Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

My mom sent me another article today about the Detroit auto industry and yet another round of layoffs which continue to decimate the Michigan economy. On a side note, if you didn’t know, Michigan has one of our hardest hit economies right now as a result of the entire state leaning on one industry for over a century, but that’s for another time.

The article got me thinking though about risk. Risk is inherent in any online campaign - be it SEO, SEM, a website launch, an ad campaign, anything. Here’s some questions you should ask yourself before, during, and after any SEO campaign.

What happens if you’re successful?

• Does your client have enough inventory to support a surge in website traffic?
• Can they handle a large volume of sales leads?
• Are their pages optimized for conversions?
• Can you report the metrics they want for success?
• Is there website setup to handle large volumes of traffic?
• If it crashes, do they have a contingency plan?
• What’s your next move if you’re a marketing/search agency and you get to be #1 in Google?
• Is there information on the website you don’t want to get out?
• Any case study or success stories you can harness to use for future sales opportunities?

What happens if you’re not successful?

• Have you defined success? Perhaps #1 in Google was too high to shoot for. See what the sites ahead of you have going for them and set client expectations accordingly.
• Can you at least demonstrate the efforts you made or results you were able to secure?
• Do you have any other tricks up your sleeve you can try?
• Was it your fault? Did the client hamstring you into solutions you knew would never work in the first place? Did you voice your opinions?
• Any learnings that can come out of this?

Is there anyway you can mitigate against those risks? Not everything is within your control, especially when working with third parties, but always good to hedge your bets if you can. Just food for thought.

So you’ve been working for months (or years) and now you’re #1 for that keyword you’ve been trying to rank highly for in Google (and any other search engines). Congratulations! You tell the client, you tell your friends, and everything is coming up roses. Then all of a sudden, the client says “Well, I guess we won’t be needing your services anymore.”

You: Uh…..I…..oh damn.

Here are five tips you can use to prove your worth to your client, beyond just gaining rankings:

1. Additional keyword optimization.
   This is pretty obvious, but just because you are #1 for “yellow widget” doesn’t necessarily mean you are #1 for “yellow widgets“. Make sure to continuously research additional keyword opportunities for your clients so you can have them on hand when they ask for them.
2. Competitive Analysis and Intelligence.
   Just because you are #1 today, doesn’t mean you will be tomorrow. Google is finicky about their search algorithm and likes to change things up every few years, just so everyone has as a fair shake (and so they can make a few extra dollars from their own services). Put yourself forth as providing competitive intelligence to both fend off and outmaneuver your clients competitors.
3. Optimizing additional media.
   Maybe you were just optimizing pages on your clients website. Maybe you were only doing press releases. Regardless, there’s always another opportunity out there to optimize something else your client didn’t think to put on their website. Maybe they have some corporate PDF’s laying around on their intranet, which their customers would love. Maybe they have some old corporate videos that are both informative and ridiculously campy. Put them on YouTube and see if you can get some viral traffic going.
4. Reputation Management.
   Your client may appreciate ranking well for “widgets in Chicago”, but they probably don’t appreciate the fact that they also rank well for “worst company in Chicago”. Let them know you can give them a hand with that as well using SEO as PR, SEM, social media optimization, and other techniques to present their side of the story.
5. Internal Education.
   Although, some SEO’s might feel like this is like giving away the keys to the kingdom, in most cases, your client doesn’t have the time, manpower, or technical knowledge to do this on their own, that’s why they hired you in the first place. So reaching out to them and offering to train their internal personnel on best practices for optimizing a press release or webpage isn’t going to take away your next paycheck. In most cases, it will actually provide you with additional opportunities, as those personnel go home and tell other co-workers, their friends, or their spouses about “the great stuff they learned today and how it can help their company.” That co-worker/friend/spouse turns around and tells their boss, and voila, you have additional leads coming in for more work.

In any case, as a good marketer, you should always have something else on the table beyond just gaining search engine rankings.

