013

How do you determine your SEO strategy?

Actually, before you answer, let’s step back.

What Is SEO, Anyway?

“Search engine optimization” has always been an odd term as it’s somewhat misleading. After all, we’re not optimizing search engines.

SEO came about when webmasters optimized websites. Specifically, they optimized the source code of pages to appeal to search engines. The intent of SEO was to ensure websites appeared higher in search results than if the site was simply left to site designers and copywriters. Often, designers would inadvertently make sites uncrawlable, and therefore invisible in search engines.

But there was more to it than just enhancing crawlability.

SEOs examined the highest ranking page, looked at the source code, often copied it wholesale, added a few tweaks, then republished the page. In the days of Infoseek, this was all you needed to do to get an instant top ranking.

I know, because I used to do it!

At the time, I thought it was an amusing hacker trick. It also occurred to me that such positioning could be valuable. Of course, this rather obvious truth occurred to many other people, too. A similar game had been going on in the Yahoo Directory where people named sites “AAAA…whatever” because Yahoo listed sites in alphabetical order. People also used to obsessively track spiders, spotting fresh spiders (Hey Scooter!) as they appeared and….cough……guiding them through their websites in a favourable fashion.

When it comes to search engines, there’s always been gaming. The glittering prize awaits.

The new breed of search engines made things a bit more tricky. You couldn’t just focus on optimizing code in order to rank well. There was something else going on.

Backlinks.

So, SEO was no longer just about optimizing the underlying page code, SEO was also about getting links. At that point, SEO jumped from being just a technical coding exercise to a marketing exercise. Webmasters had to reach out to other webmasters and convince them to link up.

A young upstart, Google, placed heavy emphasis on links, making use of a clever algorithm that sorted “good” links from, well, “evil” links. This helped make Google’s result set more relevant than other search engines. Amusingly enough, Google once claimed it wasn’t possible to spam Google.

Webmasters responded by spamming Google.

Or, should I say, Google likely categorized what many webmasters were doing as “spam”, at least internally, and may have regretted their earlier hubris. Webmasters sought links that looked like “good” links. Sometimes, they even earned them.

And Google has been pushing back ever since.

Building links pre-dated SEO, and search engines, but, once backlinks were counted in ranking scores, link building was blended into SEO. These days, most SEO’s consider link building a natural part of SEO. But, as we’ve seen, it wasn’t always this way.

We sometimes get comments on this blog about how marketing is different from SEO. Well, it is, but if you look at the history of SEO, there has always been marketing elements involved. Getting external links could be characterized as PR, or relationship building, or marketing, but I doubt anyone would claim getting links is not SEO.

More recently, we’ve seen a massive change in Google. It’s a change that is likely being rolled out over a number of years. It’s a change that makes a lot of old school SEO a lot less effective in the same way introducing link analysis made meta-tag optimization a lot less effective.

My takeaways from Panda are that this is not an individual change or something with a magic bullet solution. Panda is clearly based on data about the user interacting with the SERP (Bounce, Pogo Sticking), time on site, page views, etc., but it is not something you can easily reduce to 1 number or a short set of recommendations. To address a site that has been Pandalized requires you to isolate the “best content” based on your user engagement and try to improve that.

Google is likely applying different algorithms to different sectors, so the SEO tactics used in on sector don’t work in another. They’re also looking at engagement metrics, so they’re trying to figure out if the user really wanted the result they clicked on. When you consider Google’s work on PPC landing pages, this development is obvious. It’s the same measure. If people click back often, too quickly, then the landing page quality score drops. This is likely happening in the SERPs, too.

So, just like link building once got rolled into SEO, engagement will be rolled into SEO. Some may see that as a death of SEO, and in some ways it is, just like when meta-tag optimization, and other code optimizations, were deprecated in favour of other, more useful relevancy metrics. In others ways, it’s SEO just changing like it always has done.

The objective remains the same.

Deciding On Strategy

So, how do you construct your SEO strategy? What will be your strategy going forward?

