Posted on January 6th, 2012 by John
We’ve begun recruiting for an experienced SEO/SEM consultant to help us with the new client projects. Proximity to DC is a plus but not a requirement.
Here’s the full description and application form. Please help us spread the word.
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Posted on December 27th, 2011 by John
We’re excited to now offer standard packages for small businesses wanting help with SEO and SEM. Writing SEO/SEM proposals for startups, non-profits, and other small businesses has been my least favorite task since we started Marketade. It takes time away from more productive work, and it always felt like a guess in terms of the hours and cost we quoted.
No matter how many projects we do, we don’t seem to be able to accurately predict how long a new one will take — because SEO and SEM projects are inherently unpredictable. Especially because these have been projects for budget-strapped businesses, we tended to err on the low side in our quotes, which meant we often ended up working many more hours than we got paid for.
Our new packages attempt to solve all these problems by providing a structure that’s both clear and flexible — and gets us out of the custom proposal writing business for small search projects. We …
- offer a discounted hourly rate of $150
- use a not-to-exceed structure where clients pay only for hours we work
- don’t provide custom quotes, instead leaving it up to clients to set a max budget
- provide minimum, maximum, and average hours/costs to give clients an idea of what to expect
We realize clients would prefer to know, ahead of time, exactly how much an SEO/SEM project will cost. But given that we can’t predict how long these projects will take, we feel strongly that the approach we’ve come up with is the best one.
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Posted on November 8th, 2011 by John
When we first joined Affinity Lab, we were lucky to overlap for about a year with Provoc, a top-notch web design and development group. They’ve since grown out of the Lab, but before they did I was able to work with them on a couple SEO and writing projects and have stayed in touch with them since.
They’re a great crew that we’ve learned a lot from. So I was thrilled when they asked to interview me on SEO for their blog.
Check out the interview here.
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Posted on September 27th, 2011 by John
In my latest newsletter tip article, I cover how to do keyword research — the critical first step for any SEO project. The process often takes me 5+ hours, but I’ve boiled it down to the essentials so that you can do it in 3 hours or less if you’re generally familiar with Google’s keyword tool.
Check out the article and let me know what you think. What did I miss? What do you do differently?
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Posted on June 22nd, 2011 by John
SEO expert Danny Sullivan has a great write-up on Google’s Panda Update over on Search Engine Land. From his intro:
With Google Panda Update 2.2 upon us, it’s worth revisiting what exactly Panda is and isn’t. Panda is a new ranking factor. Panda is not an entirely new overall ranking algorithm that’s employed by Google. The difference is important for anyone hit by Panda and hoping to recover from it.
As always Danny does a great job of describing in detail new trends and changes while placing them in a larger context — reminding us of SEO fundamentals and the big picture. This is a rare thing even among SEO gurus. Read the full article here.
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Posted on April 2nd, 2011 by John
In my recent article on title tag optimization, I mentioned that small business owners shouldn’t feel bad about having keyword-barren title tags because some Fortune 100 companies do the same thing.
The best example of a bad title tag I’ve seen is the one I showed in the article: the General Dynamics homepage, which has “Home” as its title tag. There are plenty of other companies that just use their company name in their homepage title tag, either by itself (see GM), with a tagline (see GE) or with something like “Welcome to …” (see Citi).
Unlike General Dynamics — where it looks like no one has thought about SEO and where they’re not even getting the SEO benefit of having their company name in the title tag — it’s less clear in these latter cases whether leaving off keywords on the homepage is a good decision or not. One could argue that not cluttering up the homepage title tag in these cases is a good move, because their brands are so well known (and get such high search volume) and/or because their product line is diverse and they want non-brand keyword traffic to go to other pages on their site. But if I were in charge of the sites for these companies, I’d still be inclined to use some keywords in their homepage title tags. It just seems like too valuable an opportunity to pass up.
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Posted on March 23rd, 2011 by John
Back in October, we selected PhotoTour DC (previously PhotoTour Excursions) as the winner of our first SEO makeover contest for DC small businesses. We’ve had a lot of fun working with Lynford Morton during this process and, as we draw a close to this makeover, are happy to report some nice results. Below is an email I sent to Lynford a few days ago capturing the results and my recommendations for next steps to keep his momentum going.
—–
Hi Lyn,
Hope you’re doing well and gearing up for the spring tour season.
I spent a few hours today analyzing your Google Analytics data for the last few months, to see the impact of our SEO efforts so far.
You can see the results here. The first tab shows the results in graph form, the second tab shows the actual data. I more or less used the SEO measurement process described here – with some adjustments for your situation.
I looked at the 9 weeks after our SEO was implemented vs. the 9 weeks before. Not apples to apples but good enough for our purposes.
