- Crafting SEO Landing Pages
The landing page, in terms of SEO, went out of fashion.
Landing pages, which tended to be mass-generated, near identical pages pointing to one money page, became a target for the search engine spam filters.
However, the type of landing page we should take a closer look at is the type of landing page used in PPC - a page carefully crafted to lead a visitor to desired action. SEOs can benefit from applying the same techniques used for creating effective PPC landing pages to their organic pages. After all, we all want visitors to arrive at our pages, and take a desired action.
All Search Is About Connecting With People
Our pages may rank well, but if the visitor doesn't do something that ultimately leads to more money in our pockets, our sites won't last long.
In the past, ranking well has led to a pre-occupation with factors like keyword density i.e. repeating keyword phrases often.
However, the search engine algorithm's are no longer quite so stupid. The need to slavishly repeat keyword phrases in order to rank pales in comparison to other factors. It's no longer necessary to forsake good copy writing in order to please machine algorithms.
To make our rankings work for us, we must connect with people. This means our pages must talk their language and focus on solving their problems.
A fail in SEO is not missing out on the #1 ranking. A fail in SEO is a visitor clicking back. Do everything to avoid the back click.
Talking People's Language
People couldn't care less about you or your company.
People care about themselves.
Take a look at your pages. Do they talk about you, or do they talk about your audience? For a page to work well, it must connect with your audience, and the easiest way to do this is to talk about their wants and desires. If a page doesn't grab a visitors attention, they won't persevere, they will click back. What's a #1 ranking worth if visitors click back?
Here are a few guidelines on how to grab a visitors attention:
Title Tag Text Should Match Your First Headline Or if not matching the phrase exactly, it should be close to it in terms of topic. This reassures to the searcher they are in the right place.
A Search Is Invariably A Question Keyword terms often aren't phrased as questions, but they are all questions. When people type "buy DVD online", they're really saying "where can I buy a DVD online". Try to determine searcher intent. Decide what the visitors question is, repeat it, then answer it.
Create A Clear Call To Action - what is it you want the searcher to do next? Sign-up? Buy something? Click on Adsense? Make that action clear and obvious.
People Scan - Use big headings. Often. If you're vague about visitor intent, you can use a number of different headlines, or images, that grab people's attention in case your lead hook fails.
Use The Word "You" A Lot - it's all about them. Their problems, their sense of self, their language, their wants and needs. Relegate all the stuff about you, unless they specifically ask for it, or you're using testimonials.
Every Page On Your Site Is A Landing Page
Every page on your site has potential to pull in visitors.
Even if a page only receives one visit a month, it's still a landing page. Given that SEO strategy involves building a lot of content, it's easy to think of "junk" pages low down in your domain structure as unimportant.
However, if people land on those pages, then that's half the battle won. Those pages will be winners if they lead people to the pages you want them to see. Therefore, every page on your site should contain a clear call to action - leading visitors to the one thing you want people to do.
The Difference Between SEO Landing Pages & PPC Landing Pages
In PPC, the page must be tightly controlled, stay on message and lead a visitor to desired action. Failure to do so means blowing through money.
With SEO, we have more leeway. We can include a variety of text content on pages, as it increases the likelihood of catching long tail phrases. This casts a wider net, and at negligible cost. However, we still need to structure the page well enough so people a) won't click back and b) will take the desired action.
It's a good idea to structure a page so - rather obviously - the most important stuff comes first. Make the call to action, wherever it is placed, clear. Relegate superfluous text, which targets long tail variations, below the fold and/or into side links.
Most likely, a few pages on your domain will be doing the gruntwork. Most of your visitors will come in on your home page, or a small collection of well linked pages on your site. Pay careful attention to these pages. They should be as crafted as tightly as a PPC landing page in terms of language and call to action.
Test these pages. Are they converting? What is the abandonment rate? Whilst it can take a while to test and alter SEO pages, it's worth doing, as incremental gains on a few pages can lead to huge changes when rolled out over an entire site.
What happens if you make a heading bigger? Paragraphs shorter? Reposition page elements? Change the language and pitch? You can also test these variables using a short PPC campaign, of course, and then roll your findings into your SEO strategy. Once you've got a winning formula, you can roll it out to every page (landing) page you create.
- Learning SEO: It Can Get Noisy
There is obviously no shortage of information on SEO.
But thanks for turning up here :)
The sheer avalanche of SEO information can be overwhelming, for beginners and experts alike. Who do you know who to listen to? What information do you need to know, and what information is filler?
Why should you even listen to SEOBook?
1. Most Information Published On SEO Is Filler
You can learn 80% of what you need to know about SEO pretty quickly. You don't need the additional 20% in order to achieve, unless you're a masochist - otherwise known as an SEO professional :)
Most of the information you'll come across on the topic of SEO is written by, and for, a professional/enthusiast crowd. There is a massive echo chamber of opinion, constantly replenished, produced using publishing tools based on the notion of communicating something, often.
It can result in a lot of noise, and not much in the way of signal, especially when you're learning. If you're starting out, and want to focus on learning SEO, it's a good idea to tune the industry chatter out. It's more likely to confuse than help in the early stages.
2. Understand The Business Of Search
Search engines aren't your friend. At best, they tolerate SEO, but only when it aligns with company goals.
The search engines have a business to run, and their goals aren't the same as yours. Whilst search engine reps often come across as helpful and friendly, because they typically are helpful and friendly people, keep in mind that what they are saying serves their company first and foremost. Any advice they give you is, quite rightly, designed to further company goals.
That's their job.
Chances are, your goals and the search engines goals will be aligned in many areas, but take their advice with a grain of salt. They don't care if your site succeeds or not, as there are plenty of other sites to index.
3. Define Goals
Before you undertake SEO, define your website goals. Do you want to make more money? Get more attention? Get more leads?
The purpose of SEO is to get your site seen in the search engines. Your aim is to attract the visitors that help you achieve your goals. A high ranking for a certain keyword won't necessarily help you achieve your goals unless your site matches visitor intent.
Think about the web from a visitors point of view. What do they want to find? What content will they engage with? What will they spend their money on?
There's little point ranking well if the content you provide doesn't make you money and/or gain audience. It's getting increasingly difficult to rank pages that aren't closely aligned with the searchers intent. So, the more you understand your audience, and the more content that matches their intent, the more you'll get out of SEO.
4. Get A Credible, Well Organized Course
Like SEOBook's course for example ;)
This isn't a sales pitch. There are a number of great courses out there. Choose one or two that suit your budget and objectives, and dive in. Chances are, you will need to shell out some money, but the cost of a decent, well structured course is nothing compared to the wasted effort spent heading in the wrong direction.
In a nutshell, SEO is about about publishing content people want to engage with, and linking. You need to create content that matches visitor intent, you need to be crawlable, and you need to have inbound links. Good SEO courses will have this message at their core.
Did I mention links enough?
5. Connect With People
It's natural to want the secret sauce - those secret dark techniques that result in number one rankings.
Whilst this was characteristic of SEO years ago, it's less true now. These days, SEO is more a holistic, strategic process aimed at connecting with people, as opposed to a dark, technical art aimed at tricking machines.
Focus on making connections with people. That means understanding what people want. You can do this by undertaking basic market research, using the search engines themselves!
6. Test
Don't listen to me. Well, maybe just a bit. Don't listen to the repeaters in forums.
Test and measure for yourself. It's one of the best SEO courses you can do. It's ongoing, and it's free.
Start with a simple, focused well constructed site. What is a well constructed site in terms of SEO?