Some read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. They’ll watch every Matt Cutts video. They follow it all to the letter. There’s nothing wrong with this approach.

Others read Google’s Guidelines. They’ll watch every Matt Cutts video. They read between the lines and do the complete opposite. Nothing wrong with that approach, either.

It depends on what strategy you’ve adopted.

One of the problems with letting Google define your game is that they can move the goalposts anytime they like. The linking that used to be acceptable, at least in practice, often no longer is. Thinking of firing off a press release? Well, think carefully before loading it with keywords:

This is one of the big changes that may have not been so clear for many webmasters. Google said, “links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites,” is an example of an unnatural link that violate their guidelines. The key are the examples given and the phrase “distributed on other sites.” If you are publishing a press release or an article on your site and distribute it through a wire or through an article site, you must make sure to nofollow the links if those links are “optimized anchor text.

Do you now have to go back and unwind a lot of link building in order to stay in their good books? Or, perhaps you conclude that links in press releases must work a little too well, else Google wouldn’t be making a point of it. Or conclude that Google is running a cunning double-bluff hoping you’ll spend a lot more time doing things you think Google does or doesn’t like, but really Google doesn’t care about at all, as they’ve found a way to mitigate it.

Bulk guest posting were also included in Google’s webmaster guidelines as a no no. Along with keyword rich anchors in article directories. Even how a site monetizes by doing things like blocking the back button can be considered “deceptive” and grounds for banning.

How about the simple strategy of finding the top ranking sites, do what they do, and add a little more? Do you avoid saturated niches, and aim for the low-hanging fruit? Do you try and guess all the metrics and make sure you cover every one? Do you churn and burn? Do you play the long game with one site? Is social media and marketing part of your game, or do you leave these aspects out of the SEO equation? Is your currency persuasion?

Think about your personal influence and the influence you can manage without dollars or gold or permission from Google. Think about how people throughout history have sought karma, invested in social credits, and injected good will into their communities, as a way to “prep” for disaster. Think about it.

We may be “search marketers” and “search engine optimizers” who work within the confines of an economy controlled (manipulated) by Google, but our currency is persuasion. Persuasion within a market niche transcends Google

It would be interesting to hear the strategies you use, and if you plan on using different strategy going forward.

Categories:

SEO Book Uncategorized

Authority Labs Review

July 30, 2013

There are quite a few rank tracking options on the market today and selecting one (or two) can be difficult. Some have lots of integrations, some have no integrations. Some are trustworthy, some are not.
Deciding on the feature set is tough enough bu…

SEO Book Uncategorized

Pandas And Loyalty

July 25, 2013

SEOs debate ranking metrics over and over, but if there’s one thing for sure, it’s that Google no longer works the same way it used to.

The fundamental shift in the past couple of years has been more emphasis on what could be characterized as engagement factors.

I became convinced that Panda is really the public face of a much deeper switch towards user engagement. While the Panda score is sitewide the engagement “penalty” or weighting effect on also occurs at the individual page. The pages or content areas that were hurt less by Panda seem to be the ones that were not also being hurt by the engagement issue.

Inbound links to a page still count, as inbound links are engagement factors. How about a keyword in the title tag? On-page text? They are certainly basic requirements, but of low importance when it comes to determining ranking. This is because the web is not short of content, so there will always likely to be on-topic content to serve against a query. Rather, Google refines in order to deliver the most relevant content.

Google does so by checking a range of metrics to see what people really think about the content Google is serving, and the oldest form of this check is an inbound link, which is a form of vote by users. Engagement metrics are just a logical extension of the same idea.

Brands appear to have an advantage, not because they fit into an arbitrary category marked “brand,” but because of signals that define them as being more relevant i.e. a brand keyword search likely results in a high number of click-thrus, and few click-backs. This factor, when combined with other metrics, such as their name in the backlink, helps define relevance.

Social signals are also playing a part, and likely measured in the same way as brands. If enough people talk about something, associate terms with it, and point to it, and users don’t click-back in sufficient number, then it’s plausible that activity results in higher relevance scores.

