I was definitely intrigued by the post which is why I am sharing it but the more I think about it, there are a lot of missing components here. The article How Much is a Google Top Spot Worth? posted on the SearchEngineWatch blog is definitely interesting.

To sum it up, there are some graphs and pictures and stats that show how important the first spot is and how much more traffic a company gets if they are in the first spot as opposed to the 2nd and 3rd etc. While it is our goal in life to get people in these top positions on Google, there are definitely some things to point out here.

I am in no way, shape or form trying to diminish this article or argue with it. It is definitely important to be in the top spots in Google – if it wasn’t, Anduro wouldn’t exist how we do now. And I agree that the top few positions are where the eyeballs are but there is a point that is being overlooked.

What about conversion rate?  I agree that you want traffic but if it is unqualified traffic because everyone is just clicking on the first result since we all trust Google to know what we are looking for, maybe it is better to be a bit further down on the page and catch those people who are really, truly searching. Maybe those people are more qualified. Of course, it makes sense that the chance of getting a conversion increases with more traffic but I think this study is inconclusive. There are other factors to consider – conversion rate being one of the biggest ones.

Have a look at some of the comments under the post. Pretty interesting to see the different reactions from people.

What do you think?

One of the topics that I cover near the end of the course is business ethics . For this session I use a round table discussion and have each person present a situation where they had to make a decision that involved ethics – choosing right or wrong. I typically start the discussion by describing a time when our company ordered a new ink jet printer from Dell. We received the printer, all the cords and the discs with the printer drivers. The issue started shortly after receiving the printer when we changed computers and found that we had misplaced the discs. As a result, we couldn’t print. Normally, the printer drivers would be online for download but the printer was so new that this option was not available. I called Dell and they said they would send us replacement discs. We waited a couple of days and to our surprise a rather large box was delivered. Inside was a new printer, the same model as previously sent, and the discs we required. We loaded up the drivers and our original printer worked perfectly.

At this point, I stop telling the story and open up the floor for discussion. As you can guess the ethical situation is what to do with the second printer: keep it or send it back. On one hand, Dell is a huge company and likely won’t miss a tiny ink jet printer. Why shouldn’t we keep it? This assumes that Dell has made a mistake and can’t trace the fact that they sent us two printers. The issue with this option is that Dell may figure this out and then send us a bill for the second printer. We could always use a second printer but we didn’t want to pay for an extra one. On the other hand, we never paid for the second printer. So why should we keep what we haven’t paid for.

The framework that we use in class for analyzing ethical situations is offered by Santa Clara University, The Jesuit University in Silicon Valley. This framework identifies Five Sources of Ethical Standards:

• The Utilitarian Approach
• The Rights Approach
• The Fairness or Justice Approach
• The Common Good Approach
• The Virtue Approach

What I like about their framework is that each approach is integrated into the decision making process:

• Recognize an Ethical Issue
• Get the Facts
• Evaluate Alternative Actions (using each of the approaches listed above)
• Make a Decision and Test It
• Act and Reflect on the Outcome

Ethically, the decision about the printer is simple. Don’t keep what you haven’t paid for. And that is what we did but it took an hour of calling numerous departments at Dell to figure out how. By the way, we had no complaints about Dell’s service, they even paid to have the printer picked up.

However, the lingering question with most ethical situations is “What if I could get away with it?”. As one smiling student said, “If the value is low and the risk is high, then it is easy to make the ethically right decision but if the reward is huge and the risk is low then everything changes.”

An ink jet printer is about $250. And after making calls for an hour I felt that the risk of getting caught was reasonably low. I think we could have kept the printer and not paid for it. The class was about 30-70 on this issue. Some would have kept it and most would have returned it.

But what happens when the stakes are higher?

After discussing my ethical situation, I offer students in the class the opportunity to describe their situations. They use the same format, stopping before the conclusion so that we have time to discuss various options and the ethics involved.

One student described how while working overseas he could have made lots of money by collecting “gifts” from the companies to whom he awarded contracts. He didn’t make any collections but has since wondered if he would have the need for a class studying business and ethics if he had accepted those gifts.

Another student, working in Calgary, found $3,000 in an unmarked envelop by her car in a parking lot. She had no way of knowing who the owner was. What to do?