With every change you make, every new SEO strategy you adopt, test the results. Did the change help you achieve your website goals? Did you get more traffic? Better quality traffic? If your rankings improved, did this result in more/better traffic? It can be difficult to isolate variables at the best of times, but there is no chance of doing so if you try too many techniques all at once.
Make changes one step at a time. Test and measure repeat. Become at expert at measuring SEO against your goals.
Build up your own private knowledge base of SEO in your niche. Your niche may require different strategies to other niches, which is why well-meaning advice in forums and on blogs can hinder you. You'll also become a better judge of who is offering you good advice, and who is just repeating something they heard.
- SEO Consulting: How To Construct Great Proposals
Like in any consulting field, SEO is rife with competition. There is only one way to win in such an environment, and that is to set yourself apart from the crowd.
Not in a bad way, of course :)
Here are some ideas on how to construct winning proposals.
Size Isn't Everything, But It Does Count
Large proposals take a long time to do. On the upside, large proposals can look impressive, simply by virtue of their size. Clients often like to see large proposals, but they don't tend to read them.
Proposals can be a tricky balance to get right. No matter how brilliant your solution, most clients will think twice about you if you present it on a single sheet, especially if they have no prior connection with you, or aren't meeting you face-to-face. A proposal of a certain size can appear more authoritative.
What is the ideal size?
One good way of presenting a proposal is to break it into three parts. The first part is a summary, including your client-specific solution and costs. Length can vary of course, but keep it succinct. No fat.
The second part is a case study or two. Again, keep them succinct. It's highly likely that the client won't actually read beyond this point.
Finally, add background information about you, your company, your history and the SEO business, all of which should be aimed at supporting the summary page and case studies. This final part can be generic and doesn't need to be re-written for each client. Clients may only flip through this section, but tend to find it reassuring that it exists.
Contrast this approach with a proposal that is threadbare. It may be irrational, but thin proposals can feel incomplete.
Give Something Of Value Away
In your summary pages, share real information.
Share the type of information that is valuable and the sort of you'd usually charge for providing. Clients are likely to assume that if the SEO is giving a few morsels of valuable information away in the proposal, then even more valuable information will be forthcoming if they sign you. Demonstrate your mastery. If all you do is provide generic information at this point, then your proposal is less likely to stand out.
Some potential clients, of course, may pick your brain and then implement your solutions themselves. Whilst this can happen, it's unlikely. The client already knows they want SEO by the time they're at the proposal stage, and if they could have done this work themselves, they probably would have done so already.
Secondly, you can outline solutions that involve time cost to achieve. Imply that this work must be undertaken by someone who knows what they are doing. Outline the risks of not doing this work properly. The more real work, and risk, there is invlolved in implementation, the less likely a client will be willing to go the do-it-yourself route.
As we all know, there is a lot of real work involved in SEO. Make sure the client is left in no doubt on that aspect.
It's Not About You
Focus on the clients needs.
Nothing loses a potential client faster than an SEO who talks entirely about themselves and their industry. Clients don't care. Clients care about their problems and their industry. In the summary pages, restate the clients problem and propose your specific solutions. Outline time frame and costs.
This exercise is useful for a number of reasons, the main one being that you, or the client, may not know what the actual problem is!
What a client says may not be what they mean. For example, the client may say they want SEO because they're heard that's a great way to get traffic quickly. They may not say it in these words, of course. They may say they want SEO, and they want it asap.
However, if the SEO has asked enough questions, aimed at identifying the problem, the SEO may unearth unstated problems. In this case, a client wants to increase traffic quickly. A solution to such a problem might be a combination of SEO and PCC. The PPC delivers immediate traffic while the SEO strategy might take some time.
Formulate questions aimed at identifying the clients actual, as opposed to stated, problem. They may be quite different. The result is that your solution will be a good fit, which will lead to less frustration, on both sides, further down the line.
You also might discover at this point that the clients expectations are ridiculous, and you'd be better off looking for a more reasonable client. For example, I was once pitching to a large advertising company. Their clients had been asking for SEO, so all they knew is they "needed some SEO".
Great.
Problem was, as I discovered in the meeting, was that they knew nothing about the need to alter sites or web publishing approach. They had told clients they could deliver SEO as a bolt-on-service, a wave of the magic wand that miraculously delivered rankings and free traffic for life to brochure sites.
I didn't go any further with them.
Offer Guarantees (Assurance)
Guarantees are a contentious issue in SEO circles.
Many SEOs - quite rightly - point out that no one can guarantee a ranking position, which is true, but such technical nuances may unsettle a client.
Clients tend to like assurance, and a guarantee can help provide this. So rather than dismissing guarantees, look at aspects you can guarantee.
A fiend of mine, in a different industry, offers a guarantee that goes along the lines of "if you don't feel satisfied after our strategy meetings with you, even after you sign the contract, you can walk away, no questions asked, and no charge.".
That sounds like something substantial, but actually he is just restating consumer law in the country where he lives. The law is that a service must be fit for the purpose the client intended, and if it isn't, the client has a case against the provider for non-suitability of service.
My friend realized he could never afford to contest such cases, and would likely lose, as the consumer law favored the buyer. All an aggrieved client really had to do to win such a case was say the service wasn't fit for their purposes.
He was dealing with firms with deep pockets, and legal action defending against such firms would come at high cost, even if he was in the right, so he decided to restate a consumer right the client actually already had, combined with an economic reality - his inability to engage in costly legal battles - into a form of a reassuring guarantee for sales purposes.
Case Studies Are Powerful
There is no sales tool quite so powerful as a good case study. A case study is a story. People love stories. A case study is also proof of your ability.
Outline the problem. Tell your audience what the problem looked like before you started - very useful if this problem is similar to the problem the prospective client also faces - what you did to solve the problem, and the positive results of your solution.
Stories are very powerful sales tools, and a case study is a great opportunity to tell a few.
Package It Up
Consider printing and binding your proposal, and delivering it.
We receive so many emails these days that they don't make us feel very special. It doesn't feel like there is much effort gone into them. A binded proposal, on the other hand, feels substantial.
In the interests of speed, you can still send an email copy, but try doing both and seeing if you land more deals.
Charging
Don't undercharge. You'll regret it :)
- Beating the Logic & Creativity Out of You
I remember in 2nd grade when our teacher was teaching us how to do math I raced ahead and was doing lessons for today, tomorrow, and next week. The teacher rewarded my efforts by yelling at me and ripping up the pages from the book and giving me a 0 on that homework.
In fourth grade we would play around the world with math flash cards where you raced to say the answers, and I would literally go all the way around the classroom without losing. I won so much that the other kids would boo when I won and cheer if I lost. In 5th grade I scored well on some state examination test that they had me take a college level entry exam. I beat most college-bound high school students in math before I entered junior high school.
Between 7th and 8th grade we moved.
Somehow in 8th grade they put me in slow learners math. Maybe they were trying to balance the number of students in each class? While in slow learners math the teacher handed out these obscure word problem tests a few times a month. Every time we did them I would either tie with the winner or beat all the kids who were taking algebra.
There were other topics where I sucked. Anything to do with spelling fail. Writing? Not so good. Foreign language? No conozco! Typing - absolutely brutal.
All these years later I use the math and logic to make money writing words, and matching words up in patterns that algorithms like. But what more would I have done if I didn't waste 6 years of my life in the military? Maybe I wouldn't have fell into marketing, but it is almost impossible to do anything online and willfully remain ignorant to marketing. If you have any level of curiosity you will stumble into it (especially if you have any ambition and lack capital).