We don’t know for sure, of course. We can only speculate based on limited blackbox testing which will always be incomplete. However, even if some SEOs don’t accept the ranking boost that comes from engagement metrics, there’s still a sound business reason to pay attention to the main difference between brand and non-brand sites.

Loyalty

Investing In The Return

Typically, internet marketers place a lot of emphasis, and spend, on getting a new visitor to a site. They may also place emphasis on converting the buyer, using conversion optimization and other persuasion techniques.

But how much effort are they investing to ensure the visitor comes back?

Some may say ensuring the visitor comes back isn’t SEO, but in a post-Panda environment, SEO is about a lot more than the first click. As you build up brand searches, bookmarking, and word-of-mouth metrics, you’ll likely create the type of signals Google favours.

Focusing on the returning visitor also makes sense from a business point of view. Selling to existing customers – whether you’re selling a physical thing or a point of view – is cheaper than selling to a new customer.

Acquiring new customers is expensive (five to ten times the cost of retaining an existing one), and the average spend of a repeat customer is a whopping 67 percent more than a new one

So, customer loyalty pays off on a number of levels.

Techniques To Foster Loyalty

Return purchasers, repeat purchasers and repeat visitors can often be missed in analytics, or their importance not well understood. According to the Q2 2012 Adobe analysis, “8% of site visitors, they generated a disproportionately high 41% of site sales. What’s more, return and repeat purchasers had higher average order values and conversion rates than shoppers with no previous purchase history

One obvious technique, if you’re selling products, is to use loyalty programs. Offer points, discounts and other monetary rewards. One drawback of this approach is is that giving rewards and pricing discounts is essentially purchasing loyalty. Customers will only be “loyal” so long as they think they’re getting a bargain, so this approach works best if you’re in a position to be price competitive. Contrast this with the deeper loyalty that can be achieved through an emotional loyalty to a brand, by the likes of Apple, Google and Coke.

Fostering deeper loyalty, then, is about finding out what really matters to people, hopefully something other than price.

Take a look at Zappos. What makes customers loyal to Zappos? Customers may get better prices elsewhere, but Zappos is mostly about service. Zappos is about ease of use. Zappos is about lowering the risk of purchase by offering free returns. Zappos have identified and provided what their market really wants – high service levels and reasonable pricing – so people keep coming back.

Does anyone think the engagement metrics of Zappos would be overlooked by Google? If Zappos were not seen as relevant by Google, then there would be something badly wrong – with Google. Zappos have high brand awareness in the shoe sector, built on solving a genuine problem for visitors. They offer high service levels, which keeps people coming back, and keeps customers talking about them.

Sure, they’re a well-funded, outlier internet success, but the metrics will still apply to all verticals. The brands who engage customers the most, and continue to do so, are, by definition, most relevant.

Another thing to consider, especially if you’re a small operator competing against big players, is closely related to service. Try going over-the-top in you attentiveness to customers. Paul Graham, of Y Combinator, talks about how start-ups should go well beyond what big companies do, and the payback is increased loyalty:

But perhaps the biggest thing preventing founders from realizing how attentive they could be to their users is that they’ve never experienced such attention themselves. Their standards for customer service have been set by the companies they’ve been customers of, which are mostly big ones. Tim Cook doesn’t send you a hand-written note after you buy a laptop. He can’t. But you can. That’s one advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big company can

That strategy syncs with Seth Godin’s Purple Cow notion of “being remarkable” i.e do something different – good different – so people remark upon it. These days, and in the context of SEO, that translates into social media mentions and links, and brand searches, all of which will help keep the Google Gods smiling, too.

The feedback loop of high engagement will also help you refine your relevance:

Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. For most successful startups it’s a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good. Making a better mousetrap is not an atomic operation. Even if you start the way most successful startups have, by building something you yourself need, the first thing you build is never quite right…..