For keyword groups I’m focusing on the keywords we identified in our keyword research back in October. Within Google Analytics I aggregate similar words together (e.g. everything with “class” or “classes” in it) which is how I end up with “keyword groups.”
By “conversions” I’m referring to the 3 goals we set up initially in Google Analytics — visits to your Signature Excursions page, visits to your Specialty Excursions page, and visits to your Calendar. These don’t tell us whether they signed up for a tour, but it is a good indication of interest and the best conversion metric available. (I originally was trying to track clicks over to the Eventbrite page but for various reasons we haven’t been able to track those consistently.)
While the numbers aren’t huge, we have seen a nice increase on a number of our target keyword groups. For instance, “workshop” related phrases had 0 conversions prior to SEO; after they had 36. “Photography” went from 32 to 101, “class” from 6 to 21. A few groups stayed flat and one – “lesson” – dropped.
Overall your conversions on SEO target keywords increased from 50 to 175 – an increase of 3.5x. Not bad for the first couple months.
Note that I did not include “tour” related words in the analysis. Because your brand name includes “tour” it’s too hard to tell the effect of SEO on these words vs. other marketing efforts like Groupon. It does appear that your Google rankings on top “tour” phrases have increased.
Based on the analysis, I don’t think you need to make updates to the body content of your site at this time. I’m confident that over time our optimization from the end of last year will continue to help improve your rankings. I do, however, think it’s worth updating your title tags at this time based on what I saw in the results to date. I’ve attached recommendations for updating titles on most of your main pages.
—
I’m marking this as the official end of our “SEO makeover.” Of course I’m happy to answer any questions you have, now or in the future.
I’ve set up an automated report for you in Google Analytics; you’ll receive it by PDF at the beginning of each month.
As for future steps, here are my recommendations:
1. Keep the target keyword list (keyword research) doc handy anytime you make changes or additions to the website. Integrate those keywords where possible, especially in the title tags, headings, and lead paragraphs of any new pages.
2. Ensure that the title tags remain intact anytime you make updates to the site. Those are critical for SEO.
3. Check your Google Places listing once a quarter or so to make sure the information is still accurate.
4. Continue to try to attract links from other relevant websites.
5. Continue to post regularly on your blog. Consider approaching photography experts to interview on your blog, to mix up the content. And consider approaching other local bloggers offering to post tips (or be interviewed) for their blogs.
—–
It’s been fun working with you on this. Keep me posted on how things are going with your biz!
John
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Posted on March 23rd, 2011 by John
For our latest newsletter I’ve written an article on title tag optimization — what I call the “easiest way to boost your Google rankings.” If you’ve read the article and have feedback or questions, please submit them below.
Given that we often spend 5+ hours on Step 2 alone, it was a challenge to create a process that could be done in under an hour. If you have the time and want to do a more thorough job with title tag optimization, here are some other steps you can take.
Check Competitors
(I originally included this as Step 2 but cut it out in the interest of simplicity. I recommend doing it between Steps 1 and 2 in the article.)
Google the phrases you identified in step 1, and click through to the sites of any competitors or similar companies that appear on the first few pages of the organic search listings. Look at the title tag (see Bank of America screen shot in the article to know where to look) and the most prominent text on the page you land on. See any good keywords that you missed in your brainstorm? If so, integrate those into your existing phrases or add new ones.
You can also go directly to the sites of competitors you already know of; but especially if you’re a small business, expect many of them not to have keyword-rich title tags. The advantage of finding competitors through Google searches is you know they’re well-optimized for search.
For Randi’s site, I Googled “dc nutritionist” and checked out sites of two similar businesses that ranked well organically. From their title tags I picked up a few new phrases like “certified,” “health and wellness,” “specialist,” and “counselor.”
Step Up Your Keyword Research
If you have a lot of time, replace steps 2 and 3 with the much more rigorous, 10-step keyword research process I describe as part of our SEO makeover for the Melete Foundation. Expect it to take at least a couple hours. It’s hard to emphasize how beneficial this process is if you’re serious about SEO.
Optimize Title Tags on Your Other Pages
In the article I focus just on the homepage because that’s the most important title tag for SEO and I wanted to make the process manageable. But the same general process can be used to optimize title tags throughout the rest of your site. Service pages, product pages, and about us pages are ideal candidates for keyword-rich title tags. And if you came up with a lot of phrases in your keyword research, much of the hard work is already done. Just try to tailor the title tags to the specific pages as much as possible. As part of our Melete SEO makeover, I’ll have more detailed tips on full-site title tag optimization. Stay tuned …
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Posted on March 9th, 2011 by John
This is part 4 in a series of blog posts capturing our SEO makeover for the Melete Foundation.
