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.

1. The importance of the tail varies tremendously
2. People search differently for different types of services/products.
3. The importance of the tail does not depend on the size of the search spend.
4. The tail is most important for SKU-based commodity retailers.
5. The tail is critically important for some advertisers.

I love the way Damon James in our company summarized the article. His conclusion is, “For bigger websites (lots of pages) and companies with lots of discretionary funds, the long-tail is a good thing. For smaller websites (limited real estate) and companies with limited dollars, (unless they want to do it themselves), not so much.”

One of our strategies is to use SEO techniques to go after keywords that are in the middle of the tail and pay-per-click campaigns to catch keywords on the long tail.

The bottom line is that most companies have to look at the value of keywords in the long tail and determine the value. More often than not setting up a pay-per-click campaign is the best way to go.

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

Simple diagram. Great descriptions. Easy to navigate. Clear. Well put together.

Enjoy!

Essentially, if you are looking to make changes to your account, you can click on this tab and it will give you suggestions on how you could improve the account. The tool is new so right now there are only Budget and Keyword changes ideas but there is a promise that there is more to come.

I tried this tool out on a client of ours and found that, of course, Google wants me to increase the budget and add keywords. What was surprising though, is that the increase was only $0.60/day! This really won’t make them a ton of extra money but according to the tool, will increase the traffic by an estimated 121 clicks/month.

I am always a bit skeptical of new Google tools because I am never sure if the tools are meant to help the advertiser or Google but this one seems to be not so terrible – if you always keep in mind that Google is a business and they need to make money!

Here is a link to some more information about the Opportunities tab which I have actually used a few times. There are good keyword suggestions which you may have missed. For the most part though, it is just a way to check you are on the right track.

There is also another blog post about this that I received a while ago and would like to share.

Matt Olah

As a challenge, I offered to set-up the website for the price of dinner. He agreed and the barbequed steak dinner was exceptional.

Our first step was to choose a platform for the website. We wanted a website development platform that was cheap, easy to use, quick to set-u, easy to change content, had functional template designs and would work with search engines.  We considered the following sites:
- www.siteground.com using WordPress
- www.kwiksites.com/admin/
- www.citymax.com

We reviewed each platform and selected CityMax for a few reasons:
- you can set-up a site first and pay later
- they had a template with houses on it that worked well for Gord’s business
- the price was  $17.98 per month for 6 months (cheaper for a year subscription)

The URL of the website is www.whiterockstucco.com.

What I didn’t know is if the site would be search engine friendly. Below are the steps that we took to develop the pages, optimize the pages, start a linking campaign and begin to market the site online.

1. Adding Content
The first task was to add content and images which Gord did. He was even able to switch out the images of the houses in the template and add images of his work on customer’s houses.

2. Tracking Visitors
To measure performance, we wanted to track the number of visitors to the site. CityMax uses HitLinks which looks fine but I prefer Google Analytics.  Once we set-up an account adding the JavaScript code for Google Analytics was pretty simple because we could edit the HTML code of the template.

3. Selecting Keywords
The third step was keyword research which we did using WordTrackers Free Keyword Tool. For now we are focusing on 3 keyword phrases: Calgary Stucco, Synthetic Stucco Finishes, and Stucco Exteriors. We will be adding more phrases later. We avoided phrases related to “how to” and “do it yourself” since neither will generate business for Gord.

4. Optimizating
Next, we wanted to optimize the source code of the site so that search engines could find keywords easily and index the site into their inventory. This was easy using the Easy Editor and HTML Editor in the CMS.

5. Creating In-bound Links
Everyone knows that you need in-bound links to a website in order to get higher rankings on the natural (organic) results. But getting links to a new site for minimal cost and effort can be tricky. Our approach for an initial linking campaign was to submit the site to a variety of search engines and business directories using online submission programs. www.freewebsubmission.com and www.evrsoft.com/fastsubmit/ were simple and easy. I doubt they will be effective to get top rankings but this is a start. We will do an aggressive linking campaign later.

6. Marketing Online
Next, we set-up an account with Google AdWords to start driving some traffic to the website. One limitation of CityMax is that the Contact Us page has been created using JavaScript, so there is no separate URL for a Thank You page. Typically, when using Google AdWords, we would add a little snippet of code to the Thank You page so that every time the form is filled out a “conversion” is recorded when the Thank You page is activated. Unfortunately, this is not possible with CityMax.

7. Testing
The final step was to test the coding of the site. We did this by looking at the text of the site using Anduro’s online tool called SEO-Browser. We typed in the URL, parsed the site and then reviewed details in Advanced mode. The site looks pretty good but there is still room for improvement.

Results So Far:
We set the site up last week and started the advertising online on Saturday. So far, we have spent just over $100 for hosting and we set the online advertising budget at $200 per month. To date we have had 10 visitors to the site.

Jeff Nelson

In the PPC world, a useful list of words is the negative keyword list. This is a list comprised of terms you DO NOT want your ads to show for. It is important to use negative keywords. Building a negative keyword list can help improve your relevancy (which increases your quality score, which lowers your bids, etc etc!), improve your CTR and help with your overall ROI since you are no longer paying for traffic you are not interested in or that is not interested in you.

Without negative keywords, you are potentially paying for traffic you are not in the least bit interested in. If your keyword is “Snow removal calgary” as a broad match term, you don’t want to be showing up for “snowman building contest in whistler”, so you could add “snowman” and “whistler” as negative keywords.

Negative impressions have a big impact on all sorts of things in your PPC campaign. Take the previous example of the snow removal company. They are showing up for all sorts of terms with the word “snow” in it but users aren’t clicking on the ads. This now drives up impressions and leaves clicks low. This causes the CTR to be low which decreases the quality score, which drives up your costs! Or, someone who is searching for the snowman building contest actually clicks on the ad – good for the CTR, bad for your budget. You now have wasted $1.50 or whatever your bid is on nothing at all! Now if this happens 10 times a day, you just threw $15 out the window. Now multiply that over a month. You get the picture.

Google has a great report called the Search Query Report which allows you to see which terms users have actually searched for AND have seen your ad as a result of it. This is a great report to use when building your negative keyword list. If there is a word on there that is not relevant, add it to the list. Keep adding words to this list. Running this report once a month or once every couple of months will allow you to build a nice negative keyword list and eventually you will be showing mainly for the terms which are profitable for you!

Use caution when adding negative keywords though. You don’t want your negative keyword list to limit your searches. Make sure you are adding only those terms that really are irrelevant to your campaign.

If you need help with your account or have any questions, contact us here at Anduro Marketing!

We obtain this data from clickstream reports such as Google Analytics and ranking reports.

The basic metrics that we track for all clients include:
- visitors
- page views
- inbound links
- percentage of target keywords that are listed on the first 3 pages of SERPs
- percentage of visitors from search engines

We create graphs that include 13 months and a trend line so that we can compare data to the previous year. Below is an actual graph from one of our clients tracking visitors:

For each client we also track specific metric unique to that client.

Setting up and tracking KPI’s is one of Anduro’s unique skills. Our clients love the way we deliver and measure results.