Only about every 2-3 years do I see something new in SEO that I have never seen before. I’ve just been around too long and worked with too many clients. I say this not to toot my own horn. I say these things in order to help you understand where I, and many other SEO peoples, are coming from. The ideas I am putting forth in this post are the same things that my SEO brethren all experience too.

Photo Credit:imnotadoctor

Cost of SEO

I can’t even remember how many people have decided not choose me for their SEO campaign and that end up going for a cheaper package elsewhere. Maybe it’s from India and maybe it’s your nephew who says that he knows SEO. Most likely it’s your web developer or hosting provider that say, “SEO is easy, don’t pay those guys that much, I’ll do it for half that!”

What ends up happening is that the client comes back to me after having wasted their $1000/mo, or $500/mo, for the past 6-12 months and are left with no results. Or at least not the results that they wanted, expected, or needed. Had they just taken my advice in the first place, or gone with a different reputable SEO consultant they would not be 6-12 months behind their competition and would also not be thousands of dollars in the hole. Had they spent just $1000 more per month they could be seeing an actual ROI by now.

But instead they rolled the dice and crapped out. And their money lost has now become part of the cost of SEO, putting ROI even further out of reach. But to me the worst, and most costly, thing that happens in these situations is that valuable time has been lost.

Time Cost of SEO

This can be extremely expensive. The time cost of SEO is heavily influenced by what your competition is doing while you are not. But there are many things that influence the time cost of SEO. Imagine all the sales you have missed out on in the past 6-12 months because you are not ranking. Imagine all the market share that your competition has taken from you in the past 6-12 months. What if your competition has been spending more money on their efforts, with real professionals? Then you are really screwed.

How to Know if You Have a Good SEO Campaign

I’m not just going to carry on about how you need to spend more and choose good people for your SEO campaign. I actually have some ways that can help you understand if you are getting a good campaign.

First, do research on the person or company that you want to work with. Google their names. See if they are referenced in any reputable industry websites. Look for video of them too, its always nice to put a face with a name. See if there are numerous complaints on consumer sites. But be careful here because almost all of these “consumer advocate” sites (Ripoff Report, Complaints.com, etc) allow anyone to anonymously post whatever malice messages they want, and without any warrant of authenticity. But if you see many complaints from what appear to be different people (you can usually tell by the tone and the story that they tell) and on different sites then you can pretty much be sure that the company is bad news.

Get a third party to do an SEO audit of the work being done by your consultant, agency, or in-house people. Now this also comes with a word of caution because everyone has varying opinions of what is most important to the right techniques when it comes to SEO. So you have to take the SEO audit with a grain of salt. I recommend doing this so that you can get an “idea” of whether or not you are getting totally ripped off. This is not for you to nitpick at every little thing that the person auditing the SEO disagrees with. You have to be weary of the auditor wanting to steal your business away. If you can get a few different people to do the audit and that should be plenty to let you know whether or not you are getting totally ripped off or not. I will do another post on SEO audits at a later date so subscribe to my feed for that update when it comes.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that I can think of handfuls of reasons not to skimp on your SEO efforts. But most importantly is the huge cost of not getting a good SEO campaign. So please, if you are in getting ready to launch an SEO campaign make sure that you perform due diligence and that you not be afraid to spend on your SEO efforts. After all, SEO is still THE most effective form of online marketing. So if you spend hundreds of thousands on TV, radio, and print you should be spending even more on your SEO. Spend in the areas that have the best chance for an ROI. And nothing fits that bill better than SEO.

The overall jist of it is that Caffeine’s main goal is to increase the speed of its results as well as integrate more “real time” results from sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

But this is an SEO blog, and I am an SEO consultant, so we don’t care about Google getting faster or stuff like that. We want to know how this is going to affect our rankings. Right? Right!

Thank goodness that Summit Media conducted an independent study on Caffeine’s impact on rankings. They compared Caffeine results against current Google results for over 10,000 keywords.

They saw that on generic search queries news sites and social media sites were being given a bit of an advantage while other niche sites were ranking well for longer tail searches.

Most sites should not expect to lose many rankings, there were not many fluctuations, but sites with older content have a greater chance of losing out.

No changes to any one sector or niche over another. All changes seem to be across the entire index.

Domains with exact matched keywords had less emphasis

So overall not much to riot about. Things SHOULD be fairly stable as far as rankings go. But I’ll tell you this much, with the recent Page Rank update and Caffeine rolling out, things have been fluctuating. And if any of you use Google Alerts you will notice many more alerts coming through erratically and for content that is super old in many instances. I noticed this phenomenon right after Google integrated Real Time results. Seems that these changes did not mesh well with Google Alerts, which really has not been working well at all for the past year anyways.

I was recently asked to contribute to an article for iMediaConnection.com explaining how brands can use review sites to monitor their brands better. I found it a bit odd that the word “review sites” was being thrown around. To me, “social media sites” would have been a better vernacular because it would encompass all places a conversation was happening online.

This was an excellent article because it utilized a great number of experts to give their perspectives on how to monitor brands online. I wrote a great deal more than was used in the piece but I feel that I had some good coverage in there. Thanks goes to Neal Levitt, the author, for inviting me to the discussion.

I think that the quick points at the beginning of the article pretty well sum up the consensus amongst all those involved. Except I feel that advertising in areas where your brand is getting negative attention is a waste. I also feel that one of the most important points was not emphasized enough. The idea that when you find a person not happy with your brand or service, that you reach out to that person in a very public way and make amends. This puts a whole new spin on the negativity, shows the community that you care, and fuels a great PR victory that you can promote the heck out of. There you have, you have now turned a nightmare into a dream come true! There are not many chances in life for that kind of turnaround, opportunities like this are worth their weight in gold!