But education is to set up to beat the creativity out of you, punish outliers, and turn you into a debt slave consuming drone. You should respect authority, even if ill gained.
If students were any good at applying math & critical thinking to the real world there would be riots in the street.
Online critical thinking isn't typically appreciated either.
Social media makes one-liners great, so plan on including a few of them, and plan on some of your words being taken out of context and used against you.
Any form of criticism is defined as being linkbait or an attempt at capturing attention. As the web continues to saturate and it becomes more like the real world it will only get more absurd.
We are no longer in an “Information Age.” We are in the Age of Noise. Falsehoods, half-truths, talking points, out-of-context video edits, plagiarism, rewriting of history (U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, for example), flip-flops, ignoring facts (Cheney and torture for example), neatly packaged code words and phrases, media ratings focus, dysfunctional government (fillibusters have more than doubled, but most don’t realize Republicans are blocking everything), mainstreaming fringe causes….I could go on and on.
Is it any wonder why so many who are struggling with kids, jobs, rising medical costs, etcetera have such a tough time wading through all the crap?
There is only so much attention to go around. Anything you don't know = grab the ugliest segment of the market + embellish it & state that is what the entire market is. Easy. Anyone who is an SEO is a spammer who illegally hacks websites trying to sell overseas pharmacy drugs and rank for misspellings of birtney spaers. All domainers are cybersquatters & brand hijackers. Affiliates only push scams that use reverse billing fraud.
But when you go back to the math and think about it, the bottom 80% or 90% of ANY market usually isn't very exciting (or profitable, especially if you are a cog). It has been commoditized and doesn't reward creativity. It is doing the things at the fringe - the 1% where you have an artistic flair of brilliance which is seen by some as wizardry that produces profound results. It often backfires, at least off the start:
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. -
Arthur Schopenhauer
You get beat up for a while and the market tests you (sometimes for years), but eventually it takes notice:
Through this experience, I learned an important lesson: When in doubt, make your product more compelling. All of Fog Creek's affiliate marketing ideas, coupons, discounts, direct-mail pieces, catalog ads, and everything else we spent time on -- none of this was as good a use of our time as simply doing what we loved best anyway: creating useful software.
- Spam Free Search?
Just for fun. But if things get much worse it might be good for utility as well ;)
- 3 Steps for Optimizing Content for Long Tail Keywords
The following is a guest post from Tom Demers.
One of the most pivotal aspects of driving large volumes of search traffic in most verticals is effectively targeting long tail keywords. While ranking for competitive phrases and developing link authority are certainly crucial aspects of SEO, much of ranking on long tail keywords is properly targeting and optimizing for them. A while ago Aaron made the following image as a conceptual example of how the relevancy algorithms may differ for different types of keywords:
This article will outline a three step process for targeting long tail keywords.
Step 1: Build a Basket
The first (and possibly most important) consideration is determining which keywords to target. For this I think a three-step process is best:
Traditional Keyword Research
It’s always a good idea to do some idea generation and to get a feel for the possible variations of your specific targeted keyword by utilizing a keyword research tool. For the sake of the article, we’ll assume that we’ve selected our “head” or core keyword target, and that we’re attempting to rank an article for the key phrase and related key phrases. Three tools that I find particularly useful for this purpose are Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool, the SEO Book Keyword Tool, and my company’s Free Keyword Tool.
Using Your Own Analytics
Really the best source of keyword data for determining the long tail keywords you can target is your own data. This is powerful because it shows you a variety of keyword combinations, the data is proprietary (your competitors didn’t pull the list from the same keyword tool you used, so they won’t be targeting the same keywords), and you have actual data both that you can rank for a given keyword, and you have an indication of how that keyword performs on your site. In Google Analytics, there a couple of reports you can pull to get this information (most analytics packages will provide you with similar capabilities). Drill down to traffic sources > keywords > non-paid:
Then you can create a filter for the head term. For the sake of this example we’ll say we’re targeting the phrase “long tail” and variations:
By creating the filter, we can see a variety of modifiers that the page and/or other content on our site are already driving. And, if we are in fact attempting to optimize an existing page for multiple keywords, we can utilize a content report to see what that page is already driving traffic for:
You can then see all of the queries driving traffic to that page. By analyzing the traffic and conversion statistics for that page, you can then start to feature more effective variations more prominently. The beauty of analyzing your own data lies in the fact that you can de-emphasize variations that don’t convert for your site.
Continually Iterate on Both Keyword Research and Keyword Analysis
Periodically, it’s a good idea to return to traditional keyword research, and to dig back into your analytics. This is particularly true if a concept or product is seasonal, but regardless the queries driving traffic to your site are bound to shift, and analyzing both the segment of keywords you’re targeting and the actual traffic to a given page can help to drive a tremendous amount of additional traffic to an individual page.
Step Two: Put It On The Page
Unless you coordinate an army of writers or build a venture-backed model around creating a piece of content for every phrase imaginable, you can’t create a piece of content for every phrase you want to rank for. As such you’ll have to effectively target long tail keywords by including the multiple phrases in your keyword bucket throughout the page:
- Varying the Title Tag and Header - In varying title tags and headers for SEO you are ensuring that your pages aren’t over-optimized and they include relevant long tail keywords you’ll want to target (rather than redundantly featuring the same keyword twice).
- Place Variations and Modifiers in Your Content - By researching the variations of a keyword you might want to include in your content, you can be aware of them as you craft content, and you can strategically place modifiers throughout your page’s content. For instance, it might not be natural for you write out the phrase “affiliate long tail keywords for promoting products” but if you know this is a phrase that drives some traffic, you can be sure to include phrases like “whether you are a retailer or an affiliate promoting products”. You’ll be using phrases like long tail keywords frequently enough that if the longer phrase is lower competition, you might not even need to include the exact phrase to rank for it. Note below that none of the ranking pages use the exact phrase “affiliate long tail keywords for promoting products”:
- Pay Attention to All of Your On-Page Elements - Be sure to work into your page’s headlines, bolded copy, alt attributes, title attributes, etc. the variations you’re targeting. By mixing up the words and phrases you use in these elements, you’re also ensuring your page isn’t over-optimized
Step Three: Building Links For Your Keyword Basket
Finally, even though many of your long tail keyword variations will rank on their own, you’ll want to develop some links with specific anchor text to these pages. You can do this in a few different ways:
- Vary Your Internal Links to a Page– Again, this allows you to avoid being “over-optimized,” and if you stick primarily to variations that contain the head keyword within the variation and append modifiers, rather than synonyms, you’re consistently transferring relevance for your core term.
- Use an Important Modifier in Your Headline – While your title tag is what’s seen by searchers, many people linking to your article will use your headline as anchor text. Using a variation here helps attract links for important modifiers
- External Links You Control- Things like company listings, directory listings, and nepotistic links often offer you the opportunity to control your own anchor text: while many times just leveraging internal links on an authoritative site is enough to rank, sometimes utilizing article submission Websites or other low-quality external linking sources with keyword-rich anchor text can help you to rank for mid to low-competition keywords.
Ultimately the best way to rank for long tail keywords is to build an authoritative Website and seed it with a lot of content, but on a page-by-page basis you can often leverage strategic keyword targeting and your own analytic data to help drive exponentially more traffic than you would focusing solely on the “head” keyword.
Tom Demers is the Director of Marketing with WordStream, a software company specializing in pay-per click software and keyword research and organization solutions for SEO. Tom is a frequent contributor at the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog.
