Thinking of starting an SEO agency? Think again…

Posted on September 29, 2009 by admin

Starting an SEO Company these days is about ten times harder than it was just a couple of years ago. The barrier to entry is much higher due to the fact that many big companies with big budgets are starting to wake up to the fact that SEO provides an amazing ROI compared to other forms of traditional marketing. The problem is where to actually start, you need to have some sort of proven track record before a company will consider using your services. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a catch 22 situation in that you will have difficulty starting without having a portfolio of clients to chow your first customer. Also, Google’s algo’s are evolving on a daily basis and filtering out more and more of the spam, even if you are a very good SEO, I seriously doubt you will be able to complete in competitive fields if you’re starting from scratch with little resource.

If you do decide to push on with your new business venture,I would suggest the first place you start is with a business plan so you can get funding. Even if you can’t get funding, you’ll need to plan your new venture so you have some direction, this will stand you in very good stead for the future. Many companies just muddle through with little direction and will fail eventually as they fall into a “comfortable” routine of being unproductive. I believe a business plan and a solid set of goals will help you keep focused so you find the success you so desperately crave.

Another problem is how to get your name out there, do you advertise? Make cold calls? try and SEO your own site (good luck) or maybe try some PR? I’m a fan of PR and for the record, I’ve tried almost every avenue to marketing my business. There is a fine line between keeping credibility and aggressively marketing your new company, I don’t believe in Direct Marketing , I think it’s skuzzy and smacks of desperation. Advertising on the other hand is okay, however, we have not had much success for the amount of full page adverts we’ve placed in leading business magazines. We’ve had some success with the PR we’ve done in house, the advantage is that the quality of the enquiries is very, very high and the type of companies calling are exactly the type of companies I want to work with.

Unfortunately, PR is a bit of a “dark art” even more so that SEO these days, and requires that you are very creative in order to catch publishers attention, which is a bit like effective SEO

I believe you need to offer a wide range of services both offline and online whilst still maintaining a niche,I would suggest staying local to your area, state, county or whatever. – this is a great example of a local SEO company that is offering a good service in the Dallas area. This will give you an edge as you will only be competing with “local-ish” companies which means competitive levels would be somewhat lower than if you were going nationally or internationally. Also, local business want to support local companies, so you’ll have a better chance of winning some SEO work.

Whinge Post: Why Does Google Penalize Sites that Get Updated?

Posted on August 3, 2009 by admin

There is something that has been bugging me for a while, Google penalizes sites that change more than a little at once. It’s hugely frustrating to see your site disappear for months just for updating or adding content. This could be just one page that gets totally changed or an entire site for changing the homepage or adding a substantial amount of content – say > 50% in one go.

I have seen this happen to a wide range of sites, some owned by me and managed by myself and some that are totally unrelated. There is only one pattern: That’s change and get dropped for three months. It’s totally absurd to penalize legitimate sites for updating their content, I mean what does Google want – a bunch of old content in it’s index?? (I know this has been the common moan for years)

Google really needs to tweak it’s algo so it realises that a site mostly the same has not been sold or switched for spam. How hard can it be? Example: Site A is still on topic and only 60% has changed, the likelihood is that it’s the same site, not some dodgy spam. These filters seriously need to be relaxed by a great deal in my opinion.

We all know that their are exceptions, if the site is trusted massively, then it’s probably not going to drop – but for most sites, they are not authority sites that have that trust box checked and thus are going to take a long absence from the SERPS.

Matt Cutts: I implore you to review this nano part of the Algo and let sites have more flexibility to update and keep themselves current.

Google Algo UK Brand Update

Posted on June 29, 2009 by admin

Google pushed it’s algo update in the UK this weekend, it leans heavily towards ranking big brands highly in the SERPS over the teeny tiny guys who took years to get there. Just one click of the mouse and boom, Big Brands up, people who have invested huge money in their rankings obliterated.

