SEO Made Simple
“SEO is still a tiny portion of the total search marketing spend.” So states MarketingSherpa in its recent Search Marketing Benchmark
Survey. I find it hard to understand the under-utilization of organic SEO compared to PPC (pay-per-click) advertising when organic listings
are preferred by 5 clicks to 1. The natural organic listings convert better, too. So what gives?
MarketingSherpa also states that organic results are “better noticed, read and clicked on than paid listings.” The report notes that
organic listings convert as well as, or even better than, paid listings (4.2%, versus 3.6%). Study after study continue to demonstrate the
power of organic links.
Delight and Dismay
MarketingSherpa researchers were both “delighted and appalled by the year over year data on marketing search spending.” Delighted
because more marketers said they would allocate larger portions of their marketing budgets to SEO to gain valuable organic listings. But
appalled at the “continuing disconnect between paid search spending and SEO investment.”
The keyword is “investment.” SEO is an investment in time, resources and knowledge – an investment that is accountable and yields an
excellent return. The benefits of SEO are long lasting when compared to PPC because paid clicks can start or end immediately, depending on
your budget and a variety of other factors. Conversely, organic SEO changes to a website stay with you indefinitely.
Requisite Site Changes
Organic SEO takes a lot of expertise, and it also takes cooperation by the client in executing the recommended site changes that allow a
site to rank well in the major search engines. A recent Jupiter Research study states there are numerous obstacles to achieving necessary
site changes when search marketers outsource SEO to vendors. In fact, 64 percent of the marketers and agencies surveyed said they did not
implement their SEO vendor’s recommendations. This leads to the assumption that they didn’t achieve good organic SEO results.
I myself wonder just what the “SEO recommendations” were that the marketers did not implement in this study. Why? Because I’ve seen and
heard a lot of inappropriate and/or weak SEO recommendations over the past ten years.
While the reasons cited for not following through with site changes are reportedly varied, the most common were (1) “lack of internal
human resources to implement changes,” (2) “timing/ frequency of update issues,” and (3) “lack of outsourced IT budget.” In my opinion,
this is by and large due to the SEO vendor failing to set proper client guidelines and expectations.
The Communication Workaround
Can any client trust the advice they receive from any given SEO vendor? It seems like a catch 22 for the politically correct – clients
pay big bucks for SEO services, but they don’t get results because they can’t make the site changes. I say horse feathers to this
assumption – clients come to an SEO vendor for help. It is the vendor’s responsibility to guide the client to success. Failure occurs when
the vendor fails to communicate what is required of the client prior to signing a contract.
A partial remedy for not implementing site changes would be to task the SEO vendor to FTP the site changes, but many companies will not
allow outside consultants to access their site. The best solution is for the vendor to be clear up front in communicating with the client,
coming to mutual agreement on a procedure and schedule for making recommended site changes.
SEO vendors need to be more explicit in delineating the IT vs. marketing tasks necessary. They also need to consider the expertise and
knowledge factor. SEO experts can likely accomplish the site changes in less time than the client IT technicians; however, there is
tremendous value to in-sourcing SEO in the long run. Vendors can provide a realistic time schedule for accomplishing changes and factor in
time for unknown contingencies due to client company operations. Explicit communication between the SEO vendor and its client’s IT and
Marketing departments will lead to much better SEO results – a win-win for both parties.
The SEO Mystique
The MarketingSherpa report stated that “SEO under-spending” is a trend that will continue in 2006. The researchers asked, “Why don’t
more marketers invest in SEO?” The major reason given by respondents was “Don’t understand SEO, overall complexity.”
Despite the fact that users prefer unbiased organic links, and the conversions from organic links average higher than those from
sponsored links, some marketers won’t invest in organic SEO because of its ambiguity and complexity.
That’s why it is necessary to educate marketers and technical people on SEO, demystifying the process. It is really not difficult to
understand when examined step by step, but the problem lies in identifying qualified SEO vendors. SEO requires specific knowledge of
appropriate methodology and a bit of perseverance. Some of the vendors with marketing visibility lack such traits, leaving a lot to be
desired.
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Another obstacle to the widespread adoption of organic SEO is that experts in the field offer conflicting advice. A lot of what you hear
on the Forums is rhetoric and hearsay. Then there is the lack of SEO standards and a code of ethics, which further erodes the integrity of
the industry.
Some SEO experts talk in very general terms, e.g., all you need to do is write your site content for both your customers and the search
engines, give each page a keyword-optimized Title and Description Meta Tag, and get as many quality inbound links as possible. Others will
say it’s more a matter of technical changes, “you need maintenance.” Very few know what goes on behind the scenes, and this contributes to
the SEO mystique.
SEO Made Simple
First, you need a site review. This includes establishing your business goals with respect to search engines, leading you to measurable
organic SEO results. I’m talking about Server Header Status, your IP C Block, dotting the (i) and slashing the (t) in the basics of
server-side status, site architecture, page construction, content and inbound link popularity.
Next, a competitor review tells you what you are up against. Your site is obviously lacking several criteria or you wouldn’t have such
poor positioning. This will also wake you up to the reality of what is required to achieve good positioning. Hello! I think Wake Up is the
keyword here, get specifics from your vendor and don’t settle for rhetoric or marketing lingo. Here’s your script.
I want evidence that my IP address is not IP blocklisted, I want to know why a robots.txt file should be in my root directory, I want to
see I have a site status header 200 when you ping my server and not a 400 or 302. I want to see if my HTML is being read properly by a
spider read, a browser read and a request read. I want to know how to determine what my odds are of acquiring my strongest competitor’s
best positions in Google. I want to know I will be spam free, and I want to know how my site should be arranged so that spiders can find,
crawl, index and rank all my data.