The SEO Girl

Over the last few weeks there’s been a bit of debate in the corporate side of the company I dwell at over the importance of establishing PageRank as a measure of SEO success. PageRank certainly has its place in our industry, but I’m more of the “establish a desired increase in non-paid search engine traffic/keyword traffic” as a success metric. Here’s my reasoning, in a nutshell:

• PageRank is great when determining the quality of a site to connect with for link building or checking out how your competitors are fairing, but a high/low PageRank doesn’t necessarily translate into increased traffic/revenue. A website thrives or dies by the amount of traffic coming to it, and focusing on PageRank, a metric that doesn’t have an exact correlation, just doesn’t make sense to me.
• I’ve had instances where I’ve checked a client’s PageRank only to see it giving me a “0″ PageRank when a day ago it was a “4″. The next day, back to a “4″. With a metric ultimately controlled by Google and so accustomed to variances, it’s just not reliable.
• A high PageRank can be the reward of a great SEO campaign, but not the “end result” a site owner wants to see. As a site owner, you want more people coming to your site as a result of the fruits of your SEO labor, not just an uptick on a tiny green bar.
• You’ve spent time creating a user-friendly and search engine-friendly website, with valuable resources and interesting information on the site. You’ve also spent considerable time in drumming up the site’s grand opening by syndicating press releases, buying ad space, and using social media effectively. You get thousands of visitors the first month the site is up, yet your PageRank continues to be “0″. Other sites in your industry have much more antiquated, difficult to navigate websites, yet have a higher PageRank, and their Compete.com data shows you’re in the traffic lead by a long shot. Now, how much do you care about PageRank?

I’m not discounting the validity of PageRank, I just feel its place is not as a success metric. What about you? How do you feel about using PageRank to determine the overall success of an SEO campaign – yay or no? I promise I won’t bite

I was so touched and inspired by a comment on my previous post, “5 Tips For Managing an SEO Team”. Yavor Milchev wisely commented, “I think motivation is also a very important ingredient. Motivation is very easy to lose and once people lose it, it gets very hard to get it back. I have seen people do amazing things with little knowledge and experience simply because of their devotion and strive for success.”

Yavor hit the nail on the head, especially as I’m sitting here a bit stressed by my own SEO job. Motivation is a crucial personality trait in SEO. Just think of how many times your team has ensured a site is meeting SEO best practices, worked continually on on-page/off-page SEO best practices, and yet the site’s non-paid search traffic and rankings still aren’t what you’d like them to be. Yet, despite wanting to strangle Google, you persevered, tweaked your strategy, and saw results change and improve over time. SEO is one of the most frustrating, “gray” industries out there, and at the end of a busy day, there’s always things on your mind and ideas for working to improve a site’s SEO.

Yet, we love SEO and amidst the stress, we love our SEO jobs. If you want to survive in this industry, you need to be motivated to succeed, always work to help educate your co-workers, and be dedicated to seeing your clients succeed. We work in a very stressful, sometimes thankless industry, but our desire to keep going and push ourselves motivates us through those tough days and SEO quandaries. When you’re having a tough day, take heart (and a drink at 5pm) – the rest of the SEO industry knows what you’re going through, and we commend you for working through it and emerging as a person satisfied with their desire to push ahead and further our industry.

Heading up a successful SEO team is no easy feat, especially in these times where clients are hesitant to spend money and tend to want to see results overnight. I’ve held a management role at the digital marketing firm I work at for the last few years, and by sticking to our motto of “Change or die”, we’ve weathered the changes in the SEO industry and the economy. We’re always a work in progress, but I’ve learned some fundamental strategies for managing an SEO team over the years.

1. “Change is the only constant” – Heraclitus: All members of your SEO team must embrace this mantra. Sure, the foundations of SEO have stuck around, but this is an industry that is constantly changing. Sticking to the old ways is going to have you losing customers and gaining a bad rep in no time.

2. Skilled Writers: It’s beneficial to have a savvy SEO programmer on your time, but the bulk of your team should be made up of proficient writers. Whether it’s scripting personalized emails to send to potential link partners or writing SEO copy for a client’s site, they need to be able to write cleanly and professionally. Never underestimate the value of a good writer.