- Which Multivariate Testing Software is Best?
My buddies from Conversion Rate Experts have put together a review site for multivariate software called Which Multivariate. Surprisingly old school in the modern affiliate link filled web, they have made the site vendor neutral and are not planning on ever taking affiliate commissions in an attempt to gather honest reviews. Check it out. Its worth a look!
- Spam vs Mahalo: Matt Cutts Explains the Difference
When the internal Google remote quality rater guidelines leaked online there was a core quote inside it that defined the essence of spam:
Final Notes on Spam
When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam.
With the above quote in mind please review the typical Mahalo page
Adding a bit more context, the following 25 minute video from 2008 starts off with Matt Cutts talking about how he penalized a website for using deceptive marketing. Later into the video (~ 21 minutes in) the topic of search results within search results and then Mahalo come up.
Here is a transcription of relevant bits...
Matt Cutts: Would a user be annoyed if they land on this page, right. Because if users get annoyed, if users complain, then that is when we start to take action.
And so it is definitely the case where we have seen search results where a search engine didn't robots.txt something out, or somebody takes a cookie cutter affiliate feed, they just warm it up and slap it out, there is no value add, there is no original content there and they say search results or some comparison shopping sites don't put a lot of work into making it a useful site. They don't add value.
Though we mainly wanted to get on record and say that hey we are willing to take these out, because we try to document everything as much as we can, because if we came and said oh removed some stuff but it wasn't in our guidelines to do that then that would be sub-optimal.
So there are 2 parts to Google's guidelines. There are technical guidelines and quality guidelines. The quality guidelines are things where if you put hidden text we'll consider that spam and we can remove your page. The technical guidelines are more like just suggestions.
...
So we said don't have search results in search results. And if we find those then we may end up pruning those out.
We just want to make sure that searchers get good search results and that they don't just say oh well I clicked on this and I am supposed to find the answer, and now I have to click somewhere else and I am lost, and I didn't find what I wanted. Now I am angry and I am going to complain to Google.
Danny Sulivan: "Mahalo is nothing but search results. I mean that is explicitly what he says he is doing. I will let you qualify it, but if you ask him what it is still to this day he will say its a search engine. And then all the SEOs go 'well if it is a search engine, shouldn't you be blocking all your search results from Google' and his response is 'yeah well IF we ever see them do anything then we might do it'."
Matt Cutts: It's kinda interesting because I think Jason...he is a smart guy. He's a savvy guy, and he threaded the needle where whenever he talked to some people he called it a search service or search engine, and whenever he talked to other people he would say oh it is more of a content play.
And in my opinion, I talked to him, and so I said what software do you use to power your search engine? And he said we use Twika or MediaWiki. You know, wiki software, not C++ not Perl not Python. And at that point it really does move more into a content play. And so it is closer to an About.com than to a Powerset or a Microsoft or Yahoo! Search.
And if you think about it he has even moved more recently to say 'you know, you need to have this much content on the page.' So I think various people have stated how skilled he is at baiting people, but I don't think anybody is going to make a strong claim that it is pure search or that even he seems to be moving away from ok we are nothing but a search engine and moving more toward we have got a lot of people who are paid editors to add a lot of value.
One quick thing to note about the above video was how the site mentioned off the start got penalized for lying for links, and yet Jason Calacanis apologized for getting a reporter fired after lying about having early access to the iPad. Further notice how Matt considered that the first person was lying and deserved to be penalized for it, whereas when he spoke of Jason he used the words savvy, smart, and the line threaded the needle. To the layperson, what is the difference between being a savvy person threading the needle and a habitual liar?
Further lets look at some other surrounding facts in 2010, shall we?
- How does Jason stating "Mahalo sold $250k+ in Amazon product in 2009 without trying" square with Matt Cutts saying "somebody takes a cookie cutter affiliate feed, they just warm it up and slap it out, there is no value add, there is no original content there" ... Does the phrase without trying sound like value add to you? Doesn't to me.
- Matt stated that they do not want searchers to think "oh well I clicked on this and I am supposed to find the answer, and now I have to click somewhere else and I am lost" ... well how does Mahalo intentionally indexing hundreds of thousands of 100% auto-generated pages which simply recycle search results and heavily wrap them in ads square with that? sounds like deceptive & confusing arbitrage to me.
- Matt stated "and if you think about it he has even moved more recently to say 'you know, you need to have this much content on the page,'" but in reality, that was a response to when I highlighted how Mahalo was scraping content. Jason dismissed the incident as an "experimental" page that they would nofollow. Years later, of course, it turned out he was (once again) lying and still doing the same thing, only with far greater scale. Jason once again made Matt Cutts look bad for trusting him.
- Matt stated "I don't think anybody is going to make a strong claim that it is pure search" ... and no, its not pure search. If anything it is IMPURE search, where they use 3rd party content *without permission* and put most of it below the fold, while the Google AdSense ads are displayed front and center.
- If you want to opt out of Mahalo scraping your content you can't because he scrapes it from 3rd party sites and provides NO WAY for you to opt out of him displaying scraped content from your site as content on his page).
- Jason offers an "embed this" option for their content, so you can embed their "content" on your site. But if you use that code the content is in an iframe so it doesn't harm them on the duplicate content front AND the code gives Jason multiple direct clean backlinks. Whereas when Jason automatically embeds millions of scraped listings of your content he puts it right in the page as content on his page AND slaps nofollow on the link. If you use his content he gets credit...when he uses your content you get a lump of coal. NICE!
- And, if you were giving Jason the benefit of the doubt, and thought the above was accidental, check out how when he scrapes the content in that all external links have a nofollow added, but any internal link *does not*
- Matt stated "[Jason is] moving more toward we have got a lot of people who are paid editors to add a lot of value" ... and, in reality, Jason used the recession as an excuse to can the in house editorial team and outsource that to freelancers (which are paid FAR LESS than the amounts he hypes publicly). Given that many of the pages that have original content on them only have 2 sentences surrounded by large swaths of scraped content, I am not sure there is an attempt to "add a lot of value." Do you find this page on Shake and Bake meth to be a high quality editorial page?
- What is EVEN MORE OUTRAGEOUS when they claim to have some editorial control over the content is that not only do they wrap outbound links which they are scraping content from in nofollow, but they publish articles on topics like 13 YEAR OLD RAPE. Either they have no editorial, or some of the editorial is done by pedophiles.
- Worse yet, such pages are not a rare isolated incident. Michael VanDeMar found out that Mahalo is submitting daily lists of thousands of those auto-generated articles to Google via an XML sitemap...so when Jason claims the indexing was an accident, you know he lied once again!
Here Jason is creating a new auto-generated page about me! And if I want to opt out of being scraped I CAN'T. What other source automatically scrapes content, republishes it wrapped in ads and calls it fair use, and then does not allow you to opt out? What is worse in the below example, is that on that page Jason stole the meta description from my site and used it as his page's meta description (without my permission, and without a way for me to opt out of it).
So basically Matt...until you do something, Jason is going to keep spamming the crap out of Google. Each day you ignore him another entreprenuer will follow suit trying to build another company that scrapes off the backs of original content creators. Should Google be paying people to *borrow* 3rd party content without permission (and with no option of opting out)?
I think Jason has pressed his luck and made Matt look naive and stupid. Matt Cutts has got to be pissed. But unfortunately for Matt, Mahalo is too powerful for him to do anything about it. In that spirit, David Naylor recently linked to this page on Twitter.
What is the moral of the story for Jason Calacanas & other SEOs?
