Generalisation Never Makes For An Intelligent Argument – Does It?
I had intended to stay out of the recent debate on seo being a con, or seo being spammers, but it irks me when people with an audience misrepresent SEO. So many folk already comment on the seo ‘industry’ (yawn) and news I often can’t be bothered. But it has sparked some healthy debate here in the Hobo studio so…
First, to illustrate my point, here’s a an everyday small business client site we took on in July (I’ve consulted with the client in the past on other projects).
They had a FANTASTIC little ecommerce site (@1,000 products) – very well designed and built by another web dev company). Unique well written content. Unique page titles. Absolutely nothing wrong with it.
But – NO TRAFFIC from Google for (more than) 6 months!
The customer asked us SEO to get involved.
Here’s what the same customer made in the last 4 WEEKS with that rise in relevant traffic.
Not including a pretty penny from reffering sites 
If you listen to Paul Boag (who’s obviously a talented designer), hey all my client needed is a copywriter and all seo is “manipulative”. Google wants great content – that is correct, but how does it rank content? Yes, via links. He misses this totally out in his podcast.
Mmmm….. I’d love to see that strategy alone at work for (just about any ecommerce site) and in any competitive niche industry where people use a myriad of strategies including seo, linkbuilding, social media, pr networks, paid links oh AND that copywriter, to rank for terms. Look out you don’t walk around a corner into any gun fights with that knife you have there.
By the way, original “compelling content” – so easy to create isn’t it – on a site with no links and no audience and no online business authority is as useful as boring, useless content. It won’t be FOUND and won’t be READ and won’t be ACTED upon. Googlebot is stupid – it cant tell if content is good or not unless other pages links to it.
If my client listened to Derek who can rank for ‘Derek’ my client wouldn’t have called a seo company to identify why he got no Google love.
Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing.
He’d have been worried we’d have taken his money and buggered off to finance our international drugs & arms smuggling operations with our seo scamming and hacking buddies.
Generalisations are of course, the foundation of intelligent debate of course, as we all know. 
Generalisations make for excellent link bait though.
Anyway how did we achieve these results for this particular client? It was obvious there was nothing wrong with the site or the content….
- We quickly identified this site had no REAL pagerank = no trust, no authority, no ranking ability. That’s a side effect of having a weak link profile by the way.
- MOST IMPORTANTLY – We had to identify some trusted sites we could get links from that transferred trust and ranking ability. We did.
- A few Press releases to tell the world about the site
- A relatively small ongoing article submission and directory linkbuilding program
There was no need to examine the linkbuilding competition in this case – though often there is. No need to buy any crap links – I don’t. No need for any new content. No need for any fancy Google xml integration. No need to redesign the site.
A copyrighter would have been as useful as a free solar panels powered flashlight in this case. Building a good site was a mute point.
IT WAS LINKS FROM TRUSTED PAGES THE CLIENT SITE NEEDED.
Fact is – Every single site is different, sits in a vertical with a different level of competition for every keyword or traffic stream, and needs a different strategy. There’s no one size fits all magic button to press to get traffic to a site. Some folk have a lot of domain authority, some know the right people, or have access to an audience already – indeed, all they might need is a copywriter – or indeed, some pap to write or drone on about today.
They, however, are in the minority of sites. Most of the clients I work with have nothing to start with and are in a (sorry! lols) boring industry few write about.
Fact is. It’s not a seo’s fault Google is a links based search engine. In one respect, Google doesn’t even CARE what content you have on your site (although it’s better these days at hiding this). Humans do of course so at some point you will need that content so that’s why we are a creative, content focused search marketing agency. I am an SEO in that mix.
Fact is – a successful website needs good people working on every aspect of the site. The client needs to deliver. The web developer. The copywriter. The seo. The linkbuilder. The host. – everybody. You need good folk from every industry and there’s plenty of them. I’d never say you don’t need ANYBODY or rule out an entire industry. The more good people you have on your team the more likely you’ll win.
Not only me either who was bemused by the debate:
- http://www.seobook.com/seo-scam
- http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/detox-your-web-development-team/
- http://searchengineland.com/an-open-letter-to-derek-powazek-on-the-value-of-seo-27680
- http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/11-reasons-why-you-dont-need-seo-ht-powazek.html
- http://www.ask-kalena.com/seo/thank-you-derek-powazek-but/
- and many more….
Maybe designers should stick to talking about design, and let seo talk seo – we find enough to argue about amongst ourselves without outside ‘help’.
Right – back to work. I have a client with an excellent site who’s going to phone me shortly to ask why his excellent, pretty and well structured site, with original content isn’t top ten for his Christmas terms yet.
