Fishing for a good seo firm
The art of seo or search engine optimization of-times reminds me of some zany type of mine field fraught with its own dangerous characters and strewn with the battle scars of the weary who fervently claim that seo no longer works.
The battle weary are limping haphazardly and constantly looking around them in fear as they attempt to get out of the kill-zone without losing their wallets, credit cards etc. And off in the distance incompetent seo teams and even Google themselves continue to fire barrage after barrage of sneaky weapons in order to force the battle weary to throw up a hasty credit card shield or a “get me outta here checkbook”
These battle scarred veterans, would appear to have strong reasons for fervently denying that seo really works. I am sure you have met one or more of these CEO’s or CTO’s at bars or business conferences. They can’t be dissuaded and they have the scars to prove it. If they admit that it might work they have the receipts to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that it didn’t work for them. It’s kind of hard to fault a company when they have the proof in checks spent without rankings.
So, does seo work or doesn’t it ?
Well, it does and there are public companies that earn the majority if not all of their revenue from online sales. It’s difficult to tell companies like BlueNile.com, BlueNile.co.uk and BlueNile.ca, yes its the same company, that seo doesn’t work when they pulled in nearly 300 million back in 2005 from online diamond sales only. They are incidentally, on track to do 15% better than that in 2009.
Yes, that’s almost 1/3 of a Billion dollars and since they an online only company, probably the majority of this fine figure is courtesy of our good friends at Google.
So, if you are one of those chief executives still trying to persuade yourself and your sales staff that seo doesn’t work, please go have a look at the SEC papers for bluenile. They are pretty public – since they are a public company.
Seo or search engine optimization in the right hands works just fine. However, it doesn’t work in a vacuum and it must be implemented with prior analysis to figure out whether or not the set of keywords that you are targeting have a strong set of characteristics.
- Is there commercial intent behind them ?
- Are there commercial ads being bought on them? ( Indicating possible commercial viability )
- Is there significant monthly traffic looking for those keywords ?
- Are there more than a half million competing websites that show for those keywords in “exact match”?
- Are there more than a quarter million competing websites with those keywords in the title ?
The answers to the 5 questions above should be
- Yes ( Without commercial intent, most are simply researching )
- Yes ( Ads? Great, it means someone else is making money on this )
- Yes ( Below 100 monthly searches may not be significant enough unless you are selling a high ticket item )
- No ( High Competition means paying more for seo results and waiting longer to see them )
- No (See above statement on High Competition )
Ahh, but you say that you have seen this useful but rather elementary list thrice already and that you hired a group and still got nothing.
Please tell me you weren’t hiring guys to do seo on keywords like
- mortgage
- pay day loans
- poker
- credit cards
- insurance
- dating
- cars
What’s wrong with these words?
Nothing! Except there are literally 50-150 million other sites also gunning for these keywords and what a waste of time that is since the searches using these keywords have little or no commercial intent. Yes, that’s right! No Commercial Intent means the users engaged in these searches were not seriously looking to buy anything when they typed these keywords into google or yahoo.
They were simply researching and its quite likely that they would have narrowed their search in subsequent attempts.
If you really pushed your seo team or seo contractors to put you in the top of the rankings for any of these keywords, they should have objected strenuously, but if you overrode their objections and threw a serious chunk of change at them, it would take a good seo team about 3-9 months to get you into the top 10 on a regional Google datacentre. An extraordinary team might have it done in 2-3 months flat but it still would have been a waste of time.
It is likely that your results would have been commercially disappointing since the commercial intent is not there.
How do I know this? I have been doing this for yunk years. Prior to Google being a search engine, I have been putting sites in the top 10 rankings on yahoo, excite, aol and others.
So back to the question. Does seo work or not?
The answer is simple.
Yes, it does particularly when its coupled with a …
… bit of project management that includes :
- Analysis of the competitive landscape
- Analysis of the current strength of your existing website’s current authority in the chosen area
- Management of the timing behind going for easier long tail commercial intent keywords
- Then building up to the best keyword set as a medium to long term target
- Cheating by using Google Adwords to near immediately figure out which keywords clients purchase your product on
The keywords with the most traffic or most advertising may not be the keywords with the best commercial intent for your business
Does SEO work?
You betcha’
I have over 6,000 keywords in the top 10 of Google for a number of clients in England, New York, Toronto,Las Vegas,Costa Rica and elsewhere right now.
Some of those clients are now expanding so rapidly ( yes, even during this downturn ) that they don’t seriously know what particular bright fruit to pick and eat anymore. The leads are just coming in from all over the map.
The amount of seo that you will need is in direct relation to the competitiveness of the landscape that you are attempting to rank for.
Most seo services aid first with onpage optimization and quickly move into building credible backlinks to your site with the chosen keywords in those links.
If you are a regional operation within a small city/town you don’t need more than a few thousand dollars of seo spread out over 2-3 months to achieve local dominance. Usually between 50-100 carefully chosen backlinks can do the deed even if the site is a brand new site. Results should show in two weeks or less.
If your company is selling a regional product or service in which most of our customers are in a city like LA, London, Hong Kong or the Tri-state New York area, it is likely that your competition is savvy and your keywords require a bit more love. Usually between 500-1000 carefully chosen backlinks will be enough, but the site must have some maturity ( age ) already. Results should show in two-four weeks. This package here should be sufficient in most cases. In the rare case where one is attempting a highly competitive term like “pay day loan”, even though one is in a regional area with regional customers the competitive nature of the search term may require a national or even global package as described below. Certain keywords like “pay day loan” are haunted by public companies earning over a Billion dollars annually. You shouldn’t for a moment, believe that those highly competitive teams will let you simply squeeze into their space without a fight.
If you need National dominance for a product or service then click here. Usually between 1,500-3000 carefully chosen backlinks with a generous mix of high authority sites, spread out over a period of time will be sufficient for most national results in the top 10. A few other syndication methodologies which are very well received by Google and Yahoo would nicely round out the effort. There are exceptions to this and the site must be older than a year and should either have a blog or be prepared to have one installed. The backlinks might come in the form of syndicated articles, syndicated video, syndicated press releases or other syndication methods. Results should show in two months or less.
If you have decided that yours is the best Dating site or Insurance Product on the planet and you need more than just national dominance but something on the global scale then this package below is what you need. You will need to stick with it for about 6-9 months, but you will see results in two months. To dominate globally in a competitive niche means to show up in the top 10 on many different Google data centres. Typically, this means that the site is already an authority or is about to be promoted to authority status. In the past, authority sites had a Page Rank of at least 5. This does not necessarily hold true but was a guideline a few years back. The actual Page Rank of a site may mean everything or nothing. A mechanic shop online in Ohio might be the last word in mechanics and be viewed as an authority even if it is showing as a PR3.
This buy button below will give you 1 unit per month at the highest level that we have available. If you are about to release a new album or you are managing a PR6 site and need to go to PR7 or PR8 or something that you think is beyond the norm of what has been described on this page, then its possible that you may need several units worth of the button below. Click on the button, commit to start the process and we can discuss how many more units you might require.
We have put very difficult keywords like Poker, diamonds, diamond jewellery etc in the top 5 of Google on many different datacentres. So, pretty well anything is possible, though we like to stay realistic.