It’s a sad day for sure as it spells the beginning of the end of traditional SEO. If you though SEO was hard before, it has now entered a whole new dimension and the gravitational forces are ten times stronger. Many of the weaker SEO companies will be wiped out which will release some of the clients back into the SEO market. (Good for the better ones, bad for average ones with families to feed)

Sure many SEO tools are free, but links are not getting any cheaper and building a brand can take years and a good chunk of change.

I’ve put out my feelers as to how to turn your little website into a giant that can compete with the rest of them, and the answers I have been getting back are less than encouraging. Most people are saying “forget the short-tail, focus on the long-tail”. While this is a solution, it’s a pretty bad one as it means we’ll be targeting less traffic, just to stay alive. Personally, I will not stop targeting the highly competitive keywords, as I don’t want to miss out on that traffic. I will turn some of my sites into “amazing brands” and let them compete with the traditional companies that now occupy the lucrative spaces on Google.

I’ll be creating jaw dropping sites, with super content and usability along with incredible tools and then marketing the hell out of them. I think YOU CAN still compete with the big names, but you have to be highly creative and work your ass off to get those authority links. (This is obviously ideal for Google), and the long term future of your sites.

So don’t panic, there is hope but you’re going to need to sit down and work out a hard hitting strategy along with some aspects to your site that are very interesting for your visitors.

Local Websites Can Benefit by Targeting Local Areas

Posted on June 2, 2009 by

If you’re a small business and need customers desperately, you’re much better off targeting your website towards your local area. This is because as a very small business you probably do not have a huge Internet marketing budget and 6 – 12 months before the traffic and orders start to come in.

I often see successful small websites that are catering to small customers, that seem to rank really well without breaking the rules. Sites like this will do very well in my opinion in picking up highly targeted customers through long tail and relevant traffic. Who cares if they don’t appear for vanity terms, as long as it delivers the right traffic.

Place your most important products on your page and the areas that you service, it’s basic and simple, but you may just be amazed at the results it garners.

Google’s Best Spam Weapon is it’s Indexing Intelligence

Posted on May 30, 2009 by

Just a short post on how Google combats spam with it’s indexing, or lack there of. Anyone that’s been around for a while will know that it’s better to target long tail traffic for several reasons:

1) It converts very well
2) It’s easier to get that the competitive phrases

As your skill develops, you start to build these “mega spam sites” that offer little value to the web in general and are just built out of pure greed. You build them in hope of capturing a lot of long tail traffic, stuff that is highly unique, three four and five word phrases. Because, there are so many option and variants, you build hundreds of thousands of pages, as you try to cover every possible angle, as people searching for purpose built pages will almost certainly find yours first and visit your site. It’s a magnet for traffic and business.

And then you run into a problem…Google will only index a very small percentage of your site, and try as you might you just can’t get it to index a meaningful amount of the pages to deliver the traffic you so badly want.

If you are really on top of your game you can get around it without too much expense or time, but it closes the door to many spammers having a go.

Interview With Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com – SEO Legend

Posted on August 1, 2008 by admin

Aaron Wall is a well known SEO personality, while he is still “relatively” new compared to the likes of DaveN or Greg Boser, he has made a huge impression in the SEO and Internet Marketing world. His skills can only be described as outstanding. He’s one of the kindest people I know in this industry and has helped many fledgling SEO’s get on their feet without asking for anything in return. His new venture is a community and a training programme where you can speak to him directly and get virtually unlimited help.

Where do you see SEO taking us? What does the future have in store for SEO?

I think SEO is just becoming a subset of marketing…an important one, but just a piece of the whole picture. As the web grows it will grow more efficient. The ability to make a lot of money from mechanical SEO will become scarce. But at the same time the web will keep evolving, with new publishing formats and more social structure data, which will create new opportunities for creative individuals who can compete with others on a marketing front while also seeing the web through the lens of a search engine.

Many large corporations or web-related businesses have in-house SEO departments. Do you see this as an increasing trend? Maybe eventually, an in-house SEO department will become the norm?

