The Cardinal Flaw in Research

I’ve heard people talk about building websites, and suggesting that you should not even go into business before researching to see whether it will succeed. As though research of what has been can tell you what will be. Keyword research, and market research, should never be considered as tools to set a course by - they are only tools to help KEEP you on course once you have chosen a course.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that research isn’t valuable. It is. But it is only one part of the equation, not the whole thing. People who tell you that you should choose a business based on the most popular keyword searches have got it all wrong, and have misinterpreted how such research should be used, and they do not understand the limitations of such research. It is a common “internet marketing” scam though - to promise that you can do a little research, build a tacky website, stick in some AdSense, and watch the money roll in. They could not be further from the truth - but they have also given the impression that you cannot succeed in a crowded market, and that any site built without doing popularity searches is doomed from the outset (when in fact, their advice is absolutely wrong, for a number of reasons).

SEO research and Market research share a common flaw:

They can only tell you what has been. They cannot tell you what will be.

On September 10, 2001, computers were booming, and on a growth trend. Food storage was flat, a fairly lifeless business after the Y2K boom had faded. September 12, 2001, computers were flat - except for a brief surge in laptop sales. Food storage, on the other hand, went through the roof. Two days before, keyword research would have told you to optimize for computer sales. Two days after, computer sales would not have been a wise choice. Conversely, two days before, food storage would have been a poor choice, whereas, two days after, you’d have been well advised to have ignored the grim reports six months earlier and had your food storage site well established.

That is an extreme situation, where something unexpected intruded. But things that are unexpected always intrude. A business that is doing well in a strong economy may struggle in a recession, whereas one that struggles in a healthy economy may gain in a recession. A new competitor may enter the scene, a new segment of the target market may spring up. Market or keyword research won’t tell you that those things are coming.

And they cannot even TOUCH an entire class of business: when you are doing something that has not been done before, coining new terms for it, carving out a market niche that isn’t even there when you start out, providing a product or service that people don’t even know they need until they see it. Research can’t tell you how well you’ll do with that, and it can’t really help you know anything other than which overlap industries you might want to pull into your marketing.

The information yielded by marketing and SEO research is only partially complete. It can be used to draw certain inferences, but outside of those, any conclusions drawn from it are dead wrong, because essential information is lacking for accuracy. It can tell you WHAT happened, within the questions they asked. It cannot tell you WHY, or what motivated people to do what they did. Without that information, many assumptions about what the numbers mean will be completely in error.

Some people are trying to use research to forecast success, and it cannot do that. It cannot predict individual intelligence or style, it cannot predict your determination or consistency. It cannot tell you what you should or should not do in your business. It is merely a facet of the information you need to weigh in the balance and consider, not a roadmap to tell you what business you should be operating. It only shows what has been, based on what is present at the time of the statistical analysis.

Use it as a guide to help you do what you do in the most effective way. As a guide for what people have been looking for, and a SUGGESTION of what they might continue to look for, it is good. But it doesn’t mean you can set out and not adjust, nor does it mean that people will behave in the future toward your business in the same way they’ve behaved toward similar ones in the past. It’s all in the individual differences from business to business.

Good SEO research does not mean you ignore your own business strengths and pay more attention to someone else’s idea of what you should do than to your own common sense. It means you decide what you’ll do, then use SEO research as a guide to help you know how to best present that.

For it to benefit a business, it must be used properly. It isn’t a helm to set the direction. It is only a rudder to help keep you on course after you have already determined your direction.

Search Engine Marketing Math

People seem to overlook the math. They rule on a gut feeling - a promise by a marketer, or their own reluctance to invest in order to see results.

Marketing math helps you to be able to predict what will work, and what won’t, and to pin down a marketer on whether they’ll offer reasonable assurances of meeting your goals.

It starts with some basic understanding of your business. You need the answer to this question:

1. What is your average profit margin on your product or service?
2. What is your average profit per visitor? This means, figure out your average profit per SALE, and then divide that by the conversion rate. If 1 in 50 customers buys, then you’ll take your average profit per sale, and divide that by 50. This will usually be a very low number.

