Regardless of business size, selecting a partner to help develop your search marketing can be a confusing and at best daunting experience. To the uninitiated, SEO at best can appear like a dark art and this perception is certainly not helped by the shroud of secrecy that Google keeps about the true nature of their engine. This quick guide, although by no means exhaustive, is aimed to help business decision make an informed decision when choosing the right agency to work on a SEO project.
Black, white and grey hats – the importance of ethical SEO
A problem, particularly for small businesses, is that there is still what can be best described as cowboys operating, often making wild claims of getting your company to the top position of Google within weeks. Although, a part of SEO has historically been about reverse engineering the search engines algorithms to perform better than your competitors, there is a dividing line between what is considered acceptable. What at first may appear to gain you a short term boost in rankings can often run the risk of having your website removed from the search engine index indefinitely.
Black hat techniques are sometimes referred to as search engine spamming. One example is repeating an important keyphrase many times on the home page. Another is using text that is the same colour as the background of the page, so the keyphrase is visible to the search robots but not to the human reader. Engineering pages for robots is a practice known as “cloaking”. Other well-known examples are doorway and visibly optimised pages and the use of link-farms.
Such approaches should always be avoided if you care about long-term success. Only ever talk to a search optimiser who wears a white hat (although many may wear a grey one). A white hat approach uses an ethical approach that conforms to best practice set out by the search engines. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself “Does this aspect of a search imitative make the visitor experience or the way the brand is presented better or worse”.
Always ask a potential agency of examples of how they achieved success for clients. If they don’t list ethical techniques such as Keyword Analysis, On Page Optimisation, and SEO Link Building and above all creating relevant and engaging content head for the hills.
Does size matter?
Big brands tend to naturally choose one of the bigger, better known SEO agencies. Large agencies will have a higher daily rate but will have the experience of delivering results and their size gives them the chance to hire staff with a wide variety of skills. Change is constant in this world, so the more time a company can dedicate to staff education the better. In smaller agencies, a lot of time will be spent simply learning on the job and their time may be split between several clients.
However, there is also a risk with selecting a large search-marketing agency. If a client is relatively low value, then they may get less attention from account managers and may not get the best available SEO technicians. A smaller company may also have the motivation to go the extra mile to help build reputation so big doesn’t always equate to better. The final decision will usually be dictated by size of budget but remember SEO is a long term strategy and most agencies will insist on a minimum contract period of 6 to 12 months, with appropriate exit clauses.
Get with the program
Search marketing is a hugely dynamic discipline; what is accepted practice today can be outdated by the next. Although it is an exciting time to be involved in the sector, more and more search practitioners are being left behind, adhering to what used to work and sticking with habits even if they don’t produce tangible results. But how do you tell the search-marketing dinosaurs apart from the more progressive and cutting edge professionals? The following is a quick overview of some of the tell tale signs.
Too much emphasis on keyword density
Keyword or keyphrase density remains a useful SEO technique. It aims to sensibly place key search terms into your web copy (typically repeated to a predestined percentage). But over reliance on density of keywords is a far too simplistic method to estimate what is a hugely complicated process carried out by all the engines to determine the relevance of page content.
What are more important is context, relevance and meaning. Consider the following scenario; Google has two different pages to consider when returning search results for the term The Rolling Stones. One has the phrase Rolling Stones but in context of a scientific study of the rate of movement of rocks down a mountainside, the other is a biopic of the rock group containing relevant words such as Mick Jagger etc – you get the picture. We can safely assume that the page that ranks higher will be the latter. As a search engine’s value is measured by the relevance of its results to the users intention, it must judge content not by how many times a word appears but the content of the supporting copy. Therefore, creating expert copy that uses relevant and authoritative language will always be far more important part of an overall strategy rather than simply repeating certain words.
They don’t mention creating content for your site
“Content is king” has always been the mantra of search professionals although not everyone practices what they preach. Alarm bells should start to ring if an agency doesn’t display a creative approach to adding new and compelling content to your site. Search engines just love regularly updated content, and tools such as blogs are one of the best vehicles for achieving this (it also generates extra content from contributors).
Don’t have an integrated approach to Link Building/Online PR
Although link building has long been a central to any SEO strategy, gone are the days when the accumulation of large volumes of inbound links was a fruitful exercise. Gaining relevant inbound links from high-ranking websites requires an approach that is truly multi-disciplinary and collaboration with your PR team is pre-requisite for any successful natural search campaign. Specific promotions, for example, should focus on seeding content throughout a wide range of targeted websites and a variety of other online channels such as social media and news aggregators.
Lack of in-depth tracking and reporting
Constant reporting is crucial to the DNA of SEO. In order to assess and measure the relative success of any campaign, monthly reports historically normally show page rank for a wide variety of targeted keyphrases with associated conversion rates. However, when assessing path to conversion metrics, most tracking software fails to give a true picture of user journey. For example, a sale may be attributed to a click from an affiliate banner ad or PPC ad without showing that the same user may have previously found the same product via an organic search. Without using the latest, most sophisticated tracking software, crucial information is usually missing that would otherwise let us see the true performance of your organic traffic.
Of course, by the time you probably read this current thinking would have probably moved on…