Gamification

Gamification has got a lot of press in the last few years as a means of fostering higher levels of engagement and return visits.

The concept is called gamification – that is, implementing design concepts from games, loyalty programs, and behavioral economics, to drive user engagement”. M2 research expects that US companies alone will be spending $3b per year on gamification technologies and services before the end of the decade

People have natural desires to be competitive, to achieve, to gain status, closure and feel altruistic. Incorporating game features helps fulfil these desires.

And games aren’t just for kids. According to The Gamification Revolution, by Zichermann and Linder – a great read on gamification strategy, BTW – the average “gamer” in the US is a 43 year old female. Gaming is one of the few channels where levels of attention are increasing. Contrast this with content-based advertising, which is often rendered invisible by repetition.

This is not to say everything must be turned into a game. Rather, pay attention to the desires that games fulfil, and try to incorporate those aspects into your site, where appropriate. Central to the idea of gamification is orienting around the deep desires of a visitor for some form of reward and status.

The user may want to buy product X, but if they can feel a sense of achievement in doing so, they’ll be engaging at a deeper level, which could then lead to brand loyalty.

eBay, a pure web e-commerce play dealing in stuff, have a “chief engagement officer”, someone who’s job it is to tweak eBay so it becomes more-gamelike. This, in turn, drives customer engagement and loyalty. If your selling history becomes a marker of achievement and status, then how likely are you to start anew at the competition?

This is one of the reasons eBay has remained so entrenched.

Gamification has also been used as a tool for customer engagement, and for encouraging desirable website usage behaviour. Additionally, gamification is readily applicable to increasing engagement on sites built on social network services. For example, in August 2010, one site, DevHub, announced that they have increased the number of users who completed their online tasks from 10% to 80% after adding gamification elements. On the programming question-and-answer site Stack Overflow users receive points and/or badges for performing a variety of actions, including spreading links to questions and answers via Facebook and Twitter. A large number of different badges are available, and when a user’s reputation points exceed various thresholds, he or she gains additional privileges, including at the higher end, the privilege of helping to moderate the site

Gamification, in terms of the web, is relatively new. It didn’t even appear in Google Trends until 2010. But it’s not just some buzzword, it has practical application, and it can help improve ranking by boosting engagement metrics through loyalty and referrals. Loyalty marketing guru Fredrick Reichheld has claimed a strong link between customer loyalty marketing and customer referral.

Obviously, this approach is highly user-centric. Google orient around this principle, too. “Focus on the user and all else will follow.”

Google has always had the mantra of ‘focus on the user and all else will follow,’ so the company puts a significant amount of effort into researching its users. In fact, Au estimates that 30 to 40 per cent of her 200-strong worldwide user experience team is compromised of user researchers

Google fosters return visits and loyalty by giving the user what they want, and they use a lot of testing to ensure that happens. Websites that focus on keywords, but don’t give the user what they want, either due to a lack of focus, lack of depth, or by using deliberate bait-and-switch, are going against Google’s defining principles and will likely ultimately lose the SEO game.

The focus on the needs and desires of the user, both before their first click, to their return visits, should be stronger than ever.

Attention

According to Microsoft research, the average new visitor gives your site 10 seconds or less. Personally, I think ten seconds sounds somewhat generous! If a visitor makes it past 30 seconds, you’re lucky to get two minutes of their attention, in total. What does this do to your engagement metrics if Google is counting click backs, and clicks to other pages in the same domain?

And these metrics are even worse for mobile.

There’s been a lot of diversification in terms of platforms, and many users are stuck in gamified silo environments, like Facebook, so it’s getting harder and harder to attract people out of their comfort zone and to your brand.

So it’s no longer just about building brand, we also need to think about more ways to foster ongoing engagement and attention. We’ve seen that people are spending a lot of attention on games. In so doing, they have been conditioned to expect heightened rewards, stimulation and feedback as a reward for that attention.

Do you reward visitors for their attention?

If not, think about ways you can build reward and status for visitors into your site.