If you are contracting for search engine marketing services, they come in three types, and the way that affordability is calculated is different for each type:

1. One time services, such as optimization. Affordability is calculated by figuring out how long it will take you to realize a return on your investment. Generally, you invest up front on this, and then watch for results. Good SEO should pay off within 6 months to a year, and should show indications long before that. This means that you’ll need to have a reasonable assurance that you can increase your sales enough to pay for the service within a reasonable time frame. 6 months to a year IS reasonable with this kind of service. Longer is NOT reasonable!

   Take your current monthly sales, times your average profit margin. Then calculate how many months it will take to pay off the deficit before you make a profit on it. If you are investing more than 6 months of profits from your business, then your budget may need readjusting. If you are a startup, and have no sales track record, then estimate what you anticipate earning in six months, and base your maximum budget on half of your expected profit margin in 6 months, times 6.

   Good SEO will last for about 1 1/2 to 2 years, before you’ll have to look at doing it again, but it also will typically set up a growth pattern. Results can be FAR more dramatic than this, we’ve seen clients who were in the black within 2 months.

2. Payment for backlinks, article marketing, blogging, or other ongoing services. We are, again, working with average profit margin, and average monthly profits. Knowing your profit per customer can help here, because it can help you know how much more traffic you need to get in order to get a certain amount of profit.

   To start though, take your current monthly profit, and determine what you can afford, and what you want to gain. If you want to gain a profit of $100 per month, you’ll be smart to INVEST $100 per month, and EXPECT to see that in about 4-8 months, depending on how aggressively competitive your industry is. The thing about this kind of marketing is, when it REACHES the point of profit, it then keeps on climbing, even without increasing your monthly investment, so when you reach the profit point, it is straight on up from there. You start with a deficit each month, which declines month by month (if the work is done right), and which reaches the profit point, and keeps climbing.

3. Pay Per Click. It is NOT profitable for most microbusinesses. But you can tell before you even start, whether it is likely to be.

   Start with your average profit per visitor. That is, average profit per sale, divided by number of visitors per sale. If it is less than $.05, stop right here. You won’t even get out the door with Pay Per Click, you’ll be in a losing situation right from the start. In order for PPC to work, you need a profit per visitor amount of at least $5, and even then, it is going to be tight, especially if you are paying for someone else to do the marketing for you.

   Pay Per Click NEVER works for small product industries where you are selling items for just a few dollars, and where the average sale per customer is low - for example, if you sell DVDs for $15 each, and your average customer only buys 1, then Pay Per Click isn’t even an option.

If you need assistance figuring out profit points and affordability of marketing, feel free to contact the author through this website. It can be confusing if you don’t understand how long it takes to work, and what it is supposed to do when it does work. A little math ahead of time though, can help you know what to expect, and how to know if it is working. It can lay the groundwork for spotting trends that will indicate that the method IS working, even before you reach the profit point.

The affordability and math equations are different for every business. You can’t make an assumption, until you’ve actually done the math for YOUR business.

Screen Your SEO Professional to Avoid Getting Taken

Part 3 of a 3 part series.

It’s all well and good to have an understanding of what good SEO is, and to know how people are scamming others in the SEO world, but if you have to hire someone, how do you tell the good ones from the bad ones?

In all fairness, more SEO bungling occurs from sheer ignorance or lack of experience than ever occurs from outright fraud. But if you end up with a bad job, you’ll feel the same either way. Knowing that site owners need firm guidelines to judge a professional ahead of time, we are suggesting the following screening points when hiring SEO professionals:

1. Look at the website of the professional in question. If it makes promises of fast results, page one placements, or recommends an automated system, they are a company who is not honest or knowledgeable.
2. Ask for references from clients. Check them out. This might seem like a no-brainer, but many people fail to do it. Look at the sites of the clients they refer you to, and make sure that you do not see red flag elements such as over-repetition, or keyword lists in the content.
3. If the professional quotes you a price, or makes any kind of promise before they have looked at your site, RUN! They are either so inexperienced they’ll hurt your site, or they are scamming.
4. A good professional should ask you questions about past site performance. They should check your current stats and standing and ask questions about your site structure. They should ask you questions about your target market, business goals, and details about your business so that they can target the optimization in a way that will actually attract your target market. If they fail to do this, then they do not understand the marketing aspects of SEO well enough to do an effective job. SEO is PERSONAL. If your professional is not personal, then they aren’t getting the point.
5. A good professional will work within your budget, and be willing to help you prioritize tasks for your business, so that you get the most important things done first.
6. A good professional should understand that startups and very small businesses have special needs for competing against larger businesses. If you talk to them, and do not hear some explanations of how you can gain good results even when competing against more powerful companies, walk away. They won’t be able to help you to achieve good results if they don’t understand that.
7. If you hire article marketing from an SEO professional, make sure you check out their writing ahead of time. If you are not impressed with it, and if it is not interesting enough to read, then don’t hire them. Good article marketing isn’t about keyword laden articles - it is about high quality, interesting, compelling writing that draws a reader in and informs them of something new. If you don’t feel that way about their writing, then they won’t produce anything better for your business, and anything less just doesn’t work.

This list of screening criteria should help you drastically improve your odds of getting someone who knows what they are doing.

Knowing Enough to Recognize Quality

Part 2 of a 3 part series.

SEO can be a confusing and obscure profession. It is just technical enough, and just controversial enough, that trying to learn it to start is confusing! It changes so fast that if you are reading a book off the shelf, chances are your information (or at least part of it) is outdated. In order to do it well, you have to keep up with the changes, and stay involved in the arena.

There are all kinds of people out there offering SEO services. But not all of them know what they are doing! A business owner can more easily judge the competency of a service provider if they have a clear understanding of what SEO really is, what the goals are, and what separates Good SEO from Bad, or Merely Adequate SEO.

SEO is nothing more than this:

A set of strategies to help search engines more accurately identify the content and purpose of your site, so that they can accurately index the site.

Notice the total absence of the words, “manipulate”, “trick”, “make”, or other words that would imply that you are expecting anything other than accuracy. When accuracy is achieved, then traffic comes to your site that consists of people who WANT what you have.

The prime goal is accuracy. If you focus on that, then you won’t fall into temporary traps for manipulating search engines.

Good SEO services involve some tactics and philosophies that are recognizable. Any business owner can learn to recognize these concepts:

1. Search Engine Optimization is about PEOPLE first. When done right, it works BECAUSE it is done first for people. It is about how people think, what they want to know, and particularly, what YOUR target market wants to know. Whenever search engines are placed over people in importance, the quality and effectiveness declines.
2. Content is the most important factor in good SEO. Keyword usage through a site happens naturally with good content, and never sounds like the keyword use was anything other than natural. Good content includes interesting writing, good product descriptions, and meaningful headings. Good content NEVER contains meaningless repetitions or keyword lists.
3. Tags are only a small part of the SEO picture. Some people will go through a site and put in title, meta, and alt tags, and think the site is done. Those things are NOT the most important things, though they should be done. Good SEO also includes good site structure, intelligent link and filenames, topically focused pages, well organized information, and clean coding.
4. There is a difference between having tags in place, and having GOOD tags in place. Careful crafting of human appealing titles and descriptions, with intelligent keyword usage is a far different thing than what many SEO “experts” install into a site, and the results that are gained will show the difference. Many site owners will put in title and metatags themselves, and miss the goal of optimizing them also, because they fail to fully understand the real purpose of the tags.
5. Good SEO will simultaneously meet 99% of the requirements for ADA Accessiblity in a small website. Two birds with one stone!
6. Good SEO will be prioritized according to the budget, site needs, and business needs. Good content is always the first priority. Good title tags are usually the second. In an image intensive site, good alt-tags may be very important. Other items are prioritized by what the current status is, and what the business goals are.
7. SEO Price Breakpoints are different for small businesses than they are for large ones. Things that are recommended for larger corporations may not be practical for a small business, and especially for microbusinesses and startups. Focus for this business group requires prioritizing for maximum results from minimum expenditure, by a professional who knows what that is for a very small business.
8. Strategies used for very small businesses may be different from strategies used for very large ones, especially if the business in question is competing in a high-competition niche. When small businesses compete with large businesses, they are up against someone who can always outgun them with frontdoor tactics. With SEO, there are a series of solid, perfectly legit “backdoor” tactics which allow a small business with a small budget to slowly and consistently gain an advantage and a market share, by going after the bits that nobody else is squabbling over. Individually those bits aren’t much, but collectively they add up to a very nice market share when you go after the lot of them. There are ways to do this which are highly cost effective (not all ways of doing it are, but the good ones for microbusiness get a lot of bang for the buck).