I jokingly said, “Next” and everyone laughed. I’m not exactly sure but I had the feeling that most of the students would have kept the money. The student, however, told how she had taken the money to the police. The police found the owner within 30 days. The owner was a bakery and they gave the student a reward – a loaf of bread, sliced. Ironically, the student is allergic to wheat!

While working in developing country, another student witnessed an accident where a man was hit by a car late at night. The student went over to the man who was injured and sadly found that the victim was already dead. At that same time another witness came to examine the body and agreed; the person was dead. The second witness, older than the student, quickly looked for a wallet to obtain the person’s identification. During the search the second witness found a stash of cash. What would you do?

The student and the second witness left the scene with $7,000 each. His rational was that the victim was obviously involved in some type of crime by having the cash and by the way he was dressed. The other witness was bigger and older than him, so he wasn’t about to argue. The driver was in hysterics and screaming. When and if the police did arrive they would have had no hesitation claiming the money for themselves. I’m not sure what I would have done but I don’t think I would have “given” the money to the police.

The final situation was the best. The student is well educated and currently works for a non-profit organization in Calgary with an outstanding reputation. She is originally from an African country (I can relate since I was born in Uganda). She has 2 children and impeccable manners. She told of a situation in her country of origin while bidding on a huge construction project for a large telecommunications company. Two other companies were bidding on the project and competition was fierce. She prepared her companies bid delivered it personally. When she arrive at the office to submit her bid the official was not at the desk and the bids for the competing companies were on the desk – bound but not in envelops. What to do?

As a group we laughed because although the information on the competing bids would be tempting to look at, looking was clearly unethical. To our surprise the student threw up her hands and said, “I looked at the bid, ran back to my office, lowered our bid and quickly went back to submit it.” Although we were all shocked we were won over when she explained that the livelihood of many families were at stake. Many people including herself would be unemployed if her company was not awarded the contract.

By the way, I told this last story to a few business colleagues and they agreed – they would have done exactly the same thing. Their rationale was that “reviewing” the competitor’s bids was part of gathering information for “business intelligence”.

In this case, it seems that the stakes were so high that the common good outweighed fairness and personal virtue. What would you do if you were in her situation?

The link pointed to an article called “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” by Derek Powazek. In a nutshell it is tirade against Search Engine Optimization and companies offering SEO which includes our company, Anduro Marketing. I couldn’t resist reading the post and responding.

First Derek gives a quick history of the search engine industry:

“First came the web, and it was a mess.” “Then came the search engines. First primitive indexes of dumb keywords, then Google…” “The ascendancy of Google has meant that, if your goal is to get the most eyeballs possible (as any ad-supported media business’ goal is), then prominent placement in the search engine results became a top priority.”

Not a bad history actually. He should post that to Twitter. But then Derek loads up the page with name calling and loaded language to emphasize his point. His labels for Search Engine Optimizers include: “goat sacrificers”, “snake oil salesmen” and “a new breed of con man”. He then makes 3 points and elaborates on each.

1. The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work.
2. SEO is poisoning the web.
3. The One True Way.

Actually, Derek is right on each point but beyond the basic point Derek seems tarnished, tainted and terribly mislead or misinformed.

1. SEO is Obvious.
In many ways Derek is correct – much of SEO is obvious. Picking keywords, adding them to web pages and getting any type of link back to the website is free and relatively easy. But so is cooking a burger or changing oil in a car. I can do both but I don’t except occasionally. Why? Lots of reasons. I don’t have time. I’m too lazy. And the chef at BrokenCity does a much better job. Besides, I don’t have buns, burgers, condiments, fries and a stove at the office. Why should I cook a burger at lunch time when I can pay someone to do it and talk with customers, colleagues and friends instead? Sheesh.

So what are customers buying when they hire a firm to optimize their website? Where is the value in hiring a company like ours to optimize their website and boost the home page on search engines? The answer is simple. Our customers don’t want to spend time doing tasks that would take them a month of Sundays. We can do SEO faster, better and often cheaper. We have the tools, processes, and know-how to get the job done quickly and effectively.

One of the basic principles of running a successful business is to do what you do well and focus on that. People buy value. If you focus on providing value then customers will buy. But if you spend all your time learning and doing things you don’t have the aptitude, training and skills for then you won’t be able to provide quality products on time at a reasonable price. Trying to do everything sounds like failure to me.