One of our SEO training modules talks about how language in an industry can evolve. I used the SEO industry as an example because it is one I know well. In the last year or two the term SEO training went from being a low volume search term to a phrase that gets almost as much search volume as my brand does – which is especially impressive growth when considering that my brand is also a strong generic category keyword.

The people looking for SEO training are by their very nature typically in house people. Most of the clients who hire us at Clientside SEM also have an in house team.

It is hard for me to guess at metrics as far as how much in house SEO may grow, but from the people who have hired us, the people in our training program, and the people who bought my ebook I can certainly say that SEO is picking up steam and many offline businesses are getting serious about leveraging their online assets through search.

You’ve previously mentioned that SEO (and SEO business models) do not scale. Do you feel that this will always be the case? Surely as the internet is always changing and throwing new challenges in our paths, SEO might have to learn to scale and adapt to this in some respect?

I think the portion of the search engine marketing world that scales is PPC, which is part of the reason my wife launched PPC Blog. People who are already spending money may look at additional spending as an opportunity at cost savings.

The core reason many prospective customers want SEO is because they want free traffic. Given that line of thinking, most prospective SEO customers are not worth the opportunity cost of engagement when compared with how much you could earn leveraging your knowledge across domains that you own (and I have seen some of your rankings, so I know you know this well!) J

And it is hard to provide something of lasting value without having the market change around you. For example

Directories worked well for helping sites rank well. So thousands of general directories sprung up. So Google stripped the PageRank on most of those directories. This process, from market opportunity to death of a market takes at most a few years…and as Google gets better at policing the web the new easy to scale opportunities die quicker.
A well known SEO was selling an article submission package for $900, and within a year people in second and third world countries starting selling similar services for about 3% the price he was charging. And as that spread Google eventually decided to kill the PageRank scores on most article directories. That process took a little over a year.

I guess the best way SEOs could scale in a sustainable fashion are

Build and market their own websites
Create tools that many in house SEOs use (and ideally charge recurring for their usage)
Build relationships in a marketplace and act as a vertically oriented public relations firm
Engage in deep relationships with businesses where the SEO gets an equity stake and/or a piece of the upside generated through their work

Obviously part of the challenge (and maybe even a hurdle) to becoming a successful SEO is keeping up to date with changes in the Google algorithm. It’s a forever-changing, almost living entity. What wild rides do you feel the algorithm might take us on in the near future?

Unless they get significant blowback Google is going to keep trying to own more and more of the search results (via knoll, YouTube, etc.) trying to own the first click after the search as well.

Many general authority sites have sprung up around the opportunity created by Google placing so much weight on domain authority. I doubt we need eHow, WeHow, and WikiHow, but unless Google goes out of their way to stop it the search results are going to end up full of low quality generalist sites.

There have recently been some big movements based on localization, and that trend will likely only increase in the coming year.

You’ve also said that ad agencies are buying up some of the bigger SEO firms, but have still to totally “get” what search and SEO is about. Eventually though, they’ll come to understand what happens in the world of SEO, because they’ll have to. How do you think they’ll go about it and what do you suppose it’ll mean for SEO when the ad agencies finally “get” it?

Don’t look for innovation from the ad agencies themselves…John Andrews recently wrote a post about a clueless creative agency that offers SEO. Writing on the topic of SEO, that agency gave their take “Many of our clients have spent countless marketing dollars with little success.” In other words, people spending money on SEO that are spending it with them are wasting their money, which leads us to the money quote

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair

That quote describes where traditional ad agencies are at right now. They enjoy agency discounts and fat margins on large spends, but their business models are not designed around making lots of small purchases and getting no discount on the media buy.

The other quote that ties in nicely here is from John Wanamaker, “I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted … I just don’t know which half.”

If ad agencies track things too closely they not only see margin compression, but they may also prove to their clients that their high margin business is a net money loser.

With SEO becoming more and more mainstream, newer conferences are popping up all over the place. What’s your opinion on some of the newer conferences and do you think more conferences will benefit SEO awareness and growth of knowledge within the community?

The SEO industry used to be a tight knit community, but as social media has become more popular and too many people have been fighting for too small of a pie the industry has devolved primarily into nothing but a bunch of self promotion and attention whoring.