Good quality SEO prioritizes, and accomplishes more than just a single goal. It involves the entire site through all layers, and relies more on common sense and consistency than it does on any kind of tricks or secrets. It focuses on using LANGUAGE, not just keywords, in ways that put people at the fore of everything that is done.

Our third article will discuss what to look out for when hiring a professional to help you with SEO.

Getting Scammed in SEO

Part 1, of 3

I’ve seen it again and again - someone pays a “professional” for SEO, and wonders why there are no results - or worse, watches their traffic drop. So how you gonna know who to trust, and how you gonna keep from getting ripped off?

The first thing, is to be aware of what legitimate SEO services are:

1. They are not sold for $29 a month. No “search engine registration” services exist that are worth the money. This is not SEO - in fact, it is neither necessary, nor effective.

2. They cannot be automated. Automated SEO is a fraud. Every time. No matter who is selling it, it is worthless, and will not help you. SEO is about intelligent language use. Computers can’t begin to do that.

3. They are personal, and time intensive. Now… there are some things that can be done quickly and easily, but the most important things take some time. That means you will have to pay for quality. Good professionals can break it down into manageable sections so you can pay for it in blocks, and each one will give some results.

4. Good SEO involves working with the whole site. It affects content, first and foremost, but also is a part of the design, coding, layout, site organization and structure. This means a good expert will look beyond tags and headings to optimize your site.

5. Good optimization can be done on ANY kind of site - it does not matter whether it is a shopping cart, a plain HTML site, or a Content Management System. The degree to which each allows changes, and the manner in which they are performed is variable, but the most important things can always be done.

6. Good optimization does not involve illogical repetition. Period. If it feels to you like something has been repeated too many times to make good sense, or to look like it belongs there, it isn’t done right. Excessive repetition is not part of good SEO.

7. Good SEO is NOT provided by someone who promises that they can get your site onto the first page of Google! This is a scam tactic. ANYONE can get your site onto the first page of Google. No kidding. But the key point is to know WHAT they’ll put it there FOR. Legit SEO experts won’t promise a THING until they look at your site, and get a grasp of your marketing competition.

There is a vast gulf between bad SEO, and good SEO. And it ranges from barely effective, to highly effective. And good SEO won’t always be EVERYTHING that can be done - sometimes it is just the most important things within the budget that the site owner can afford.

Our next article will cover what site owners should know about SEO, to get a quality job.

Competitor’s Names in Keywords

Somehow in the SEO world, the tactics that spammers use seem to really start to catch on with the ignorant public (through publications by internet marketing scammers) a few months after the reasons why you should not use them have been publicized within the SEO field. This makes it very hard for beginners to sort the wheat from the chaff.

A spam tactic that still seems to be gaining ground within the “internet marketing” circles is that of putting competitor’s names in the keyword lists. In fact, this tactic has had some negative publicity lately, but only the experts have paid attention.

There are three main reasons why doing this is a bad idea.

1. Search engines frown on it. It is nothing more than keyword spamming, and it is recognizable by search engines as such. In fact, they pretty much consider any keywords that are in your keyword tags, but not in your content, to be irrelevant, and too many of them are flagged as spamming.
2. Search engines really only pay attention to the first 20 to 25 keywords. The rest are ignored. Frankly, you have more important keywords, more relevant ones, which should be given precedence. When the list is limited, you need to make every keyword count.
3. Legally, you can lose your business over this tactic. No joke. If you use your competitor’s names in the coding of your site (where you cannot put the trademark symbol), and you do not reference them in a way on your site that shows the trademark symbol, they can sue you for trademark infringement. Internet law is still evolving, but the standard is to relate offline law to internet law in a very direct way, and this issue has been no exception - you are using someone else’s tradename for your profit, which is long established as an illegal practice. Given recent lawsuits, there is every probability that you’d lose a suit involving use of competitor’s names in your keywords. They have more money than you, and can hire better lawyers than you can (otherwise you’d not be trying to capitalize on their success).  Many of them have people on staff whose job it is to go looking for tradename infringement - you would not believe how picky they can be! I’d give an example of something we actually experienced, but to do so, I’d be risking tradename infringement for the company in question!