I’m still kind of in shock from this news, but apparently, according to comScore numbers Yahoo! Buzz’s traffic numbers were higher than Digg’s for April. Seriously? Kind of hard for me to believe, but I guess unless we hear from Digg and Buzz as to their exact traffic numbers, it’s the best we have to go on.

I’ve been seeing more and more that marketers and regular users on Digg have been saying “it’s impossible to get on to the homepage of Digg” and that “digg is broken“. But this is really surprising news for such a young site. I’m thinking that the marketing team at Yahoo! Buzz should be given several gold stars for pulling off this feat. Either that, or marketers have discovered a way to exploit Buzz for everything it’s worth.

I haven’t checked it out yet, but I definitely will now. Does anyone have any experience with Buzz? Easier to use than Digg? Better information? What’s the reason for someone to jump from Digg to Buzz or vice versa?

Do you think MegaVideo.com is trying to say something with their SEO? Somehow I don’t think this is a good long term strategy to gain viewing traffic.

During several recent SEO and SEM campaigns, I’ve seen a few clients trying to bid or pursue organically their own brand or company names. This is a good strategy if you have obscure brand names or company names: Cleaning Product 5, Chicago Consulting, or Joe’s Diner. But if you are a major brand and your customers are smart enough to go after that specific brand name, product name, or company name which you have trademarked and patented then let them. Don’t spend your ad dollars going after something like that. It would be better served putting it to use in other more competitive segments where you cannot make headway either organically or with PPC.

Also, I’ve noticed a practice recently by some unsavory marketing firms, who shall rename nameless, who bid against other marketing firms’ names to compete against them. Seriously? Do you think it’s worth your ad dollars to bid for a user who was obviously looking for “Company X” and instead saw your ad for “Company Y”? Do you think that is an effective strategy beyond making yourself look unprofessional in the ad landscape or that the person will have a last minute change of heart and instead say “Well, I was going to spend several hundreds of thousands of dollars with Company X, but I saw your ad and I guess I’ll flop over to you instead.” Somehow I don’t think that is the case.

Bottom line: I think bidding against your competitors is only an effective strategy very early in the buy cycle of a purchase where the user is still defining their search criteria and trying to put competing companies next to each other. If I am searching for “cherry cola” and I see an ad for Cherry Pepsi and Cherry Coke, I may go either way, but if I search for Cherry Coke, I’m not likely to be dissuaded by an ad for Cherry Pepsi.

So recently, I was inundated with the “Digg Effect“, which if you are unfamiliar is similar to the Slashdot Effect, in that your site goes through the following process:

1. Your site is discovered by someone.
2. They post it to either Digg or Slashdot.
3. Your site is flooded with traffic, which it either handles without a hiccup or crashes disastrously.

My site handled it fairly well in that it didn’t go down completely, but definitely choked at times. Below is a screenshot of the Digg post that made the site crash:

Click for full version
Click here for Digg Page

So what does the Digg Effect look like graphically?

As you can see, my traffic is not really on par normally with what Digg can drive to a website. I realized I had been “Dugg” when I walked away from my desk and half an hour later, my email box had “25 new comments” to be moderated for my blog. Normally, I get one or maybe two, but never 25, let alone 90. The range of comments also surprised me as the diverse nature of Digg’s audience.

So what can a marketer take away from this?

If you are going to give users the ability to “Digg” or post your content to a social networking site, make sure it’s the content you want them to post. In this case, I “dugg” my own article, which I always do as a good blogger. The result is exactly what I wanted out of Digg, which was to drive traffic and links to my site to inform users, get out my own opinions/brand, and maybe make a few dollars off Adsense. However, let’s think for a moment about the worst case scenario, which is often how a Digg thread starts:

I’m a disgruntled web developer at Company X. I post an internal memo online about a product release date that will be missed on Company X’s website. One of our users finds that memo and Digg’s it. Ten minutes later, I have half the users on Digg looking at this memo and our stock plunges 15%.