Sites like 99 Designs use a game to solicit engagement from suppliers as a point of differentiation for buyers. Challenges, such as “win the design” competition, delivers dozens of solutions at no extra cost to the user. The winners also receive a form of status, which is also a form of “payment” for their efforts. We could argue that this type of gamification is weighed heavily against the supplier, but there’s no doubting the heightened level of engagement and attraction for the buyer. Not only do they get multiple web design ideas for the price of one, they get to be the judge in a design version of the X-Factor.

Summary

Hopefully, this article has provided some food for thought. If we were going to measure success of loyalty and engagement campaigns, we might look at recency i.e. how long ago did the users last visit, frequency i.e. how often do they visit in a period of time, and duration i.e. when do they come, and how long do they stay. We could then map these metrics back against rankings, and look for patterns.

But even if we’re overestimating the effect of engagement on rankings, it still makes good sense from a business point of view. It costs a lot to get the first visit, but a whole lot less to keep happy visitors coming back, particularly on brand searches.

Think about ways to reward visitors for doing so.

Categories:

business

SEO Book Uncategorized

Building And Selling An SEO Business

July 16, 2013

There’s an in-depth discussion going on in the members area about how to sell an SEO business. There will surely be readers of the blog interested in the topic, too, so I thought I’d look at the more general issues of selling a business – SEO, or otherwise. Specifically, how to structure a business so it can be sold.

Service-Based Businesses

Service based businesses are attractive because they’re easy to establish.

Who can sell a service? The answer is simple–anyone and everyone. Everyone is qualified because each of us has skills, knowledge or experience that other people are willing to pay for in the form of a service; or they’re willing to pay you to teach them your specific skill or knowledge. Selling services knows no boundaries–anyone with a need or desire to earn extra money, work from home, or start and operate a full-time business can sell a service, regardless of age, business experience, education or current financial resources

The downside of a service based business is that they’re easy to establish, so any service area that’s worth any money soon gets flooded with competition. The ease with which competitors can enter service-based markets is one of the reasons why service-based business can be more difficult to sell for a reasonable price.

Selling A Consultancy

Some businesses are more difficult to sell than others. Agency business, such as SEO consulting, can be especially problematic if they’re oriented around highly customized services.

In Built To Sell: Creating Business That Can Thrive Without You, John Warrillow outlines the reasons why, and what can be done about it. The book is an allegory about the troubles the founder of a design agency experiences when, after eight years, he is fed up with the demands of the business and decides to sell, only to find it’s essentially worthless. His business creates logos, does SEO, web design, and brochures, so many of his trials and tribulations will sound familiar to readers of SEOBook.com

Smart businesspeople believe that you should build a company to be sold even if you have no intention of cashing out or stepping back anytime soon

There are 23 million businesses in the US, yet only a few hundred thousand sell each year. Is this simply because the owners want to hold onto them? Yes, in some cases. But mainly it’s because a lot of them can’t be sold due to structural issues. They might be worth something to the seller, but they’re not worth much to to anyone else.

If You Were To Buy A Business, Would You Buy Yours?

If you put yourself in the shoes of a buyer, what would you be looking for in an SEO-related business? What are the traps?

We might start by looking at turnover. Let’s say turnover looks good. We may look at the customer list. Let’s say the customer list looks good, too. There are forward contracts. Typically, owners of businesses place a lot of value on goodwill – their established reputation of a business regarded as a quantifiable asset.

Frequently, goodwill is overvalued and here’s why:

It is fleeting.

A company may have happy customers, happy staff, and people may say good things about them, but that might all change next week. Let’s say Update Zebra, or whatever black n white exotic animal is heading our way next, is rolled out next month and trashes all the good SEO work built up over years. Is everyone still happy? Clients still happy? Staff still happy? Were there performance guarantees in place that will no longer be met? The most difficult thing about the SEO business is that critical delivery aspects are beyond the SEOs control.