3. Divide and Conquer: Each member of your team has their own strengths and weaknesses. Create sub-departments within your team to solely handle account management, SEO copy, social media monitoring, link building, blogging, press releases, etc. You’ll be building up your team’s confidence in their skills by giving them responsibility for their own mini-departments, and they’ll be able to focus on making their realm of SEO that much more successful.

4. Account Meetings – We hold monthly account meetings, where each client’s account team meets for a half hour, evaluates the stats for that month and develops an outline of the next month’s strategy. This ensures the team is in continual communication about how the account is doing, and we have a forum for ideas and innovation in place.

5. Client Check-in’s - You’re not going to be able to please every client, but it’s always best to take the bad with the good and welcome criticism. We check-in with each client mid-way through their contract term and send them a short survey regarding their perception of their SEO campaign’s performance, interaction with the team, and ways we can improve our relationship together. It may bring some issues to light, but knowing what you can do better with greatly strengthen your team.

These are just a few tips – feel free to share more about your experience managing an SEO team, what has worked for managing your team and ideas we can all benefit from!

This is more of a poll than a blog post, but I’d like to see which SEO tools the SEO community is using and why they find them effective. I’m on a quest this week to find a tool that includes the following items, and I’d like to see if I can find a match for my needs:

• Keyword research tools, like the Google Keyword Suggestion tool and SemRush
• Link building management, with the ability to add link building contacts, assign them to projects/categories
• Content management, with a “project” folder for each client so we can store their SEO copy and blog posts in their folder
• Social media tools – Similar to HootSuite.com where we can post to multiple client Twitter accounts by logging in to only one master account, see stats on the amount of clicks links in our posts receive. Ability to post to multiple Facebook Business Pages would also be a plus.
• Google Analytics integration/Automated reporting tools – Would absolutely love if the SEO tool had white-labeled reports that pulled relevant data from the client’s GA account
• Keyword tracking – Although we stay away from measuring SEO success solely by keyword rankings, it would be nice to have a keyword tracking system so we can sync up changes in rankings to traffic patterns.
• Google Alerts data – Ideally, we’d like the system to automatically search for mentions of the client’s brand name/relevant keywords, a la Google Alerts.
• Project management – A “lite” project management system built in, allowing users to create/assign tasks, view tasks assigned to them and the timeframe for the tasks

And of course if this was packaged into a nice little dashboard with a bow on top, that would be even better.

Have you seen specific increases in productivity with the tools you’re seeing? What’s on your SEO tool wishlist? Leave a comment and let me know, any and all info would be very helpful.

- Thanks for helping an SEO girl out!

I had an SEO discussion with a friend this week over a site that featured 4 “nofollow” links, and then listed those same 4 links a bit below them, “followed” this time and with relevant anchor text, instead of simply “Site.com”. My friend, who definitely knows his stuff when it comes to SEO, explained they chose this tactic so the full amount of “link juice” would only flow to the followed set of 4 links, rather than having to be split between the two sets of links. I replied that yes, the theory behind this is valid, but on a site with a grand total of 8 outgoing links, it’s a bit of a mute point, and may actually raise a spider’s suspicion, as the site is basically shouting out that they’re gaming search engines.

His perspective was that of a technical SEO specialist, mine was more of a natural, visitor-centric SEO specialist. His point is 100% correct, but in this instance, there’s no need to “nofollow” those links. If the site had 25 outgoing links and only wanted PageRank to flow through 4 of them, then the other 21 links should certainly be “nofollowed”. But not for a site with a total of 8 links.

This brings up a good point – if an SEO specialist knows the Google Webmaster Guidelines in and out and applies those principles to their client’s sites, does that make them experienced in SEO? Personally, I feel that knowing when to implement those guidelines is what really shows you know SEO. I’m always learning, but I feel it’s best to learn the technical SEO techniques, and then, and only through experience, learn why they’re beneficial to some sites and how to apply them to best benefit that individual site.

My friend has a wealth of SEO knowledge, and I do look to him for technical SEO questions. SEO duals are nothing new between us and keep us both on top of our game. The art of SEO is about gaining experience on knowing when to apply those SEO best practices, not necessarily in memorizing them.

I had a discussion with my SEO team today on taking responsibility for our clients’ successes, or sometimes, their unfortunate lack thereof. Let’s be honest, not every client has a stellar SEO experience, just like not every sandwich you nosh on or clothing you try on is going to fit. But I do feel an SEO specialist needs to be accountable for their client’s results after at least 3 months of SEO service. Some may disagree with me and say there’s tons of variables – what if the client has a poor site design, is in an extremely competitive industry, or is uncooperative with the SEO specialist?