Some of the conferences might be great for networking, but for people really looking to learn I imagine that seminar formatted learning is probably going to yield greater value transfer to the attendees and higher retention of information.

The marketplace is a competitive one indeed, and I believe you’ve said that most of the public rivalries are “driven by a need for attention in a competitive marketplace instead of SEO businesses trying to beat each other on a one to one basis”. But as time and the media has told us, eventually we might well be led into a situation where big SEO companies are battling it out to become the best, or to have a monopoly in a certain field of SEO, don’t you think?

To some degree Google shapes much of the market competition and helps create monopolies and market leaders. A few examples

Why is one link broker penalized such they don’t rank for their official business name when other brokers are not?
When I scraped Google rankings on my site, we were blocked from scraping but other competing sites are allowed to. So I had to create a rank checker extension to get around that arbitrary road block.
Why are most directories considered spam when Business.com is trusted? They consist mostly of paid listings, and as of about a year ago only had about a half dozen editors managing 65,000 categories.

The war of white hat/black hat is a constantly raging one. With more and more SEOs joining the fray, and having said that many of the better SEOs are “technique agnostic” and are willing to do whatever it takes, what do you think this spells for the future of SEO and how white hat/black hat SEO is done? Also, as an increasing number of techniques are becoming “outlawed”, what are your thoughts regarding the matter of former white hats now being branded black hats simply due to a “law” change?

I think as Google continues to promote their own properties in the search results most SEOs that can see beyond the tip of their own nose will respect Google’s arbitrary changing guidelines less and less.

Relevancy is a game of public relations as much as it is a game of finding the right results to promote. At some point Google goes too far and then people stop trusting them.

Put another way, how can Google try to claim buying and selling links is unethical because they pass PageRank then pollute the web with ads offering things like lonely cheating housewives? In my book Google’s link sales are far sleazier than anything I have ever considered promoting.

Nowadays it’s fair to say that a lot of people purposefully set out to do harm to SEO, either by publically speaking ill of it, or by blogging negatively. With the way that SEO is evolving, what do you think it will take to make them change their tune and properly understand that SEO doesn’t necessarily mean “evil”?

All throughout history established businesses have tried to diminish and vilify new business models and new competing businesses.

On numerous occasions I have read an SEO hate article in the mainstream press, denouncing the field as a bunch of money wasting opportunistic scammers, only to get an email or call from the in house SEO for that publisher asking me an SEO question. The media says SEO is crap while hiring in house SEOs…so they don’t even believe the garbage they are publishing. They are just publishing controversy to pump up their page views.

I think when SEO stops delivering such a strong ROI it will be considered a legitimate business practice.

What do you think the future holds with regards to the evolution of information dissemination? Blogs, media sites such as Digg, and viral marketing are all important parts in getting the message out there, but how do you think these will fare with time? Will sites such as Digg be as important in the future, or will there be newer and better sites, or different methods?

I think as more people get actively involved in blogging and other types of media creation we will become more aware of marketing and media manipulation. This will lead us to be less likely to trust large media organizations and automated filters while we learn to replace these outlets with trusted individuals and small groups we identify with.

Media will get chopped to bits. Google will still be a huge ad network, but most media companies are going to keep seeing marketshare erode as we subscribe to niche publishers.

The Top 10 SEO’s in the World

Posted on July 25, 2008 by admin

I always wanted to find out who the best SEO’s thought the Best SEO’s were, I’ve asked around and made a list of the top ten. If you don’t agree with any of the list, please contact the people on it directly:

10. Seth Godin – He may not call himself an SEO but he sure is – http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

9. Dave Naylor – Load mouth, big balls, lovely bloke, knows everyone, everyone wants to know him. – http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk

8. Ralph & Dirk – AKA Fantomaster.com – These guys revolutionised the industry and have forgotten more than you’ll ever know

7. Brett Tabke – Brett built upon Jim’s initial work and commercialised it. Commercial intent and capitalism are the underpinings of SEO and for that Brett should be in this list

6. Bob Massa – Being an effective SEO doesn’t just mean understanding the algorithm inside it, it also means having the balls to “go for it” darn the consequences. No one has gone for it more in the search engines than Bob when he sued Google – http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2165111 He didn’t win but he definately has testicles the size of watermelons!