The conclusion is short and simple:

Don’t do it.

It is a tactic which will harm your business, without bringing it one iota of benefit before it crashes on you.

Pagerank Perplexities

Following the grand tradition of SEO, pagerank has gone from being something you needed to understand in order to improve site traffic, to something that is now downgraded to just another facet in the big picture, as spammers have manipulated it and made it less and less of an issue.

Pagerank IS still something that affects your Search Engine Positioning. Various writers have speculated that because pages with low pageranks are higher in the listing than pages with high pageranks, that pagerank no longer has any value in search engine positioning. They have misinterpreted what pagerank was all about, and what it is still about.

All pagerank ever meant is:

All else being equal between two pages in a search engine rank, the one with the higher pagerank will be positioned over the one with the lower pagerank.

That is all it ever was. It was never meant to mean that if a good page and a bad page were competing for the same space, that the bad page would be ranked higher because of a higher pagerank.

Content, and other weight factors are MORE important factors. And in theory, they always have been. Google has just made more of an effort to ensure that their algorithms were less manipulatable through nothing other than pagerank.

Pagerank is gained through backlinks. But not just any backlinks, those which Google considers to be “good” backlinks. Exactly how accurately Google can measure backlink quality is up for debate, and probably always will be. But backlinks from spam sites don’t count, and various factors influence how much value is given to those that do.

The rule is (and always has been), get good backlinks. Get them in legitimate ways (good quality directory links, link swaps with people you know, article marketing, forum posting, etc), and don’t try to manipulate the system.

Good backlinks help your site get more traffic, both directly, and indirectly. Pagerank is just a quick number that lets you know whether you’re doing enough to be noticed.

SEO for Real People

The argument goes around… Do you optimize for people, or for Search Engines. And the answer is very simple, but rarely understood:

When proper optimization is done, it is more effective with BOTH people, and search engines.

The key to good SEO isn’t in manipulating search engines. It is in helping search engines ACCURATELY index your site - to index it in a way that help PEOPLE to find it.

When you do it right, it starts with understanding your target market. How they think, what they’ll put into a search engine, what they’ll want to see in a title or description, what they’ll expect to read in the first paragraph, and what they want you to deliver in the content.

If you get it right, then good SEO will increase the appeal for real people, as well as giving it higher search engine ranking.

Some experts say this a little differently, such as:

Write for people first, then optimize for search engines.

or

Use Keywords naturally.

The good SEO experts understand that it isn’t about whether Search Engines or People are the most important factor. It is ALL about people. It starts with figuring out how people think, progresses to appealing to those people to get them to click, then ends with giving them what you promised so that the click means something to them, and to you.

Less than that, and you are pretty much wasting your time.

Mining the Long Tail

Less frequently searched keywords are referred to as “long tail” keywords. They are worth going after if you are in a highly competitive niche, where getting top positions for high demand keywords is difficult or impractical. Long tail keywords are less often searched, but they are also almost invariably far less competitive. So the mere presence of them on a page will get traffic to them.

Long tail keywords are rarely words that you need to aggressively research. Rather, they are phrases that will naturally occur from good quality writing. Many of them cannot be accurately predicted, no matter how much research you do, because they are the keywords that have a larger degree of randomness to them.

There are three basic strategies to getting good long tail traffic results:

1. Good product or service descriptions. The descriptions you give to specific products or services are hugely important. Well-written, descriptive, and evocative explanations will enhance your SEO results, AND be more persuasive to your site visitors.

2. Good additional content pages. Adding well chosen, topically focused content pages to your website can enhance the ability your site has to draw visitors who are interested in what you have. This is partially an indirect approach - many will be there for the information only. Others will be drawn into the rest of your site and will convert to clients or customers. The key to this one is well-chosen, and well-written topic pages.