- If you are going to create a thin spam site you need to claim to be anti-spam to legitimize it. Never claim to be an SEO publicly, even if you are trying to sell corporate SEO services.
- If you have venture capital and have media access and lie to the media for years it is fine. If you are branded as an SEO and you are caught lying once then no soup for you.
- If you are going to steal third party content and use it as content on your site and try to claim it is fair use make sure you provide a way of opting out (doing otherwise is at best classless, but likely illegal as well).
- If you have venture capital and are good at public relations then Google's quality guidelines simply do not apply to you. Follow Jason's lead as long as Google permits mass autogenerated spam wrapped in AdSense to rank well in their search results.
- The Google Webmaster Guidelines are an arbitrary device used to oppress the small and weak, but do not apply to large Google ad partners.
- Don't waste any of your time reporting search spam or link buying. The above FLAGRANT massive violation of Google's guidelines was reported on SearchEngineLand, and yet the issue continues without remedy - showing what a waste of time it is to highlight such issues to Google.
- Funny Dilbert SEO Comic Strip Cartoon by Scott Adams
And all this, only to find out there was a missing ingredient the whole time ;)
Of course, if Dilbert had a text version of the cartoon and perhaps a more relevant alt tag in his embed code that would help too. Just saying ;)
- Killer Google AdWords Guide for Affiliates
My wife used to tell me that I would give too much away...and then she pens something like this AdWords affiliate guide. It doesn't seem fair ;)
- Comparing SEO Business Models
One of the great things about SEO is that it allows you to see many lenses on business that you can't normally see with most other professions (outside of perhaps something in high finance or management consulting anyhow). One day you are building a bootstrapped business from scratch wondering when it will make its first Dollar, and the next day your on the phone with McKinsey consultants or an executive from a fortune 500 company talking strategy.
Zeta Interactive's Hugo Guzman is one of the the folks in the SEO industry who has a broad experience set which perhaps eclipses my own, as he has done virtually everything. And so I recently interviewed him...
You run some of your own sites, have done some private SEO consulting, I believe you may have done some in house SEO for a while, and are now deep into the bowels of the SEO agency world. What are the best and worst parts of each role?
Great question! Here’s my take based on personal experience in each role.
Running your own site(s)
Best Thing: That feeling of unbridled entrepreneurism. I’ve always felt that website building is sort of like the new real estate development, only anybody can do it and it costs less than $100 to get started (if you know what you’re doing). The other great thing about running your own site(s) is the ability to cut out on time wasting and bureaucracy. There’s no need for filling out corporate approval paperwork or sitting through useless meetings or conference calls, so you can focus in on building content, building links, building databases, and building relationships.
Worst Thing: The cold hard reality of monetization. There used to be a day when paid links could easily bankroll early development until you got other revenue streams to a point of sustainability, but that well has dried up to a certain extent. Affiliate revenue and Adsense are both viable but take time to develop, especially if SEO is the main source of traffic, so like you, I believe that the best option is to cut out the middle man and develop a product/service of your own that fills a specific niche need at a fair price. I think that the emergence of FourSquare and Twitter localization suggests a strong opportunity for hyper-niche, location-based website development. You don’t have to be the best in the world at a specific thing in order to be successful. Just be the best in your locale or region.
SEO consulting
Best Thing: Being able to do SEO “The Right Way” (or at least “your own way”). It feels good to execute an SEO program that way you see fit, especially when it works! It makes for a very rewarding experience. It’s fun to build out the list of deliverables, the timeline for implementation, and the success metrics and KPIs that will be the foundation of your client programs.
Worst Thing: Dealing with the sales grind, chasing after clients that don’t pay on time (or at all) not getting the hourly bill rate you know you deserve, etc…basically all the business stuff that has little or nothing to do with pure SEO. Unfortunately, many of the SEOs that go this route get caught up in the grind by failing or refusing to fire bad clients, so that they can focus on building revenue by offering more granular or expanded services for their good clients.
In-house SEO
Best Thing: Being embedded in so many different aspects of a business and learning about marketing and biz dev elements outside the pure SEO realm. I spent several years working with CBS Interactive and I learned a ton about so many things and worked with some really intelligent people.
For example, I learned how C-level executives frame marketing channels like SEO. The main success metric that I was measured on was percentage of overall referring traffic (well under 10% when I first started). Even though I was able to exponentially grow natural search referrals, especially for key niches like fantasy football and March Madness – both of which are huge moneymakers for CBS – the cumulative effect on overall traffic was minimal (never reached 20%). The reason was simple; CBS owns their major television network as well as a myriad of local television affiliates, radio stations, billboards, email addresses, etc, which literally drove millions and millions of unique referrals.
This introduction to mass media metrics helped me gain perspective on the role SEO plays within the larger scheme of things (brand building and management, push/interruption marketing, email marketing, etc). And it was this perspective that would help me connect with marketing executives when I made the move to agency SEO, because I finally understood that while SEO is arguably the most cost-effective marketing channel, it was only one piece of a much larger puzzle.
Worst Thing: It’s hard to move up the corporate ladder and earn big dollars. Because SEO is typically straddled between marketing and IT, it’s tough to move up into upper-management positions. Some companies (like the Tribune Company) are starting to wake up, but for the most part, it’s still tough to move on up.
SEO Agency
Best Thing: It’s sort of like the Peace Corps in that it’s the hardest job you’ll ever love. Granted, you’re not really helping the world be a better place (just helping companies become more profitable) but getting to work with so many different verticals, marketing philosophies, business executives, and web environments is incredibly rewarding. Agency SEO (if you work at a good agency) will undoubtedly make you a better SEO, and a better business person in general.
Interestingly enough, it’s the seemingly unconquerable workload that proves to be the catalyst for professional growth. Dealing with multiple clients, each of which has impossible deadlines and unrealistic ROI expectations, forces you to prioritize your efforts and focus on the strategies and tactics that will deliver the most bang for their marketing buck. SEO’s that fail to grasp this are quickly burned out and leave the agency life (and usually return after a year or two after realizing that they can’t make much money in-house). SEO’s that “get it” quickly make an impact for clients – and the agency’s bottom line – catapulting them into management and executive roles.
Worst Thing: It’s sort of like the Post Office. The work just keeps coming and coming. It’s extremely stressful, demanding, and demoralizing at times. But hey, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger right?
From which of the 4 roles do you see the greatest profit potential?
That’s a tough one. In-house probably has the least profit potential, followed by agency work. Although it’s worth pointing out that some of the better agencies out there take extraordinary steps to keep talented individuals happy and give them a true stake in the company’s success. My agency definitely falls in that category.
Consulting has very solid profit potential but building your own site(s) is definitely king in my book because if you pick the right niche and truly devote yourself on all levels the potential is limitless.
You (Aaron Wall) write about this topic quite a bit, but it’s important to re-emphasize. If an enterprising SEO is looking to start their own site(s) the first thing to take into consideration is the level of passion they have for the topic/theme that the site(s) will encompass, because if the passion isn’t there, it’s unlikely that said SEO will have the motivation to work through the inevitable plateaus that await his/her new business. Also, as most of us know, building the right kind of content is what often leads to the inbound links that will serve as the foundation of a solid search presence, and that’s much easier to do when you truly love the topic/theme you’re dealing with.
When you guys take on new clients are you knee deep in the SEO projects? Or do you focus more on training your team?