Don’t think it can happen? Look at Applegate. It’s because of Digg, blogs, and other social media that this “information” spread as fast as it did. So the bottom line for online marketers is that sometimes it’s an excellent idea of what tools to provide your users, but at the same time, make sure your information security is such that you can mitigate this kind of risk in case you do enjoy the “Digg Effect”.

To learn more about link baiting, social networking lead generation, or link building using Web 2.0, feel free to contact me anytime.

2 comments

Over the past year in the world of search optimization, a new term has arisen called “trust rank“. Before trust rank, there was page rank, which was a method used by search engines to determine the “rank” of a specific page in relation to others within the same site and across the internet. When it was first launched, page rank was thought to be the end-all be-all for rankings. If you got a high rage rank, you got high rankings. After a while, people started to game the system by linking high PR (page rank) pages to other high PR pages and it went up and up. Now Google, and eventually Yahoo and MSN, take into account “trust rank”, which is how trustworthy or reliable the neighborhood of information is.

Let’s take academia for example. If I compare two sites called www.healthcare.com and www.healthcare.edu, which do you think I would obtain the most reliable information? The .edu extension most likely means that it went through some kind of committee or standard which evaluated the information to make sure it was reliable and repeatable. The .com extension, although it may be identical to the .edu information, could have been posted by anyone, from anywhere in the world. Hence, the .edu extension is given more “trust”. The case goes with other large corporate websites or major news portals. A link from the Chicago Tribune is probably worth more than some random blog reporting chicago news. Why? Because the Chicago Tribune has an editorial staff, web team, copy editors, etc. etc. who all scrutinize and verify information that goes on their website.

So how does trust rank work?
So far as anyone knows outside of the major search engines, it’s pretty much all manual. I can assume that they have created automated processes to give certain extensions (.gov, .org, and .edu) extra points towards TR (trust rank) and then they are given more points based on manual verification of information on those sites. You can also think of it as “how difficult is it to get content published on this website?” If the answer is extremely difficult, most likely the TR is high, if it’s “anyone can do it” the TR is probably really low (I’m looking at you social networking.)

Know something I don’t or left out? Let me know in the comments.

As many webmasters know, you often find “No Referral” data in your web traffic session mix. What is this “No Referral Data“? Where does it come from? Every visitor to your website has to have come from somewhere. They just can’t arrive out of thin air. Well, the short is answer is yes they can. The long answer is below.

1. Users arrive via a bookmark or by directly typing in your website. If you have a great brand name (Pepsi, Toyota, Amazon, etc.) you probably have a ton of this. Users arrive at your website because they know your company or know your brand and just assume that you own www.mybrand.com. Or you make it easy for users to “Bookmark this site” via javascript or del.icio.us. One way to track this could be by redirecting users to page that changes often www.mydomain.com redirects to www.mydomain.com/index/1234 or something. You could even have the /index/1234 hidden behind the scenes using some SEO trickery so as to maintain the user experience.
2. Your web server files are not formatted correctly. Needless to say, this is not good. There are a number of problems that this could have stemmed from, so I’ll leave it up to Google to explain.
3. Visitors are arriving by clicking on a link in an email you sent them. This is the case for most desktop email clients. Even web email clients should register that the user arrived via a web email client (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.). In order to check for this, you should set up an email redirect in order to catch this traffic. So when the user clicks on the link in your email they go to www.mydomain.com/email-redirect?www.mydomain.com/actualpage.htm or something along those lines. The redirect functionality shouldn’t be that difficult to set up, it’s just a matter of rolling it out into your email communications that may be a hassle. This will eliminate any most uncertainty in your traffic, as users could still type in your domain manually when they read it from your email.
4. UTM (Urchin Traffic Monitor) is not tracking properly. This is most likely the least of your worries. Again, I’ll defer to Google for the tech mumbo jumbo. But it essentially comes down to a lot of factors, over which you have little or no control unless you are an ISP yourself, in which case you better know what is going on.

Anything I might have missed? Let me know in the comments.