Let me give you an example. Let’s take Dell – a large company with a large budget for brochures and online ads. One would assume that their website would automatically work well with the search engines. Not so. A couple years ago we got an email from a business manager for the business unit focusing on small and medium business. He thought there was untapped opportunities for Dell to rank well on search engines. His rationale was that paid ads on Google cost money and high listings on the organic side of Google are free. Good point. We “messed around” with the URLs, source code, anchor text, internal links, external links and strange things started to happened. Pages on the Dell site start ranking at the top of the SERPs. Dell.com is still in top spot for “business laptops”, beating out 25 million other pages. It’s in 3rd spot, out performing 109 million other pages, for “servers”. The end result – our contact at Dell got promoted. Nice.

But what about small companies? What value do they get from SEO? About 5 years ago Wayne Thomas came to us. He runs a small company called CleanSuite Software Inc. His company produces software for dry cleaning businesses. He wanted to have more visitors come to his website. He had some ideas of how to do that but wasn’t confident and simply didn’t have enough hours in the week to optimize his site and pursue inbound links. We talked. He hired us to help him out and he is a very happy customer. CleanSuite is a small company that is building its reputation and success on our talents. If you go to Google.com and search for “dry cleaning software” his site is listed in 2nd spot beating out 1.3 million other pages. He was in first spot until recently. Wayne, give us a call.

In summary, yes, SEO is obvious to some people but not everyone. For companies that want to reduce their marketing risks, an SEO firm is a good bet.

2. SEO is poisoning the web.

Derek’s complaint is that Google’s search algorithm is based primary on building links back to a site. Then he goes on a rant about “SEO cockroaches” and “SEO bastards” doing all kinds of devious techniques to get links which have temporary value. He is right. If you use black hat tactics and try to trick Google you will get caught and the website will likely be tossed out. But who uses black hat techniques? Any SEO who has been in business for more than 3 years and can prove results never tries to trick Google. What we use are best practices.

1. Picking keyword phrases that will drive qualified visitors to a site – people looking for what companies are offering.
2. Optimizing a web page by adding the keywords in the right spots so that the search engine crawlers can find the phrase. This isn’t secret or hard but it has to be done correctly.
3. Building a web of reputable industry related links back to the site. Not really hard but time consuming so we can’t waste time going after useless links. No one is going to pay us for work that doesn’t produce results.

Derek, what’s wrong with using best practices?

3. The One True Way – Good Products and Good Content.

Derek’s point that many writers create “dumbed down content” is valid. It is sooooo true. I see tons of crappy content on the Internet every day. But I read fast and I can spot dumb content very quickly. Here’s the rub. I doubt that I’m the only one with a critical eye. The folks at Google aren’t stupid either. They know what good content looks like.

Thanks Derek for a stimulating article and your point of view. Ultimately, you and I can agree on something. Create good products. Create good content to let people know about it. Repeat.

Speakers included:

• Social Media Victories – Real Businesses, Real Campaigns, Real Results by Patrick Schwerdtfeger, Tactical Execution
• Cause Marketing by Shauna Causey, Comcast
• The Power Triumvirate of 2010: The Convergence of Social-Mobile-Local by Gillian Muessig, SEOMoz
• Investor Relations 2.0 – Using Social Media to Reach Investors and Support Your Stock by Doug Lacombe, communicatto
• Fatal Mistakes that may Destroy your Internet Marketing Campaign by Dennton Fahl, BlackSun
• Taking Facebook Connect to the Next Level – Social Context by Ryan Merket, Facebook Consultant
• XRay Vision – Using SEO-Browser.com to Diagnose Problems with Your Website, Jeff Nelson, Anduro Marketing
• Conversation Marketing by Ian Lurie, Portent Interactive
• A Picture Is Worth 10,000 Words by Alli Marshall, Strix Insights
• Alternate Reality Games by Kevin Franco, Francomedia
• The Power of Web Video for Businesses by Tish Bell & Stacy James Fry, BizBOXTV
• Social Media & Gaming: The Untapped Market by Evan Fishkin, Portent Interactive

We are all looking forward to next year’s conference.

Here is a link for more details: Internet Marketing Conference – Calgary 2010.

Great line-up of speakers. So far 60 people have registered. Ends on St Patrick’s Day – March 17th.

Topics include Social Media, Gaming, Videos, SEO, Pay-Per-Click and Industry related news.