Keyword research is the foundation of good SEO. The goal of this step is to identify a list of 15-30 “target keywords” — phrases that people interested in your type of business are likely to search on and that you want to rank well on. It is not a step to take lightly. If you do mediocre keyword research, you’ll likely end up with a completely different list of target keywords than someone doing great keyword research. Since a number of future steps in the optimization process rely heavily on this list, everything else will suffer as a result.
In Melete’s SEO kickoff meeting we spent about a half hour brainstorming keyword ideas, but that was just to provide us with a starting point. Ben from Melete joined me at Affinity Lab for most of the official keyword research session, which lasted about 2 hours. Here’s what we did:
1. Review Competitors.
As is often the case with non-profits and foundations, Melete doesn’t have any organizations they consider true competitors. But there are groups doing similar things, and at the end of our kickoff meeting I asked the Melete team to come up with a list of them. They later sent me a list of 8 similar, yet more established, organizations: Projects Abroad, i-to-i, CDS, CIS, Global Volunteer Network, Cross Cultural Solutions, World Teach, and CIEE.
2. Learn from Competitors’ SEO.
I quickly looked at all 8 sites and identified 4 that seemed to have done some SEO, by looking for keyword-rich title tags. I focused in particular on 2 (Cross Cultural Solutions and CIEE). By looking at title tags and home page content, I was able to add a number of new potential keywords to our starter list, such as: international community service, teach overseas, international volunteer travel, teach in [country], volunteer abroad, and fellowship program. These were phrases that we’d missed with our initial brainstorm, and some of them, like “volunteer abroad,” opened up an entirely new set of words that would become part of our target list later on — and that we might have missed otherwise. Competitor sites are a great way to fill in the gaps in your brainstorming before you start deep diving into keyword types.
3. Bucket Keywords.
Next Ben and I took the full list of keywords so far (brainstorm + competitor research) and broke it into similar-themed groups. As is usually the case, there were multiple ways to slice and dice the list; for instance, “summer teacher exchange” could be in a “summer” group or in a “teacher” group. In cases like that, we put them in both and then later narrowed down the list. The final 5 groups were:
- volunteer
- cross-cultural
- teach
- community
- other
Each bucket had an average of 5 keywords.
4. Pull Volumes and Expand Buckets.
With some initial structure in place, it was now time to turn to data to expand, improve, and eventually narrow down our list. We went to Google’s keyword research tool and pasted in each bucket of keywords, one at a time. Each time, Google spit back monthly search volumes for our words as well as a long list of related words. We scanned through the keywords and, if there were obvious words that we should have included in the original buckets, we added those to the search box and reran the search.
This allowed us to pick up an even wider range of variations. Sometimes we redid the search a few times, sometimes only once. Once we felt like we’d caught all the major words for that bucket, we then went through the search results, checked the ones that seemed like good matches, and exported those to a spreadsheet. We did this for all 5 groups, using a separate tab for each. See these in the last 5 tabs of our Melete Keywords doc.
5. Combine Buckets.
We then copied all keywords from each of the 5 tabs and pasted them in one sheet. We ended up with about 80 keywords. The next few steps are time intensive per keyword, so often I will narrow the list down at this point by search volume if the combined list is 100 or more (e.g. remove all keywords with search volume under 200 per month). In this case, I decided to leave the list as it was because 80 is a manageable number and there weren’t obviously irrelevant words on the list. See the full list of keywords on the first tab of our keywords doc.
6. Add Relevance Scores.
Volume is a great way to evaluate keywords, but there are 2 other critical factors: relevance and likelihood. Of the 3 criteria, relevance is the only subjective one in the way we score it. I define it as the “fit between site content/service and likely searchers’ intentions, relative to other keywords on list.” Another way to think about it is, will most of the people doing this search stick around if they land on your site? Scoring this is mostly a gut reaction, but it’s good to run some of the main types of searches to see what’s currently popping up on Google. Sometimes we’re obvlious to completely different, equally popular meanings of search phrases (e.g. “paris hilton” the hotel vs. “paris hilton” the person).
Ben and I started by sorting our spreadsheet by keyword, to try to get similar keywords near each other. Then we flew down the list and assigned a relevance score of 1 to 5 to each phrase, with 5 being the most relevant. I entered a number and Ben shouted out if he disagreed. After we had scores for all 50 keywords, we sorted by score to see where the distribution was skewed. Since this is a relative score, and since we’re trying to prioritize keywords at the end of the process, we want a roughly even distribution. So we adjusted some scores to even it out. See our relevance scores in the first tab of our keywords doc.
