All posts in Search Engine Optimization

The cheapest isn’t always the best

by Chris M on December 19, 2012 in Business, My Life, Search Engine Optimization with 7 Comments

I’m not one for pitching on projects as I believe building business relationships on trust is far more concrete than doing some fancy presentation and winning the work – of course, this applies to both sides, the company and the provider. That is not to say that it isn’t important to communicate what one is able to do, please don’t get me wrong, I just don’t feel that a flashy presso is an approach that is better than building the trust. I also understand that sometimes you have to pitch, but in most of my cases I like to get to know potential clients before entering into business relationships, it’s worked very well for me.

A few months ago I was involved in a situation where there was a level of pitching involved, I did what I had to do, I also went for the trust angle and my offering and costings were very good – I went in lower than usual as it was a client I would have very much liked to have worked for as the brand shared a lot of my feelings. The pitch went well, the client liked me and I was fairly confident that I would get the work. A month went by, I sent through a follow up email and the client replied positively, but explained that it was going to be a slow process – I’m happy with that and completely understand.

I didn’t land the project.

My company is fairly new and I wanted to understand why I hadn’t landed the project so I popped the client a reply thanking them for letting me know (I truly appreciate being told when I don’t land work) and asked for some advise, was my pitch bad, did I quote incorrectly or anything that I could take and work on for the next time. The response was very polite and it boiled down purely to cost. I was a little shocked by this, but I was given some insight into the client’s budget at the time, so I thanked the client and went on with business.

Now, today, a few months later the brand popped up in passing conversation, completely randomly, and I decided to head back to the office and have a look at the website and see how things were going. My experience in SEO allows me to quickly look at a website and identify some of the key tasks any SEO company would immediately implement on a website, such as: meta data, sitemaps, backlink profile and so forth. Now, most of us know that meta data is no longer the be all and end all when it comes to SEO (if you didn’t know that, you do now). However, although it’s not a heavy ranking factor, it’s still incredibly important to make sure that it’s relevant, suited to the page’s content, not duplicate and is user friendly for when the results are displayed by Google, Bing and so forth. On this client’s website, all the meta data hasn’t been updated, it includes keywords that are irrelevant and in many cases, they’re duplicate! The website runs on WordPress, I’ve seen the backend, so I know it’s not a case of being a strong CMS that doesn’t have the functionality to update meta data uniquely. I also noticed that the sitemap is old, it doesn’t take any of the new pages that the client had just created when I met them into account and there’s no sign of any changes to the link profile. The list does go on, but for the sake of this post I shall not bore you. Oh, and the website’s rank for the keywords they were interested in haven’t changed one bit, I compared it to the report I pulled when I was pitching.

This sort of thing pains me, not because I didn’t win the work (sure, that plays a part), but mostly because I know that I could have done a better job, an ethical job and a job that the client would be able to see the result of. I can’t help but think that the company who won the pitch quoted really low, landed the client and has honestly done absolutely nothing – probably sends them a monthly report with some complicated graphs and keyword lists that make it seem like a lot is happening. It just feels wrong to me, horribly wrong, when there are SEOs and inbound marketers out there doing great ethical work, these cowboys and flyby nighters are giving the industry a bad name.

Now, I know this is life and I know that this happens in all industries, so I’m certainly not saying this is all about SEO, but in this case it was and it infuriates me that these great people (the client) are not getting what they are paying for. It also makes me mad that I could have landed an incredibly nice client and done some amazing work.

Perhaps I should email the client and touch base?

less than sign, forward slash, rant, greater than sign

Understanding more about (not provided)

by Chris M on September 18, 2012 in Search Engine Optimization with 2 Comments

It wasn’t too long ago that the SEO industry went up in arms about Google increasing privacy levels and showing (not provided) for keyword searches performed by logged in Google users in Google Analytics accounts. Of course, not seeing what keywords people were searching for and arriving at your website was a huge less of intelligence.

I’ve been working on an account at iMod Digital that receives a great deal of (not provided) data and I’ve investigated ways to extract intelligence so that the data isn’t wasted. As the months go by, we’ll all see more and more (not provided) results in our accounts, so let’s find ways to work around it.

I wrote an advanced segment in Google Analytics, quite a simple one, which shows us what the person’s intention was when they performed a search and arrived at the website. I might not know what they keyword is exactly, but I’ll know their intention and if the website is set up correctly and keywords are being tracked, it’s not too difficult to determine which keyword they were searching for.

The advanced segment can be seen below, and you want to view this segment when you’re looking at “All Pages” under “Site Content” in Google Analytics:

Below is an example of the output provided when applying the advanced segment to the content on the website:

As you can see, I’m able to see which pages, that users who arrived as (not provided),  was arriving at. From this I can get some intelligence as to what keywords they were more than likely searching for, amongst other things.

If you’d like to skip setting up the segment yourself, you can simply click here, choose the profile you want to add the segment to and click save – it’ll automatically add the segment to your Google Analytics account.

Quite a useful little snippet, I certainly enjoy using it!

Nerd?

by Chris M on August 27, 2012 in Humour, Search Engine Optimization with 4 Comments

Right, so who’s a nerd?