Truthfully, I’m no longer involved in day-to-day management of SEO projects. I do touch almost every single account, but usually it’s as an advisor to the SEO specialist that’s assigned to the account or because the client needs to tap into my historical knowledge of the account (I’ve been working with some of our clients for several years now and know more about their history than some of their employees). Basically, I keep tabs on each account and come in to deal with really tough and/or complex scenarios that junior team members have never encountered. That said, I do spend a considerable amount of time testing specific hypotheses, either on client sites or on test sites that are owned and managed by my agency.
One of the most memorable tests we performed was for a major insurance and financial services brand (one of the biggest in the world) that was having a ton of trouble getting their agent profile pages indexed (they had thousands of them). They were convinced that simply adding these pages to their XML sitemap would do the trick, despite the fact that Google explicitly states that submitting an XML sitemap does not replace override their normal indexing and ranking methodology. In order to convince them to take an alternate route (focusing on internal linkage that helped eliminate orphaned agent pages) we simply tested their hypothesis by taking a baseline measurement on the number of indexed agent pages, then adding all of the agent pages to their XML sitemap en masse and then measuring the impact on indexing for those pages (the impact was nil). We then convinced them to implement our recommendations and subsequently measured their impact on indexing of agent pages (over 80% of those pages were subsequently indexed). The result? An interesting conclusion that helps guide our recommendations for other clients as well as an incredibly happy Insurance brand that has now been with us for going on three years!
As for the rest of my time, it is spent training our team of specialists (and the sales folks and the account management folks) supporting sales across the US, leading sales efforts in the Southeastern United States, and working with our product development team to build tools that help facilitate SEO. Oh and I try to help promote the agency when I find some spare time ; )
It wasn’t always like that by the way. I started my agency life as a specialist and have gradually moved up the ladder.
Many of the bigger agency-styled companies sell watered down services of limited value. For example keyword ranking / websourced / marketsmart interactive went from the largest SEO company to closed almost overnight. How do you scale SEO within an agency while preventing the watering down effect that is common at most?
This is an extremely tough problem to overcome, but one of the things that we’ve focused on is product development that helps automate certain facets of the SEO process, so that our specialists can spend their time being truly strategic.
For example, back in 2008, I figured out that our specialists (including myself) were spending an inordinate amount of time formatting and filling out the Excel templates that are used to deliver page-level code recommendations to clients (more or less a staple of agency life). This included copying and pasting the existing code side-by-side with our recommended code, so that the client’s IT/dev folks could use it as a point of reference when implementing. This was essentially data entry work that was extremely tedious and took up a tremendous amount of time.
Working with our tremendous product development and digital services team based in Hyderabad, India, we were able to develop a web application that automatically scraped the designated code for a particular client web page and populated in the correct fields within our Excel template. Now, all our specialists have to do is fill in the recommendations in the appropriate fields, cutting delivery time in half. It’s tremendous productivity booster and also a tremendous morale booster for our specialists.
If you’re on the client side and are interviewing perspective SEO providers, make sure that they have some sort of technology platform in place that will help automate or at least facilitate some of the non-strategic facets. Otherwise, you’re going to spend a ton of money on what essentially amounts to data entry.
From a consumer perspective, a lot of the agencies are long on sales but short on results. What are some of the key signals consumers should pick up on when determining if an agency is the real deal or one that is selling watered down water?
That’s easy.
Ask them if they can help with direct implementation via CMS and/or hard coding. Ask them to go into excruciating detail in terms of how they handle link building (most agencies claim they do link-building, but it usually just boils down to directory submissions and paid links). Ask them to explain how content influences link-building and social media efforts. Ask them to go into excruciating detail in terms of how social media and SEO dovetail. Ask them to go into excruciating detail in terms of how they leverage analytics as it pertains to SEO. Ask them if they’re accustomed to working with senior (even C-level) executives to facilitate approval and implementation of recommendations.
If they’re worth their weight, they’ll jump at the chance to give deep answers to each and every one of these questions.
As an ad agency you guys are also involved in other marketing elements from companies. Does search ever become a key consideration when it comes to product naming, product positioning, and other advertising formats? If yes, could you share some examples?
My agency was arguably the first to truly embrace the cross-channel interactive agency model, so we definitely work with clients across a variety of marketing channels, and as a matter of fact, we offer a variety of services beyond search (we just made the Forrester Wave for email service providers).
I can’t get into specific clients and URLs due to confidentiality agreements, but I would say that well over 50% of the clients we work with take search into consideration when naming products, positioning products, and even picking vanity domains. I would say that about 25% of our clients make search their top priority when considering these types of things. Those are our favorites, because they really “get it” and work SEO into everything they do.
One example that I can give you (without revealing specific client names) is the purchasing of vanity domains to drive SEO for specific product/service offerings. I’ve seen companies drop anywhere from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands in order to secure domains that have large, authoritative link profiles and already rank for high volume keywords. In fact, I recently did some consulting on behalf of one of the largest VC firms in the world, helping one of their clients (we’ll call them “Company A”) essentially put a price tag on a the value of a domain that was owned by a smaller firm that “Company A” was looking to acquire. I actually think that this type of work could become a nice hyper niche for me in the future (until Google and others finally accomplish their goal of eliminating domains from the search equation…but that’s a story for another day).
What strategies do you use to help clients provide adequate resources for a large or complex SEO assignment when the results might take many months to materialize?
We’ve gone as far as to help clients screen potential hires or contractors in order to help them staff up for large initiatives. In addition, we’ve embedded our employees at a client’s office for large stretches of time in what you could call a “dedicated resource” type of arrangement. Lastly, we’ve helped coordinate cross-division committees and/or multi-agency collaboration in order to help get large initiatives off the ground.
Basically, I’ve always preached to the team that they have to do anything and everything to make things happen. Often times, it’s this extra effort that ends up become the primary measure of success in the client’s eyes, especially if there are some solid metrics to go along with it.
What success metrics are used along the way to help clients appreciate the returns on the SEO efforts?
I find that year-over-year trending is extremely valuable because it takes seasonality into account, and we’ll deliver that type of trending both at the aggregate level and focused on specific “big money” keywords. Incidentally, our agency doesn’t shy away from extremely competitive keywords. We go after everything that fits the client’s vertical but just make sure to set expectations early on. Clients deserve to rank for the biggest money terms, but they also need to understand that in certain cases it could take years to achieve above-the-fold placement.
Also, I believe that it’s critical to drill down and measure non-branded keywords as opposed to just looking at raw aggregate referral data, especially when you’re working with big brands that drive mammoth amounts of brand queries. If you don’t strip out the branded search referrals, then you’re not really measuring SEO (99% of the time, branded keywords have and always will rank No. 1 so the traffic they drive are a function of brand awareness, not search engine optimization).
Google is known for letting bigger brands get away with being a bit spammy. Do you ever suggest to clients that they have the opportunity to push the window?
The short answer is “Yes”.
We conform to “White Hat” SEO (whatever that means) but we also believe that it’s our job to educate clients on techniques that may or may be deemed as “spammy” by search engines like Google. They deserve to understand the entire SEO landscape, not just the vision created by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Also, for clients that are already relatively SEO savvy and were already dabbling in techniques deemed unsavory by Google, we will gladly provide a third-party opinion and consulting on those activities. We believe that they deserve that level of service for the premium they’re paying.
Within a company internal politics often end up kicking SEO into the back seat. When doing agency work, who are the key individuals from within the companies you service that you consider it a must to loop in on the project?
Start with the CEO (seriously). And by the way, this also applies to social media initiatives.
