Windmills or Windbreaks? December 5, 2008
Posted by bohenriksen77 in Misc. Stuff, SEO.Tags: financial crisis, SEO
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When the winds of change are blowing, there are to kinds of people. People building windbreaks and people building windmills, which kind are you?
We’ve been asking that to a lot of clients lately. Because a lot of people are apparently building windbreaks instead of windmills. Some of our clients have contacted us, because the want to cancel their SEO agreement. The reason they want to cancel the agreement: ‘We all need to save money in these times of financial crisis.’ Then my next question is, are you stopping all your marketing efforts? I haven’t heard a single ‘yes’ to that question yet. So I begin to dig a bit deeper, trying to find the reason to why the cut their SEO efforts before any other online or offline marketing effort. The most common reason I’ve met, is that our clients doesn’t really understand what SEO is, and what it does for them. The second most common reason is that our clients doesn’t really understand the reports we’ve been giving them, so they really can’t see the value of it.
So we’ve startet improving our reporting, to really emphasize the value of our SEO solutions. Then we’ve begun educating our clients more in what SEO actually is. And last but not least, we’ve launched a service called Cross Optimisation where we focus on balancing your SEO and SEM investments to achieve optimal return. We’ve been able to reduce the AdWords investment with up to 50% for some of our clients while maintaining the same or higher return.
So my point here is, when then winds of change are blowing, build windmills. In marketing look at the ROI of your different efforts before stopping them. And if there is an area where you can’t see you ROI ask you instead of just cancelling it.
Other than that: Keep the money rolling, the financial crisis is just something we imagine.
Keyword strategies part I – the Mom test July 29, 2008
Posted by bohenriksen77 in SEO.Tags: keyword, keyword strategy, SEM, SEO, the mom test
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This is vacation week in Denmark, meaning that less than half of our company is at work, and the rest of us are strugling with the heat, we doen’t have A/C and rigth now there is about 86 degrees in the offices. So I thougth this migth be a good time for rambling about keyword strategies and how to pick good keywords in terms of SEO.
This first talk on keyword strategies, will be a very simple approach to getting started, which I’ve chosen to call the mom test. The principle behnd this way to find a good set af keywords to begin with, is to have someone without a deep knowledge, technical insigth or understanding of your products, services or business to help you, for example your mom. The reason for doing it this way, is that people with a good knowledge of the product, or people working with it every day, tend to be blind to the way their clients search. One example of this could be a computer parts webstore optimizing keywords for specific harddrives like ‘Hitachi CinemaStar 7K500 320GB’ because they always know what they want for themselves, but they migth have bigger success if they optimize keywords like ‘Cheap Hitachi harddrives’ or ‘Reliable harddisks’.
They point is, that even though you know every bit and piece of your business, you migth not know the how your users search for your products or services, so ask people who doesn’t know your business what they would search for, if they were to aquire your products or services.
End of part I, I’ll be back soon with part II.
SEO != 42 July 17, 2008
Posted by bohenriksen77 in SEO.Tags: search engine optimization, SEM, SEO, usability
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For those finding the title of this post a little cryptic i recommend reading the Wikipedia articles Operators in C and C++ and Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
In the time I have worked with SEO, most of the sales pitches I have heard regarding SEO and SEM, from our own sales staff, partners and competitors, has concluded that “If you wan’t your online business to succeed, all you need is SEO/SEM, and your ROI will skyrocket!”. I know and accept that salesmen tend to glorify the product, and will do almost anything to sell it. I know they will make it look like you doen’t need anything but SEO/SEM and you will be fine. But I disagree.
While I’m not a business genius, my understanding is that keeping a client happy means keeping a client, and it takes less effort to keep a client, than to gain a new client. Assuming that my simple business understanding is correct, I have fougth for a more holistic approach, where SEO is an important part of the foundation for online success, but not the one true answer.
My view on things is that SEO/SEM should go hand in hand with usability, design and market analysis. Having the best, most userfriendly website in the world won’t do anything good, if nobody can find it. Having lots of search engine top rankings won’t do anything good if people exit your website as soon as they get there, because it is ugly or userhostile. Even the best website with great rankings won’t do anything good for your business, if users can’t relate the website to the search they just did, so this is where market analysis comes in.
The market analyst in cooperation with the SEO/SEM can help tailor content and searchphrases to match your products and services, so that rankings on the rigth words will lead to qualified traffic. The market analyst together with the usablity and design teams will be able to apply a model like AIDA to make sure the relevant traffic has easy access to your conversion points, so you can earn your profits.
Summed up, when done rigth, visibility will lead to traffic which leads to conversions.
Googlicate content July 15, 2008
Posted by bohenriksen77 in SEO.Tags: duplicate content, googlicate content, search engine optimization, SEO
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Working in the R&D department of a SEO company, I often get the following two questions:
First people ask me “What is SEO?”, and after having answered that, or pointed people to the Wikipedia definition of SEO, they usually follow up by saying “That sounds like a nice thing, how do I do that on my website?”. Then when I start answering the question, or give them some general advice on SEO, they tend to either loose interest in it, or say that its to complicated for them to do.
Tor those who think it is too complicated, I must have failed in my explanation, for in my opinion SEO is a pretty simple concept. So I end up telling them to read Matt Cutt’s blog, for he often has som easy free advice on what to do, or at least on what not to do.
Then a little while ago I discussed SEO with technically savvy friend of mine, and we got into the details of duplicate content issues and stuff like that and he ended up saying “So one would rather have Googlicate content than duplicate content!”. I kind of like the him naming it Googlicate content, and have used it since, in my trying to make simple what good content is from a SEO point of view.
So after some thinking, rethinking and reformulating my (pretty long) rule of thumb on creating Googlicate content is:
When creating content for a specific keyword or keyphrase, have someone, preferably from your target audience, read the page. Then ask them if they would be satisfied if they found that page when searching for that keyword or keyphrase.
If they are satisfied, you should be satisfied, but most often there will be parts of the text that needs a rewrite or two. This is because the people writing the text typically has a deeper understanding of the product or service they are writing about, and then the text will be to complicated for the target audience.
Having said this, there is a lot more to SEO than good content. Before starting to write, you need to find the keywords/keyphrases that you will write to, and this is often a more complicated task than writing the text itself.
To sum up this post: When trying to write Googlicate content, think about the user, not the search engines. A good relevant user experience will result in good search engine rankings in the long run.