3. Additional websites or pages. This may be an infosite, a blog, a Squidoo or MySpace page (though those pages may be given less weight by search engines than a full website or blog), or any other additional, independent web presence. Other sites should be topically focused, and again, the key is good topic choice, and well-written content. Other websites can allow you to focus on one aspect of your business scope, and to draw in people in a “neutral” way. When you present information separate from your service or product site, it has higher credibility in the eyes of the reader. Forget doing this if you don’t intend to do it right. Shortcut sites will be ignored by search engines. They’ve got to be good quality, and to add to the substance of the web.

We have used all three of these tactics successfully with our clients. The tactic we choose has to do with how their business is set up, and what they are most easily able to sustain. We have also used them with our own business, and continue to do so. About 1/3 of the contacts that come to us from the web, come from one or another of our websites that is not our primary service website. Another significant number come from searches that lead to pages on our site that were not sales pages.

Start with high quality content. Well-written descriptions and explanations which draw people into the page. They’ll draw from search engines and they’ll invite again once they get to the page. Writing this kind of content is an art, and the effect of it is powerful enough to be worth paying for. Well written content, with well optimized pages is an unbeatable combination, while all the optimization and promotion in the world cannot make up for the lack of good content.

It is worth mining the long tail, especially if you are a microbusiness who is up against powerful competition that can outgun you on the optimization front - not that you should not optimize for the high demand keywords, you SHOULD. But you should also use the long tail “backdoor” tactic to gain the edge. Each long tail keyword has little power within itself. But combined, they can add up to a huge market share. Enough to make a small business very prosperous.

SEO - How to choose the right url.

To begin let’s point to one item - your url. 

If you already have an url registered, good for you, you are on your way. If you don’t already have an url perhaps we can help you find a great one.  As everyone knows you should use your main keyword (s) in your url.  You did know that, right?  Urls are parsed and words are picked out by the search engines so don’t sell yourself short on your url name.  Picking a good url can dramatically help your SEO efforts later on.  If you have already chosen your url and it does not have your main keyword (s) in it, do not despair.  You can work around that later. But if you have not chosen an url, here is how to get a great one.

Unless you are already branded, ie: HP, Campbells, Dell, Amazon, Weyerhaeuser, you need to get a descriptive url.  An url that will serve as your address.  Do not use your company name.  Huh?  That’s right.  Your company name goes on your web pages and not necessarily in your url.   No one will search for your company name.  They will search for whatever item they want to purchase.  Leave your company name out unless you can make it fit. 

Example: Let’s say you sell web services that include development, design and maintenance.  So you might want “web services” in the url.  Oh no, they are all taken you say.  Not so.  Try including your towns name before or after the term, like this:  wichitawebservices or webserviceswichita.  Wichita happens to be a metro area that includes my town of residence so I used that, clever? Not really but it is descriptive and tells the casual browser two things - what you do and where you do it from.  Both very important items. 

What if that’s already taken?  OK, move on to another choice. Let’s try this, use your state name or abbreviation - kswebservices or webservicesks.  This might be where you could use your company name if it is one word, ie: brownwebservices.  Or more description, like this: designwebservices, webservicesdesign.  The variations are many and wide flung.  Choose wisely and your url will help the search engines find you, where you live and work and/or exactly what you do. 

Very recently I happened to read some comments at a very highly touted website (SEO-wise) forum.  There were some heated comments regarding url’s and whether they are important as they pertain to SEO issues.  The expert there said “No, urls are just addresses, they have no meaning when it comes to SEO.”  That statement made me see RED.  The “expert” is dead wrong, urls DO count if they are good.  If they are not relevent to your business or location it’s OK too, it won’t hurt you, but a great url WILL help your SEO.  Some of the (so-called) experts are executives who have not worked in the trenches for a long time.   (OK, I have to say it: the expert in question looked like a lunkhead in her own forum! I just shook my head and then lol’d.)

I have been building and SEO-ing (is that a word?) web sites for a very long time. Everyday, day in and day out. Experience is a mean teacher.  Knowing what works and what doesn’t sticks in your head after you have done it over and over, about a bazillion times. You know this to be true from your own experiences, right?  Any expert (lunkhead) who says the url name does not matter is blowing smoke.  They are simply out of touch.

Next time: Domains.

See you on the flip flop. 

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