Goodwill is so subjective and ephemeral that many investors deduct it completely when valuing a company. This is not to say a good name and reputation has no tangible value, but the ephemeral nature perhaps illustrates why buyers may place less value on goodwill than sellers. If you think most of your business value lies in goodwill, then you may have trouble selling for the price you desire.

….the only aspect of goodwill that can unequivocally offer comfort to an investor is the going-concern value of a company. This represents things such as the value of assets in place, institutional knowledge, reputational value not already captured by trade names, and superior location. All these attributes can lead to sources of competitive advantage and sustainable results; and/or they can give an entity the ability to develop hot products, as well as to achieve above-average earnings.

If a buyer discounts most or all of the goodwill, then what is left? There is staff. But staff can leave. There are forward contracts. How long do these contracts last? What are they worth? Will they roll over? Can they be cancelled or exited? A lot of the value of an agency businesses will lay in those forward contracts. What if the customers really like the founder on a personal level, and that is why they do business with him or her? A service business that is dependent on a small group of clients, who demand personal attention of the founder, and where the business competes with a lot of other players offering similar services is, in the words of John Warrillow “virtually worthless”.

But there are changes that can be made to make it valuable.

Thinking Of Service Provision In Terms Of Product

Warrillow argues that a business can be made more valuable if they create a standard service offering. Package services into a consistent, repeatable process that staff can follow without depending on you. The service should be something that clients need on a regular basis, so revenue is recurring.

His key point is to think like a product company, rather than a service company.

Good service companies have some unique approaches and talented people. But as long as they customize their approach to solving client problems, there is no scale to the business and it’s operations are contingent on people. When people are the main assets of the business – and they can come and go every night – the business is not worth very much

That’s not to say a service business can’t be sold for good money. However, Warrillow points out that they’re typically purchased on less than ideal terms, often involving earn-outs. An earn-out is when the owner gets some money up front, but to get the full price, they need to hit earnings targets, and that may involve staying on for years. In that time, anything can happen, and the people buying the company may make those targets difficult or impossible to achieve. This doesn’t necessarily happen through malice – although sometimes it does – but can arise out of conflicting incentives.

There are other stories of entrepreneurs going through the change from service to products, although the process may not be quite as straightforward as the character in the book experiences:

So I’m sure there’s a lot of entrepreneurs out there that want to make the switch from consultancy to selling products. Belgian entrepreneur Inge Geerdens did exactly that: she pivoted successfully from providing services to selling a product…….A product is entirely different. You have costs that you can’t cut. In a service company, you can downsize everyone if you want, and run it at basically zero cost. It’s impossible to do that with a product. There’s hosting, development, upgrades, bug fixes, support: those are costs that you can’t flatten in any way. Your developers need new PC’s a lot sooner than consultants!

Nonetheless, the book offers seventeen tips on how to adjust a service based business to make it more saleable, and there are a lot more great ideas in it. Hopefully, outlining these tips will encourage you to buy the book – I’m not on commission, honest, but it’s a great read for anyone starting or running a business with the intention to sell it one day.

Let’s look at these tips in the context of SEO-related businesses.

1. Specialize

It’s difficult for small firms to be generalists.

Large firms can offer many services simply by having many specialists on the payroll. If a small business tries to do likewise, small business end up with staff wearing many hats. Someone who is a generalist is unlikely to be as proficient as a specialist, and this makes it more difficult to establish a point of difference and outperform the competition.

In terms of SEO, it’s already a pretty specialized area. The businesses that might be more difficult to sell in this market sector are the businesses offering multiple service lines including SEO, web design, brochures, etc, unless they have some local advantage that can’t easily be replicated.

However, positioning as a generalist can have it’s advantages, especially if the ecosystem changes:

Despite the corporate world’s insistence on specialization, the workers most likely to come out on top are generalists—but not just because of their innate ability to adapt to new workplaces, job descriptions or cultural shifts. Instead, according to writer Carter Phipps, author of 2012’sEvolutionaries generalists will thrive in a culture where it’s becoming increasingly valuable to know “a little bit about a lot.” Meaning that where you fall on the spectrum of specialist to generalist could be one of the most important aspects of your personality—

This is perhaps more true of individual workers than entities.