Sure, the responsibility also lies with the client. The client needs to incorporate the SEO suggestions and SEO work into their site in a timely fashion. The SEO specialist also needs to  guide the client with site suggestions, branding ideas, and strategies on how to outshine their competition.

You can outline an SEO specialist’s work in the line items of a contract, and after a few months you can say, “Well, I did what I was supposed to. It’s not my fault their SEO didn’t work out.” But in the end, when it comes to whether your SEO business and industry cred lives on, it’s about how much you effort you put into making that individual campaign as successful as possible in the time you have allotted for it. If you can say you gave it your 200%, then I’m convinced you did your job well and showed responsibility for that account, whether the client stays on or leaves. However, if you simply did “what you’re supposed to”, then my friend, it’s time to choose another industry.

I’d like to hear your thoughts – should an SEO strategy be strictly bound to contract line items, or is it necessary to go above and beyond? Is there a middle ground? I may sound like I’m on a lofty soapbox here, but believe me, I’m working on actual client SEO campaigns every day, and I know it’s not an easy question to answer. I sometimes wonder what a 9-5 leave-and-forget-about-work job would be like, but I love this industry and my work way too much. Plus, this SEO Girl loves a challenge

I heard an interesting quip from a SEO friend last week – a client asked my friend if she “was an SEO expert”. My friend has years of SEO and online marketing experience, and is someone I would definitely consider to be an SEO expert. However, my friend promptly explained to the client that although she is very experienced, there is no such thing as an “expert” in SEO, as strategies are continually changing and any SEO worth their salt is always learning.

The client had a bit of trouble understanding this concept, as there’s shady SEO companies all over the world screaming “Hey! I do meta tags! I’m an SEO expert!” at him. Hearing the truth that someone experienced in SEO is actually always learning and striving to improve themselves threw him off a bit. By the end of the phone call, the client began to understand and trust my friend for her honest, thankfully.

I’d like your thoughts on this. What qualifies a person to be called an “SEO expert”? Is it years of experience in white-hat strategies, but few case studies to show for it? Success, but with shifty strategies, such as paid links? Or a person who writes about SEO and is widely recognized in the industry, yet rarely practices actual, hands-on SEO? Or is the “expert” the perpetual student? What’s your take? I’m personally leaning towards the SEO engaged in hands-on, white-hat strategies, but the good guys in SEO sometimes do finish last.

There’s been a lot of changes happening around me lately, contributing to my lack of posting, but also reminding me so much of the state of the SEO industry. I absolutely cannot imagine an SEO specialist who can’t adapt to change – you’d literally be left for dead while the industry continues to evolve. We do still have that in the form of shadey SEO people who simply submit their client’s sites to tons of spammy directories, or even worse, comment on random blogs for a (meaningless) link. But as SEO becomes more of a tech household word and site owners learn more about what makes SEO tick, we’re all going to need to adapt to the changing times and focus on the big R: “Results”.

Two years ago “Twitter” was just a random mumbling of words, and today even my mom knows what Twitter is. We’ll be seeing this more and more, and we need to accept these changes, weed out the “flash in the pan” sites, and concentrate on using these new strategies to see success, as well as be masters at the foundation of SEO. Have no fear – SEO specialists who are continually moving ahead, while knowing the in’s and out’s of the basics, will prevail.

I just wanted to quickly post and apologize for my lack of posting/tweeting lately! I’ve been very busy with SEO clients, and haven’t had much time to dedicate to posting. I’ll definitely be posting this week, and hopefully I’ll have some more time soon It’s just hard when you’re this good (joking! Though, true…)!

It’s no secret that client retention can be very difficult in SEO. Unlike Pay-Per-Click where clients can see an exact ROI (Return on Investment) figure, SEO has no such metrics. Sure, you can measure keyword rankings, traffic, and revenue, but there’s always the clients who simply don’t see the correlation. These clients are very numbers-oriented and success driven, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just very difficult to quantify SEO.

I’d like to hear your take on this – how do you measure SEO ROI? I’m toying with the idea of utilizing the client’s web analytics program to view the non-paid search revenue they made during the months we managed their campaign, versus their SEO management fee. Still not an exact ROI, and works best for sites we started managing as soon as the site went live. How about you?

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