Anduro is offering a discount. Call our office and we will give you the promo code.

Malcolm co-wrote the case study, entitled “Anduro Marketing: Internet Services vs. Software Sales“, with Sid L. Huff. Sid is a Professor and Head of School at the School of Information Management, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.

The summary of the case study as list on HBR.org is:
“Anduro Marketing is a Canadian company that sells technical services to companies wanting to improve their search engine website rankings. Though small, Anduro has attracted several major clients in both Canada and the United States, and expects steady profitability and growth. Anduro believes it can generate substantial additional profit by developing and selling a suite of software products that automate its technical service offerings.”

The case presents the conundrum that we had to either develop a technology suite related to SEO tools or focus on expanding our service offerings. I won’t tell you in this blog post what we decided to do. But you can contact me directly and I’ll let you know. Please contact Jeff Nelson via our Contact Us page.

I have heard Rahul give this presentation live a few times. It is a classic story of a young guy starting a company doing what interested him. The company morphed into making high end PCs for gaming while the rest of the industry was focused on driving the price of PCs down.

The company has been profitable since day one. Typical of his business acumen, he bought a heritage home near downtown Calgary for $700,00o and sold it for $1,000,000 in 2005. He and his co-workers changed the focus of the company because they loved playing online interactive games but were annoyed at the performance of existing machines. They cut $1,000,000 in revenue in unrelated work (hosting and networking) in order to build a brand that focused on high end performance PCs.

His keys to success: focus on the customer and build excellent quality products. Sounds simple but Rahul had the perseverance, energy and smarts to execute this game plan.

Have a look at the latest PC from Voodoo, called Firebird.

Great story. Excellent entrepreneur.

He lists a variety of tools but the one that caught my eye was the Keyword Tree developed by Juice Analytics. To used the tool you need data in a Google Analytics account.

This tool combines the value of tag cloud and relationships. Very quickly you can see which combinations of keywords people are using to get to your site. The menu of keywords at the bottom of the screen show a list of all the keywords – it is so easy to use.

The Referrer Flow Tool is also interesting and valuable.

The purpose of this tool is to answer 2 questions:
a) What pages are visitors viewing?
b) Where are they coming from (referral page)?

The tool takes a bit of practice to understand but in about 5 minutes you can gain an appreciation for which pages are valuable and where referrals are coming from.

When you have a bit of idle time, try out these tools.

Let me outline how our company is using this tool to help our clients. We have a few clients in the industry of global positioning systems (GPS). One is a manufacture of industrial hardware and applications, www.novatel.com and the other is a retail seller of mobile GPS units for consumers, www.gpscentral.ca. For both clients we are preparing a “gap analysis” to determine how their website is ranking for terms related to “gps”.

Note: The following data is aggregated industry related data, not data specific to GPSCentral.

Our analysis for companies like GPSCentral is a typically along the following lines:

• Enter the search term “gps”
• Adjust the filters to your specific interest: Web Search / Canada /  All subregions / Last 12 months / All Categories to get the resulting page and graph
• Click on News headlines to see related news
• Click on Forecast get future trends (you must select 2004 – present for this function to be available)

If you login using your Gmail account you can get additional detail related to search volumes. When logged in, the y-axis becomes a percentage scale with 0 being zero and 100 being the highest volume during the selected time period.

For the gap analysis example, our next step is to review the Top Searches and Rising Searches and determine how the website is performing for these specific terms. For example, the top search term listed is “gps garmin”. When we look at Google.ca we can see that the website is performing well for this term – 2nd and 3rd positions. The website is also listed on the first page of Google.ca for the next 4 terms including “garmin”, “gps canada”, “magellan gps”, and “magellan”.  But when we search for the 6th term on the list, “gps review”, www.GPSCentral.ca is not listed in the first 10 pages – room for improvement.

By using the “site” command in Google we can quickly determine that a pages has not been specifically optimized for “gps review”. A few pages on the website contain this term but none of the pages have “gps review” in the title of the web pages.

At this stage we have a few options:

1. Select one of the existing pages and optimize the page for this term.
2. Develop some new optimized content and add that page to the site.
3. Start a linking campaign to improve the performance of the existing page or the new page

We haven’t started yet, but we will over the next few weeks.

Contact me if you have comments, questions or suggestions.

Jeff Nelson

Try it out for yourself! You’ll be amazed.

-Stefanie-