The goal is to find a way to move the needle for a client, even if we are faced with a tough situation in terms of marketing approval, legal approval, or IT implementation (this is more or less par for the course in verticals like Pharma and Financial Services). If we can move that needle, then we’ll immediately push to get in front of upper-level executives, so that we can help them understand what we’re trying to accomplish in the long term (and that we won’t accomplish it at the expense of their brand affinity or legal standing).
If you’re not getting face time with a senior director, VP, or C-level executive, then you’re probably not doing a very good job.
Hugo Guzman is the Vice President of SEO & Social Media at Zeta Interactive. He can be reached via email at hguzman@zetainteractive.com or via Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/hugoguzman.
- Grading Google's Marketing Practices Based On Google's Standards?
The following is a guest post by Slaven Radic.
The Google Buzz team has had quite a week. Their new product quickly lived up to its name, though mostly for the wrong reasons, generating buzz about its own privacy issues. Calling the original Google Buzz privacy settings lax would be a gross understatement. It created a storm of complaints, best put in perspective by Harriet Jacobs in her F*ck You, Google piece.
In short, when you logged into your Gmail account Google simply took all of your frequent contacts and mashed them up into an active social network without much input from people they were connecting. If you exchanged a lot of emails with your editor and your under-cover sources from the same Gmail account, now they were connected through your public profile if you didn't happen to catch the Buzz opt-out checkbox. Or what about using the same Gmail account for emailing your husband and your boyfriend? Well now they're introduced - you're welcome.
Yes, sounds like a pretty naïve and reckless way to implement a major feature but Google protested that they just wanted to help and meant no evil. After all, their CEO Eric Schmidt had an interesting take on expectations for privacy online: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place". That was said nary two months before Google Buzz launched - I guess people like Harriet Jacobs and her abusive ex-husband just didn't listen.
Oops, Our Bad: Thanks For All the Users...
Since the launch, Google has done an amazingly quick about-face and pledged to do better. The latest set of changes make signing up for Buzz a tangibly more transparent experience, probably what it should have been at launch time. The press has mostly applauded their quick response and patted Google on the back for their responsiveness and keen focus on Gmail user experience.
But let's see what Google's naiveté about privacy issues meant for Google Buzz:
- 9 million posts and comments
- 300,000 mobile check-ins per day
- Buzz already rivals Twitter for sheer network size
Those are some pretty impressive numbers for any online launch, but to achieve this in under three days is just unheard of. Actually, there are businesses that do generate this level of interests from their prospects in that short of a time-frame and Gmail deals with them on a daily basis: spammers.
The '9 Million-Post' Question
The question is did Google simply make a "mistake" and not consider these fairly serious privacy issues, or did the massive amount of spam Gmail churns through each day actually demonstrate effectiveness of a new business model?
The former is hard to believe when you consider the army of privacy lawyers Google has and their job to review privacy considerations in revenue-generating AdSense programs. This is especially critical in Gmail, where you are shown ads based on emails you exchange. Gmail achieves this by reading through all your email and matching you up with advertisers interested in addressing your daily struggles. After the initial outrage over this concept a few years ago most users have resigned to trust Google that they have their best interests in mind.
Your Trust, Google's Toilet Paper
Google Buzz violates this trust in a serious way. In light of Google's experience in this field, it is hard not to take Google's mea culpa with a huge dose of skepticism. After all, if Google had made Buzz an opt-in service - something that users had to enable rather than be tricked into joining - they would be just another social network trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter.
Leveraging millions of Gmail users was a shortcut simply too tempting to avoid. The fact that Google decided to revise Google Buzz activation process over the weekend is simply a red herring: they only needed a few days to convert some of the hundred million plus Gmail users into millions of Buzz users, and become the de-facto Twitter competitor over a single long weekend.
Google "fixing" this privacy snafu a few days later is equivalent to spammers adding an "Unsubscribe" link to an email that's already done its damage.
The strong impression from the last few days is that Gmail users were a pawn in a very cynical game: Google trying desperately to become a player in the social networking space, after the Orkut launch and their acquisition of a handful of other companies in this space failed to produce results.
We're Not Evil
This is a tough act to pull off when your motto is Don't Be Evil. It's been said that eventually Google's shareholders will push it to make product moves and decisions that end up hurting its brand in a quest for monetization. It will be interesting to see if Google comes out of this with their motto intact.
- How To Start A Web Business And Survive
An SEOBook reader, Josephbm91, outlined a problem many of us have faced: when you're starting out, it's easy for clients to walk all over you.
So let's take a look at strategies for those starting out, be it in SEO, web design, or other small, web-based businesses. Those of you who have established web businesses, it would be great if you could share your experiences and strategies in the comments :)
Making The Start
How do you make the start? You've got a computer, an internet connection, and a few ideas. How do you get from that point to a thriving business, when you have no customer base, no money and no experience?
Yeah, it's hard.
But you'll literally work through it :)
Society Is Testing You To See If You're Serious
Ask anyone in business, sports, music or any other competitive human endeavor how they got recognized in their given field. They'll most likely tell you it didn't happen overnight. Whilst talent, luck and having the right connections play a part, the one trait common to those who succeed is persistent hard work.
In Outliers, a book about how people achieve extraordinary things, Malcolm Gladwell found that to achieve mastery in anything - be it golf, webdesign, programming, music, fashion - takes roughly the same amount of time: 10,000 hours.
Thankfully, we don't need to be masters at running a small business before we start one, else no one would ever do so. But the underlying idea is sound - persistent hard work is the key to success.
Being persistent sends a message to those around you, including potential customers, that you're serious about what your doing. If they see you often enough, doing the thing you say you do, then you'll eventually be recognized for it.
So if you feel you need to prove yourself, you're right. Society actually demands you do.
What Is Worth Getting Serious About?
Many people start businesses because they enjoying doing something. Someone who plays sport may have the desire to be paid a good living wage for playing the game she loves. Someone is good at art, so he wants to be a designer.
Whilst there is nothing wrong with this approach - having a genuine passion for something will help you get through the rough times - I'm sure you can spot the potential problem. There might be a LOT of people who have a passion for the same thing. The more people who want to do something, the more effort you need to put in in order to stand out.
In terms of sport, it's relatively straighforward. The sprinter with the fastest times gets recognized and progresses. Those sprinters with slower times either get better, or go find something else to do. In business, its a little more complicated, but the principle remains the same.
You need to stand out.
Supply And Demand
Think carefully about supply and demand. Ask yourself: is there sufficient demand for what I want to do?
Let's say you want to do web design. Is there demand? Why, yes, the demand for web design services is almost infinite. New companies start every minute, and most of them will need a web presence. Established companies who already have a web presence change their design from time to time, thus creating even more demand.
All good.
Now let's look at the supply side.
How many people want to be web designers. The answer is: quite a few. In fact, it would appear that web design demand is more than met by the supply of web designers. What happens in such situations is there is a downward pressure on prices, because those who create demand have a lot of supply to choose from.
The world is oversupplied with web designers. At least, it's oversupplied by people who call themselves web designers. There's a difference, of course, between someone who owns the tools of production and those who use those tools well to solve business problems. Owning a camera does not make someone a commercial photographer. Likewise, those with the most artistic design skills may make lousy web designers if they aren't focused on business aspects.
Recognizing the reality of the situation might may you reconsider your choice of career, and opt for an area where there is heavy demand and short supply instead.
Another way to face this problem is to differentiate. Can you do something better than other designers? You may be highly skilled in contemporary graphic design, in which case you may choose to place strong emphasis on displaying your portfolio, and target the type of clients who appreciate - and will pay for - this expertise.