7. Add Likelihood Data.
I define “likelihood” as “probability of achieving page 1 Google ranking after SEO, relative to other keywords on list.” You could also call it “competitiveness.” To score likelihood in an objective way, I use a great technique I learned from Jill Whalen: “allintitle” searches on Google, which tell you how many web pages have that phrase in their title tag. Jill’s argument for using this technique is this: “Because title tags are given so much weight by Google, any page that is using the phrase in their title tag is at least rudimentarily optimized for the phrase, and is therefore one of those that you’re competing against.”
For Melete, I took each of the keywords on our list and entered them into a Google search using this convention: allintitle: “[keyword]”. Then I took the number of results Google returned and entered that in my spreadsheet. See the data I entered here, under the “Title Pages” column in the first tab.
8. Convert Volume and Likelihood Data Into Scores.
At this point we had data for all 3 criteria, but we needed to get volume and likelihood on the same 1-5 scale as relevance. So we set up a legend for each on another tab, and then used a VLOOKUP function to convert them all into scores. As with relevance, volume and likelihood are relative scores. The scale doesn’t need to be a perfect reflection of actual values, and we want similar numbers in each group. See the scoring legend and conversion formula I used here, under the Legend tab and the Volume and Likelihood columns in the first tab.
9. Total Scores.
Whew. It’s been a lot of working getting here but now we enter the fun phase. We added a “total” column and summed the 3 scores, and then ordered in descending order.
10. Identify Targets.
With total scores in place, it was finally time to identify our target keywords. We added a “targets” column and assigned a 1, 2, or 3 to about 25 keywords total (5-10 of each number). We could have just gone by the “total” column, and made the top total scores 1s and so on. But it’s best to combine the scores with some human judgment, which we did. See our final list along with all scores and tabs here.
Keyword research can be a grueling process. The reward comes later when you’re optimizing the site and eventually analyzing your SEO results. When you’ve done a thorough job with keyword research, you don’t waste time second-guessing and rechecking your keyword list throughout these later steps. And of course the real reward comes when you see more high quality traffic coming to your site. Hopefully we’ll see that soon for Melete. But we’re not there yet.
Up next: content and tag optimization.
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Posted on February 14th, 2011 by John
A few clients sent me yesterday’s great NY Times feature story on JC Penney’s underhanded SEO techniques, so I figured a blog post was in order. The Times uncovered huge numbers of spammy links pointing to JC Penney’s site, which it suggests helped it achieve #1 Google rankings on a number of keywords for months. While probably the most damning, this was only the most recent in a bad few months for Google in the mainstream press and the SEO community:
- In November the Times ran another fascinating front-page business section story on Google search results, this time focusing on an online eyeglass retailer who purposely treats his customers terribly because he’s found that their negative online reviews (with links) help his organic rankings. He goes so far as to threaten customers and post things like this on forums where negative comments appear: “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.” Danny Sullivan, possibly the most respected expert on SEO, told the Times “it’s fair to say this is a failure on Google’s part.”
- Two weeks ago the Washington Post featured a story titled “How you and Google are losing the battle against spam in search results.” Among other things, the articles points out that one measure of Google’s success rate — the percentage of people to visit a site after a search — fell 13% last year. Internet pioneer Tim O’Reilly told the Post “It’s clear that Google is losing some kind of war with the spammers. I think Google has in some ways taken their eye off the ball, and I’d be worried about it if I were them.”
Meanwhile, a number of prominent SEO experts have been offering their own in-depth criticisms, and pleading with Google to stop rewarding spam-like techniques. Like anyone who practices good SEO techniques like rigorous keyword research and on-site content optimization (often called white hat SEO), I have long been frustrated and perplexed by many of the commercial search results I see on Google — and by the ability of companies using bad SEO tractics (black hat SEO) to achieve success — so many years after these tactics became common knowledge in the search community. The recent string of bad buzz is, in my view, mostly good thing. I’m optimistic that it will help:
- Embarrass Google into putting more resources into fighting bad SEO tactics
- Decrease Google’s emphasis on links — the main vehicle for bad SEO
- Increase Google’s use of other, less “game-able” factors. Bruce Clay, for instance, predicts huge growth in the importance of social media “likes” and local search results, which he thinks will increase from 20% of all search results to 50% by the end of 2011 and 70-80% by the end of 2012
- Cause a lot of large and mid-size companies to back off link spam and question their SEO consultants about it — for fear of getting punished like JC Penney. I suspect a lot of online marketing managers in the Fortune 500 got emails from executives today saying something to the effect of “we aren’t doing this stuff are we?”
- Help efforts to establish a credible third-party designation for good SEO consultants
The bad news of course is that the buzz will encourage more bad SEO activity by smaller companies willing to take the risk who didn’t previously realize how effective it is. Bad SEO companies won’t be going out of business anytime soon. But hopefully all this press will help to start a shift in the tide.
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