The 2012 SEO Industry Survey

by Chris M on August 21, 2012 in Search Engine Optimization with No comments

The day has finally come, the Search Engine Optimization survey results have been released and they’re full of awesome goodness! Call me a geek, but damn do I get excited every year when these results are launched.

Take it all in folks:

 

References:

We hope that you find this information useful, big thanks to the folks at SEOmoz for putting the survey together and sharing the information in such a useful manner!

by Chris M on July 16, 2012 in Humour, Search Engine Optimization with No comments

This is just brilliant:

Nominate Cape Town for Moz Meetup!

by Chris M on July 15, 2012 in Cape Town, Search Engine Optimization with 1 Comment

SEOmoz is a company based in Seattle that builds SEO tools and hosts the web’s most vibrant SEO community. If you’re in the SEO industry or even have an interest, you’ll have heard of SEOmoz and the incredible things they do.

SEOmoz travels the world every year through a program they call MozCation – this is an effort for them to meet incredible people around the world and this year they’ve opened up their destinations for the public to decide. Quite simply, you can nominate your city and two cities get chosen!

So, I’m reaching out, imagine having the team to Silicon Cape?!

In order to nominate Cape Town, all you need to do is Retweet my tweet:

 

Let’s bring these SEOs to Silicon Cape, let’s show them what we’re made of!

Duplicate design SEO penalty

by Chris M on June 22, 2012 in Search Engine Optimization with 4 Comments

Penguin, Panda, Penguin, Panda, Penguin, Panda – two algorithm changes by Google that any SEO should know a great deal about. We all know that link building isn’t like it used to be, cheap links, buying links and all of that are becoming less and less popular, in fact, if an SEO talks a lot about link building, I would stay well away (Disclaimer: Link building still plays a big role, but on low to medium budgets, you aren’t going to get quality links).

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about today is a topic that really interests me and that is the topic of duplicate design now having a negative effect on how a website ranks on the Internet. Say what? Yup, if you have a duplicate design, you will be penalized. So what does this say about the theme houses such as WooThemes, ThemeForest, Elegant Themes, eFrog Themes, Themezilla and all the other competitors in the premium WordPress market? That industry is already horribly saturated, but what now if people aren’t going to be even less inclined to purchase a theme if they know it’s going to have a negative effect on their rankings? Of course, there are sites that have exceptional content and will still rank, but the average person isn’t capable of writing exceptional content so will this person be penalized for purchasing a theme and using it along with thousands of others?

I completely understand why Google would take this factor into account for ranking purposes, it makes complete sense, but regardless of whether it makes sense or not, is it something that is fair? The reason I ask that question is because not everyone has the funds to hire a great designer and then a great developer to create theme a website, so what should they be doing if they want to rank well and not suffer a penalty for using a repurposed theme?

Here’s a good video a friend of mine found and sent to me, it’s worth the watch:

What do you think, should Google be penalizing people for having duplicate designs?

Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal) is a legend

by Chris M on June 12, 2012 in Guru's, Humour, Search Engine Optimization with 11 Comments

The Oatmeal is a hugely popular comedy website run by Matthew Inman. Wild fire hit today when Matthew released a comic outlining his recent experience with a competitor who had been stealing his work and publishing it without credit. Matthew blogged about the competitor flaming him for stealing his work and the competitor has now sent Matthew legal letters claiming slander and $20,000 as compensation.

The comic Matthew wrote can be seen here and is probably one of the funniest posts I’ve ever seen on The Oatmeal, huge respect to Matthew for putting that together and just tying it up perfectly. I recommend reading it.

At the end of the day, Matthew has decided to instead of giving this awful competitor the money, he will instead raise $20,000 and donate it to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society as the money will be better spent there than being used by a thief – or at least that’s how I see it.

As of launching the donations channel, over $45,000 as already been raised and there are still 15 days left to donate – that’s quite an incredible support base he has and big props to him for pulling this off so elegantly.

UPDATE: 24 hours later and he’s raised $105,239 already!

For those of you who didn’t know – Matthew was the CTO at, what for it, SEOmoz several years ago – I bet you didn’t know that (The SEO junkies will appreciate all of this from another level). Matthew was involved in the web design and development side, and wrote a lot of the foundations for the tools we know today. He left SEOmoz in 2007 to pursue his own dreams. I can still remember reading his work all those years ago!

What a brilliantly executed “campaign” for good cause.

Ranking Number 1 on Google by Matt Cutts

by Chris M on May 15, 2012 in Humour, Search Engine Optimization with 8 Comments

The answer is here:

Analytics: Email Schedule & PDF Export are BACK!

by Chris M on March 25, 2012 in Search Engine Optimization with No comments

I can’t believe it, after thousands and thousands of complaints, including my very own blog post, Google have rolled out an update and Email Report Scheduling and PDF Exporting are back!

Both features are in BETA mode, so expect a couple problems, but wow, I’m over the moon that they’re back. These are two features that I used to use religiously, and I know that many other SEOs and website authors did as well.

Well done Google (took long enough)!

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