5. NFFC – He simply is search and if he doesn’t know the answer he knows someone that will. Who he is, few know, how to get in contact with him, fewer still know but if you have a large floodlight, can beam an image of Nottingham Forest Football Club’s logo into the sky, he may just come to your rescue.

4. Matt Cutts – I feel confident that if the gamekeeper ever turned poacher he’d have more venison that he’d know what to do with

3. Jason Duke – Where do the top SEOs go for help when they don’t know? Well know you know!

2. Krishna Bharat – Hilltop, nuf said. A bloody god!!! – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krishna_Bharat

1. Jim Wilson – Jim was to SEO as the Wright brothers were to flight – http://memorial.jimworld.com/legacy/ He is missed!!

** I’ve been told that Jim Wilson was rude mean and spiteful to people new to the industry, again, not my opinion, just what I’ve heard.

I also thought Danny Sullivan, Michael Gray, Greg Boser, Aaron Wall and Todd Friesan deserved a place, they are certainly up there with the best.

99% of Links Don’t Work on Google

Posted on July 14, 2008 by admin

If you consider yourself an SEO, then you must know that links = ranking on the search engines. When I first started out, virtually any old crappy link would do. Even FFA links worked okay and got your website ranking well.

However, times have changed, and since 2003 and it has become much harder to rank your site well, especially on Google. This is because Google has changed its search algorithm and is filtering the majority of links.

Google filters out and doesn’t trust the vast majority of links on the Internet, and I estimate this to be as high has 99% of all links. If you’ve been in SEO a while, I’m sure you have tried to broker some bargain deal where a guy in India will do “1000 directory submissions for $50″, only to discover it was the worst $50 you’ve ever spent.

If you want your site to rank, forget about “wholesale” links. These include links from directories, article sites, forums and similar places where you can go and get “a lot of links” without any editorial judgment easily. Even paid links fall into this category, with a high percentage of paid links being filtered out. Even what are deemed as “bulk” links where you can make 3-way link exchanges don’t work very well.

“Mechanical SEO” is almost dead. Where you can churn out a website, get some links and rank well. It’s so much harder to obtain decent rankings on Google, the algo is very SPAM resistant.

However, it is still possible to obtain good links, and the easiest and most cost effective way is through link bait. Linkbaiting can be a hundred times easier than going out and manually tryng to find non-filtered links. A good piece of link bait can generate tens of thousands of links, and can be created in a couple of days.

Google Rankings Highly Unstable

Posted on July 7, 2008 by admin

I’ve noticed recently that Google’s rankings are particularly unstable. This has happened before. Previously the rankings went through a period of changing up to twenty times in a single day.

Alas, this volatile period seems to have returned with even more fury. We’re seeing some of our sites on the first page and then another search shows them on page two or three. Never before have I managed to affect the rankings so dramatically by just pressing F5.

I noticed a comment posted by Jeremy Luebke on Aaron Walls community forum:

“Forget a daily shuffle, I can hit search and get one SERP, and then hit the button again and get a different set of results. So I am seeing instant shuffling all day long.

Here is another weird thing.

When I talk about a SERP I mean from 1-1000 for each search with it being pages to 10 listings per page. I click search and get a set of SERPs. I click to go to the 2nd page and get a different set of SERPs. In other words, the 2nd page may contain results that where on the first page because the results shuffled between pages. Also results that should have been on the 2nd page are nowhere to be found because the SERP of the 2nd page actually ranks the site on the first page.

This happens logged in or not on 3 different machines & 6 browsers, one of which is my testing box which has never once logged into Google and always clears cookies so this goes way beyond personalization or web history.”

Strange times at the moment, lets hope things become more stable soon.

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