2. Make Sure No One Client Makes Up More Than 15% Of Your Revenue

If a business is too reliant on one client, then risk is increased. If the business loses the client, then a big chunk of the business value walks out the door.

Even though we usually land an annual contract, once that runs out, the client can cut us loose without any of the messiness involved in firing employees — that is, no severance pay, no paying unemployment benefits, no risk of being sued for discrimination or harassment or any of the other three million reasons why an ex-employee sues an ex-employer

3. Owning A Process Makes It Easier To Pitch And Puts You In Control

It is more difficult and time consuming to sell highly configured solutions than it is to sell packaged services. Highly configured services are also harder to scale, as this usually involves adding highly skilled and therefore expensive staff.

In SEO, it can be difficult to implement packaged, repeatable processes. Another way of looking at it might be to focus on adaptive processes, as used in Agile:

Reliable processes focus on outputs, not inputs. Using a reliable process, team members figure out ways to consistently achieve a given goal even though the inputs vary dramatically. Because of the input variations, the team may not use the same processes or practices from one project, or even one iteration, to the next. Reliability is results driven. Repeatability is input driven.

4. Don’t Become Synonymous With Your Company

Yahoo lived on without its founders. As will Google and Microsoft. The founders created “machines” that will “go” whether the founders are there or not.

Often, small consulting businesses are built around the founder, and this can make selling the company more difficult than need be. If customers want the founder handling or overseeing their account, then a buyer is going to wonder how much of the customer list will be left after the founder exits. It can even happen to big companies, like Apple, although their worry is perhaps more about the ability of successors to lead innovation.

If you never returned to your business, could it keep running?

Test yourself simply by asking yourself these questions and if you can respond yes to all of them you are well prepared:

Do you have a strategy in place should you, or a key staff member, be unable to return to work for a long period, or never?

Is this strategy documented and has it been communicated effectively to the business?

Do you have a process in place that ensures qualified and appropriately trained people are able to take over competently when the current generation of managers and key people retire or move on?

Has this strategy been documented and communicated to the key people involved?

Do you have a ‘vision’ for your business? Does it link easily to the ‘values’ of the business and the behaviours of the people within the business?

Has your ‘vision’ been well articulated and communicated with the people in the business?

Are you able to demonstrate your business plans for a clearly-defined viable future?

Have these plans been clearly articulated, documented and communicated to the key people within your organisation?

5. Avoid The Cash Suck

Essentially, try to get payment up-front. This is a lot easier to do for products than services. Alternatively, use progress billing. Either way, you need to be cash-flow positive.

Poor cashflow is the silent killer of many businesses, and poor, lumpy cashflow looks especially bad when a business is being packaged up for sale. It’s difficult to make accurate forward revenue predictions when looking at sporadic cashflow.

6. Don’t Be Afraid To Say No To Projects

It can be difficult to turn down work, but if the work doesn’t fit into your existing processes, then you need to find extra resources to do it. Above all else, it’s a distraction from your core function, which will also likely be your competitive advantage.

This point is also highlighted well in The Pumpkin Plan:

Never, ever let distractions – often labelled as new opportunities – take hold. Weed them out fast

7. Take Time To Figure Out How Many Pipeline Prospects Will Likely Lead To Sales

What’s your conversion rate? This helps a buyer determine the market potential. They want to know if they can expect the same rate of sales when they take it over.

8. Two Sales Reps Are Always Better Than One

The reasoning for this is that sales people are naturally competitive, so will compete against each other, which benefits the business.

Most of us would agree that salespeople are competitive by nature. This is obvious and necessary. After all, these are the people we put on the front lines to win the day and bring back revenue-producing opportunities for the company. They are assessed on their sales performance via metrics and measurements, and they’re incentivized with compensation and perks. Many organizations even have annual sales drives or competitions to quantify the level of performance and measure who is the best.