Anyways, how about that duplicate content? Well, its not nearly as big of a deal as it used to be. Google has wised up and started to monetize aggregated, syndicated, news content. Therefore they had to change the ways they treated dupe content.

If you have a trusted domain or are not totally, obviously, trying to manipulate the search engines. So its OK to have some duplicate content as long as its not done on purpose and with intent on ranking higher. Having a trusted domain puts you in a whole other category. And it makes sense as most spammers or black hats have dupe content on weak domains. Plus if you have dupe content you will most likely hurt yourself because you will dilute your internal link juice.

What I mean by bait and switch is when SEOs take a page that has a good amount of links and redirect the page to a product page, homepage, or wherever so that the new page can rank for the term that the old page did. Now sometimes the new page that the 301 is directed at is relevant to the old page, but sometimes it is not. And it is in this latter instance that Google gets offended.

It was noted that Google worked to eliminate this tactic (the latter in the previous paragraph) by implementing the Googlebomb algorithm a whle back. the idea is that if you 301 a page and the new page is not relevant to the old one, meaning the new page does not contain the keywords from the old on the page, then Google diffuses the passing of the anchor text(s). So the old page will still pass page rank theoretically, but it will no longer pass any keyword anchor text link value.

What does this mean to SEO consultants?

This means that if you want to take full advantage of 301ing pages with links to new pages, make sure that the two pages are relevant and that the new page contains the keywords of the old. It makes sense being that Google wants relevant results. It was too easy to manipulate the SERPs using 301s before. Now at least there is an order of relevancy.

They offer a “Master Certification” for $3500 and it covers SEO, PPC, Analytics or Online PR. Now I am typically against these types of things but you should see who the teachers are!

That is a veritable who’s who of online marketing in each respective field! Avinash for analytics, Eisenberg for conversion, Dr. Rimm-Kaufman for PPC, etc. I mean come on now, is Matt Cutts going to teach Google optimization? That is a solid lineup of teachers that would make even the most seasoned SEO consultant attend. I have been wanting to refresh my PPC skills after all, and I have been following the RKG blog for a long time now.

It is a steep price but at least they do have some of the best minds in our industry. I will go ahead and stamp my approval of this course just based on that fact alone. If anyone has done the course or is going to do it please comment here on your experiences.

1. Go to Google Maps
2. Click “put you business on Google Maps”
3. Sign in or Create an Account
4. Click “Add New Business”
5. Enter your business information
6. Click “Next”
7. If it shows your business is already on there, click “claim listing”
8. If it’s not there, click “add listing”
9. Then you can enter additional details such as business category, opening hours, photos, payment options, etc.
10. Click submit
11. At this point, you will need to verify you business by phone or postcard. After you are verified, your info will appear on Google Maps.
12. Later on, you can go back to Local Business Center to edit your information, see how many people went to your listing, or create coupons.

That’s about all there is to it. There is not a whole lot of work for what could potentially be a whole lot of exposure and added convenience for customers looking for what you offer. You should probably take a few minutes and do this. I have seen merchants make HUGE gains in sales just from a better optimized local listing!

photo credit: UrvishJ

With that I give you some predictions for the SEO world in 2009.

The economy WILL hit the SEO industry despite predicitions of growth. If businesses are cutting costs, then marketing is almost always the first to go! And if client’s cannot or will not pay their past due bills there is not much people can do about it.

This means that if you are an SEO you need to try and collect as much up front as possible when doing work. Make client’s share in the risk with you. Trust me, during these times EVERYTHING is negotiable.

Consolidation is already happening and will continue. So if you have the cash get into acquisition mode. There are so many small to medium sized companies trying to sell of right now it is ridculous. And there are so many good domains for sale at the various domain marketplaces! I am salivating. Too bad I don’t have the cash to take advantage of this.

Local search will continue to be important. It is cost effective and still pretty wide open, although its much more difficult than it was even a year ago to optimize for say, Google Local. SMBs will look to spend small amounts and local search is where that can be an effective strategy. Typically local search produces quicker resulsts which also helps its cause.

Trade show attendance will plummet. If you have ever been to a search marketing trade show then you know how crazy expensive they are.  You will start to see cheaper trade shows popup and I think that this is great news!

SEO will get more and more difficult as Google rolls out more and more updates targeting different metrics. Linking will still be uber important. But so will bounce rate, time on site, etc.

Paid Search, or PPC for short, will continue to get more and more difficult for SMBs as more big players come to the table from traditional media spends.

photo credit: MichaelMarlatt

The organic SEO consultant will become alot more active with blogging and will put up at least a post per week! Ambitous, I know.

Its the SD Bloggers 1st Anniversary Party this coming Tuesday, and I have to say that “you’ve come a long way baby!” It makes me so happy and proud to see Web and marketing events and organizations grow and be successful in San Diego. We really do have a wealth of talent in the technology fields and I still do not feel that San Diego gets the recognition that it deserves. Groups like this and the San Diego Ad Club are really becoming big!

The purpose of this group is to support local bloggers by providing a way to network with other bloggers, discuss blogging techniques and technologies, and to have fun! A huge recognition needs to go to Matt Browne who runs this group, and many others, in addition to running his own successful company Integral Impressions! I mean, I hardly have time to just write in my two blogs let alone run a whole company and many groups after hours as well as have a family. So Matt really deserves lots of praise. He has worked tirelessly to give back to the community and his work is paying off.

If you are in the area, I highly suggest that you join and attend the 1st anniversary party! The event will be at:

Modus Supper Club
2202 4th Ave, San Diego, CA 92101
619.236.8516