Written by Shaun Anderson
Shaun, great article in terms of showing how SEO really can work for your business – very often potential clients are often sceptical about what we can acheive for them, so if you put it to them in terms of graphs that show an increase in a) traffic and b) money then you’re going about things in the right way, forunately, we are in a position to demonstrate our efforts in teh same way:
http://www.webmarketingadvisor.com/SEO-blog/dental-practices-must-use-wma-for-internet-marketing-seo-45297-27-and-63-new-patients-in-90-days-for-3-5k
Of course, graphs don’t show whether the methods used were manipulative, blackhat, whitehat, whatever but as long as you’re transparent in what you’re doing it should avoid unfounded critiscm from other areas of expertise.
As for designers, I’ve had enough of them hinder my webuilding/optimising proceeses to be able to say designers only take care of their own indulgences when they’re designing a website, but that’s another story, and probably ultimately not true…. (well not of every designer anyway)
Does your client not use Google Base? Or are the stats being merged with Google Organic?
I have serious love for Google Base this year, for clients with a reasonable amount of products it has been representing an impressive portion of the traffic and sales.
I had a listen to Paul’s podcast and I’m pretty much speechless…
You can generate the greatest piece of content in the world but it still needs disseminated. How he doesn’t even mention this is beyond me.
There are numerous tools and services out there that on the surface, make a certain level of distribution pretty straightforward to achieve but if you’ve got a real, kick-ass, game-changing piece of content waiting in the wings then it deserves to be plugged in to part of a wider campaign to increase your search engine prominence and is ultimately just another weapon in the arsenal.
As a company, we don’t do SEO. Most of the clients we start working with aren’t quite ready for the commitment (financial and otherwise) that serious SEO requires. We do, however, advise clients on doing the basic strands of website optimisation, directory registrations, Local Business Centre listing tidy ups etc as it’s amazing how easily these are missed by time-pressed clients.
These processes in themselves won’t have any really meaningful impact on SERPS but it leaves the path clear for further SEO stuff and that’s where I’d have no qualms in bringing a company like Hobo in…
This wasn’t supposed to turn into an advert for Hobo, but there you go.
@James – From the get go the site wasn’t quite in Google Shopping though it is now (unoptimised though – I haven’t had a chance to look to see why Base is not performing as much as it should be – it’s my next task on this site after I finish the linkbuilding kick).
@Dave – I can assure you, no manipulitive or spammy tactics. Simple linkbuilding – no rocket science.
I have a few simple rules.
• Dont embarrass myself
• Don’t embarrass the client
• Don’t get the client banned
• Don’t be a nuissance to other sites when linkbuilding
i’m no longer sure about the “no links + no authority = won’t be FOUND, won’t be READ and won’t be ACTED upon”? Some recent results on one of my personal projects, is making me think that part of this article might itself be generalising..?
aforementioned project of mine has no links, no authority, is relatively new, but is being found (w/ low volume but very highly-targeted traffic), is being read (w/ avg pageviews of 14 pgs), has bounce rates < 1%, and therefore has me thinking it may have potential.
mind you, at this stage it's generating zero revenue, and i'm thinking the success is much-assisted by the competition being less-than-optimised. but being an SEO hack, with much-less-than your level of understanding, i'm worried about me being banned! even though it's all white and no black.
well that's not entirely true, and that's part of the problem with SEO; if you're not an expert, everything has a tinge of grey.
Of course, it’s all dependant on what your punting and everything is grey. Every site is different as I say. In the example above, I am talking about run of the mill ecommerce sites, with products that are available on other sites (but with original content of course).
I can only talk from my experience. I have my own projects and I just DONT EXPECT THEM TO MAKE MONEY till I start linkbuilding to them. Even great content needs to be found, and found by people who will then promote it further.
If I had REALLLY GREAT CONTENT I would CERTAINLY NOT sit back and wait for others to find it – I’d be putting it in front of others.
Hi Shaun, when you say “simple linkbuilding — no rocket science”, I have to say I think link building is anything but simple. I have to say I find it one of the hardest SEO tasks because I have no control over it. It is tedious, arduous and just plain hard to do. What would be your number one tip? And please don’t say write great content because let’s be honest — it’s hard to write riveting content about, say, a toaster!
People I have spoken to in the field say that it is sometimes about bribery (which I can’t believe we have come to) I’ve also been told that commenting on blogs and forums is important even if they are all no follow. What are your thoughts on this?
When I see nofollow on blog comments, I think I believe Google doesn’t pass pagerank or ranking ability throught them. I have a few thoughts on this I will ask for discussion next week.
Ha ha I would never say jUST write great content – that’s a cop out! I am going to do a blog post on that one tomorrow – I usually don’t do weekend blogging but it’s sort of a test anyway this weekend (which is after all very important too)…..