9. Hire People Who Are Good At Selling Products, Not Services

If you’ve gone to the trouble of systematizing your services to turn it into a product, then you don’t want salespeople agreeing to meet a customers demands by bending the product to those demands. Either the product meets their demands, or it doesn’t. I have known some service-oriented salespeople sell solutions that the company doesn’t even offer, reasoning the sale is the important thing, and the “back office” will work it out somehow!

Part of the rationale is that product based salespeople will filter out clients who want something else, and focus on those who are best served by the product, and likely to want more of it in future.

10. Ignore Your Profit And Loss Statement In The Year You Make A Switch To The Standardized Offering

It will likely show losses due to restructuring around a repeatable process or product. In any case, the future buyer is not buying the previous service business, they’re buying the new product business, and it is on these figures alone, going forward, the business will be judged.

11. You Need At Least Two Years Financial Statements Reflecting Your Standardized Model

See above.

12. Build A Management Team And Offer A Long Term Incentive Plan That Rewards Their Loyalty

Just like a buyer doesn’t want to see a business dependent on the founder, a buyer doesn’t want a management team abandoning ship after they’ve bought a company, either, unless the buyer is happy putting their own management in place.

13. Find An Adviser For Whom You Will Be Neither Their Largest Nor Smallest Client. Ensure They Know The Industry

Warrillow advises using a boutique mergers and acquisitions firm , unless you business is worth well under $5 million, in which case a broker is likely to handle the sale.

Between 1995 and 2006 about a quarter of merging firms hired boutique banks as their advisors on mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Boutique advisors, often specialized by industry, are generally smaller and more independent than full-service banks. This paper investigates firms’ choice between boutique and full-service advisors and the impact of advisor choice on deal outcomes. We find that both acquirers and targets are more likely to choose boutique advisors in complex deals, suggesting that boutique advisors are chosen for their skill and expertise.

14. Avoid An Advisor Who Offers To Broker A Discussion With A Single Client. You Need To Ensure (Buyer) Competition

Sometimes, advisors are scouts for favoured clients. This can create a conflict of interest as the advisor may be trying to limit the bidding competition as a favor to the buyer, or because they’re earning higher margins from that one client for introducing deals.

15. Think Big. Write A Three-Year Business Plan That Paints A Picture Of What Is Possible For Your Business

Think in terms of what the business could be, not necessarily what it is within your capabilities. For example, if the business is regional, what are the possibilities if it was scaled to every state? Or the world?

The buyer may have resources to leverage that you do not, such as established agencies in different markets. What happens if they sell your product to all their existing customers? Suddenly the scope of the business is increased, and the possible value is highlighted. Imagine what it would be like if you had the networks that were possible, as opposed to those you have at present.

16. If You Want A Sellable, Product Oriented Business, You Need To Use The Language Of One

“Clients” become “customers”, “firm” becomes “business”. It’s not just a change of positioning, it’s also a change of mindset and rhetoric, which in turn helps frame the company in the right light for the buyer.

17. Don’t Issue Stock Options To Retain Key Employees After Acquisition. Instead, Use A Simple Bonus.

Stock options can be complicated, although pretty common in the tech world. Warrillow’s argument against stock options is that they can complicate the sales process, as it’s reasonable all stockholders should get some say in the terms of the sale. This probably isn’t such an issue for larger businesses, as buyers would expect it.

Instead, Warrillow recommends a stay bonus, which is a cash reward for key staff if you sell the company. There should also be bonuses beyond the transition in order to inceentivise them to stay.

Conclusion

There are a lot of good tips and ideas in Warrillow’s book, and I’ve really only scratched the surface with this summary. These tips require context to get the most out of them, but hopefully they’ve provided a good starting point.

Have you bought or sold an SEO business? It would be great to hear your experience of doing so. Do you agree with some of these tips, or disagree? Please feel free to add to the comments!

Categories:

book reviews

SEO Book Uncategorized

Scaling Your SEO Business in 2013 and Beyond