You may have, or can acquire, detailed market knowledge in one particular niche - i.e. travel sites, real estate sites, etc. Clients, generally speaking, are a lot more comfortable with providers who understand their area of business. You have an advantage if you can speak their language, rather than just the self-absorbed language of design forums.
Can you focus on a geographic area? i.e. the immediate area where you live. Sometimes, people want to deal with someone local.
What is the thing you can do for which there is a market? If there are too many competitors in that market, then slice that market up until you can find a niche. Aim to be top of that niche. Then put in persistent effort working that niche in order to build reputation.
Chris Pearson gave away a number of popular free Wordpress themes on his site, created designs for popular sites (including Copyblogger & SEO Book), and then created the Thesis theme for web developers, which has since done 7 figures in sales volume. Yes Wordpress themes have become commoditized, but due to his strong marketing and continual increase in product value he was able to differentiate & build a solid business model. In his own words on starting out, Chris wrote:
Before I launched Thesis, I created a few free WordPress themes that became extremely popular. Although these themes defined the early stages of my career, they are really nothing more than visible markers of a learning process that continues today with Thesis.
Establishing Yourself
Once you've decided on an angle, you then need to establish yourself. Society wants to see how serious you are.
It is very difficult to market a business without some form of track record. But every business needs to start somewhere, and they don't start with a track record. So, the most important task for someone starting out - in any occupation - is to get one.
One way to get a track record is to treat your first few jobs as a marketing cost. This is the cost of establishing a reputation, and if you make any money at all from these first few jobs, it's a bonus. The aim is to get referrals and a portfolio of work.
Approach charities or small local business who need a web presence and offer your services for a deeply discounted rate, or for free. It's a win-win for both parties, because they may not be able to afford web design, and you need their testimonials and experience.
Be sure to make it clear that the job is being done at a discounted rate, and let them know what your usual rate it. This way, they'll perceive value, and won't be in for a shock when you ramp your prices up for any future work. Focus on building a positive relationship with these clients. If they are happy with your work, they may well refer you to others.
Once you have a track record, the risk to a future customer of hiring you is diminished. You become a known quantity, which puts you above the wanna-bes.
Is this working for free? Some might consider it that way, but it could also be seen as just another marketing expense, like advertising. Many businesses, including big, established businesses, give away products and services - in the form of loss leaders - in order to help get their foot in the door. People who train for careers pay to learn, whilst as a freelancer, you can potentially learn on the job for free. Clients can teach you a lot about your own business , especially where your strengths and weaknesses lie.
Pricing
It's important not to stay cheap or free, however.
Some think the easiest way to get business is to undercut competitors on price. This can be a self defeating strategy, especially for the sole operator, for a number of reasons:
You get cheap clients - people who seek the lowest price probably aren't placing much value on what you do. These type of clients, ironically, can also be the most demanding. They want the most for the least, and will often push you on the amount of work you deliver.
Someone else can always undercut you. There will always be a competitor who has a cost base lower than you do. From there, you're locked in a no-win race to the bottom.
If it looks cheap, it is cheap. It's human nature not to value something that is cheap, and place a lot of value on something that is expensive. In the book How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer, the author describes an experiment conducted with wine. Participants were told one bottle was cheap and one was expensive. The expensive bottle got rave reviews from tasters, and the cheap one - not so good. However, the labels were switched. The expensive wine was actually the cheap wine.
Perception counts for a lot.
So if your angle is cheap, make sure your margins are still high enough to sustain you. Only you know how much you need to survive at any given time.
Alternatively, target ruthlessly, either by offering a superior, needed product, more niche know-how, or find some other angle where there is untapped demand. Be prepared to prove your worth by providing case studies describing how you've solved people's business problems in the past.
Got any other tips for those starting out? It would be great if you can share what you know :)
- Why Be Fair
We've discussed in the past about how our brand is "everything we do".
As an SEO provider, business owner, or service provider, your brand is more than your logo, website and advertising. It's also what you say, what you do, how you act, and how you treat people.
Today, let's look at the benefits of using fairness as a way to add value to your brand.
The Importance Of Reciprocation
We all know about "win-win" deals.
The best deals leave enough on both sides of the deal so both parties can prosper. A deal where one party takes all and the other party gets very little isn't desirable for many reasons, one being it just isn't fair.
Rational business theory often overlooks this point. If a client "wins" by screwing you down to the very last cent, and concludes the deal, then supposedly everything should now proceed through to delivery and conclusion. But humans are emotional. The aggrieved SEO is hardly going to act like a true partner. More likely, they'll look to reciprocate the treatment they've received.
What is the cost of negative reciprocation?
We are social animals. If someone treats us well, and is fair, we feel we should treat them likewise. If someone screws us over - well - they can't expect us to give 110%. What they can likely expect is negative reciprocation, which can manifest itself in many different ways. It's not quite "revenge", but such ill-feeling can end up costing a lot more than any savings the customer made on the deal.
The same is true of your customers.
The Process Of Fairness
It is important that your dealings with customers be:
If you commit to being fair, and be seen to be fair, you can still get more out of the deal than the other party - win-win deals don't need to be, and most often aren't, 50/50 - but the other party is unlikely to resent you for it if they feel the process by which the deal was arrived at was a fair one. Psychological studies have shown people often care more about how a decision was arrived at, rather than what the final decision actually was.
Fairness of the process colors people's perception of the outcome.
What Does It Mean To "Be Fair"?
Be seen to be fair in the eyes of the person you're dealing with. This can be difficult to make concrete, but if you don't have a genuine intention to be be fair, you almost certainly won't achieve it.
In practice, it means not making arbitrary decisions, listening to all parties and considering their view. It also means making making the rules transparent. A game where only one party knows the rules breeds resentment.
An outcome should be reached where each party can see each step taken, and why it was taken. People may not even like the outcome, but they are much less likely to reciprocate in a negative manner if they feel they have been treated fairly, in a fair process. A sense of fairness runs very deep in our psyche- it's tied up with ego, self-respect, status and recognition.
This attitude of fairness can run across all aspects of business, not just in deal making and sales. It also applies to customer service. If a customer highlights a problem, how do you react? Do you see it as an opportunity to build brand? Do you seek an outcome that will advantage only you, or do you aim to arrive at a fair outcome for all? I'd wager aiming for the fair outcome is the better long-term bet.
But what happens if a customer is being unfair to you?
Of course, this can and does happen. Some people will take advantage. Again, seek to make the process fair and transparent, even though they might not like the outcome you seek.
Hard But Fair
Yes, yes - this all sounds very nice, but it's a shark-fest out there! That may be so, but you can still play hard whilst also using fair process. You've heard the phrase "hard but fair". The fairness makes the "hardness" acceptable. "Hard and unfair" tends to result in lawyers. In this respect, a fair process itself can add value, rather than destroying it by incurring extra costs.
Brand And Fairness
Proctor & Gamble have an internal set of "Ten Commandments" and the very first commandment is "Do The Right Thing". Their employees must demonstrate" rectitude, integrity and fairness". Sure, all companies say that, but the companies that actually do it build stronger on-going relationships, and strong brands. Do you return to companies who you felt treat you unfairly?
Your brand incorporates relationships with all those who you deal with, and may of those people you'll deal with over and over again. Great brands aren't just about the outcomes they achieve. They are also about how the process by which they achieve those outcomes, and if that process adds emotional value, as opposed to destroying it - by being seen to be fair - then your brand becomes stronger.
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