SEO: “The cougar” among today’s sexy marketing mediums
Today’s marketer, brand, or small business is being courted by some very well endowed marketing options; from the siren song of Facebook’s ad-targeting options, sly stalkers like banner ad retargeting, and email split testing to digital properties like Twitter and Pinterest who entice with their exotic social media models.
Despite these tempting options, I will make the case that search engine optimization, an almost 20-year-old marketing craft, is aging gracefully and still sexier from an ROI perspective than other marketing methods a fourth of her age.
She is not easily seduced, but when she is, you will have a most loyal mistress.
SEO is not into no-strings-attached flings, this is going to be a long-term relationship. From a resources management ROI perspective what makes SEO sexy is that you do the work once to get ranked and then you reap the rewards in perpetuity with little ongoing effort. It’s a do 80% of the work upfront then spend an hour a month kind of thing. As you can see in the video case study above, the site for my marketing firm, RoselandDigitalAgency.com, has been ranked #1 for the keyword “Denver marketing firm” for several years now. With as many as several hundred web and marketing firms in my city, some of which have been in business for decades and featured in national media publications, this is a highly competitive search phrase. This took a lot of work to get ranked for…
- Investing in a pricey premium domain name.
- Writing over 50 articles and blogs about my company’s services.
- +20 client references, testimonials, and case studies.
- Producing and syndicating over a dozen videos.
- Syndicating dozens of online yellow pages type directory listings.
- Buying and building thousands of backlinks from authoritative online destinations.
After about four months of this, I had gone from page 10 to #1 on the first page of the search results. That was about two years ago and I’m still there. In the last two years, I’ve done surprisingly little work to maintain this coveted position. Compare this to any kind of Pay-Per-Click, banner advertising, or social media campaign which requires an ongoing investment of money or time (or both).
She’s no tease, if you give her what she wants…
A keyword-rich, one-to-four word .COM domain.
SEO went through her experimentation phase a long time ago, now (with some keyword research) she will tell you exactly what she wants to push her buttons. In the ten years that I’ve done SEO for dozens of clients in a wide range of industries, there’s one thing I’ve found very consistently, a website with a keyword-rich domain name that overlaps desirable search phrases has a significant advantage in the SEO rankings over a similar website with a less descriptive domain name. This means that if you can acquire (you may even have to pay a pretty penny for it) a short, descriptive .COM domain which overlaps the phrases your prospective customers are typing into Google, you have a distinct advantage in outranking your competitors.
This is how I got ranked for “Denver marketing firm,” I paid close to $400 in a GoDaddy auction for DenverMarketingFirm.com.
Link juice and 301 redirect freakiness: You might be wondering, if you paid all that money for DenverMarketingFirm.com how and why does RoselandDigitalAgency.com come up as the URL in the Google search results? While I was building all the content and ranking authority in my site I used DenverMarketingFirm.com, after I had achieved the #1 ranking I went into my Godaddy domain management dashboard and did a simple 301 redirect of DenverMarketingFirm.com to RoselandDigitalAgency.com. This transferred the “link juice” and within a few days, RoselandDigitalAgency.com was on top of the rankings. My reasons for doing this were twofold…
- Branding: I want my prospective clients to see that my firm stakes our reputation and my family’s last name on the quality of our work
- The direct match domain name advantage is well known amongst marketing and SEO professionals. So I wanted to confuse my competitors who may attempt to outrank me using the same strategy.
Question — My clients will sometimes ask me: Is there a search engine ranking benefit to buying a bunch of slightly different domain names and then forwarding them all to my primary website to use the direct match domain name ranking factor to my advantage to get my primary site ranked for all those slightly different search phrases?
Answer — My answer comes from years of experimentation, research, and the closest thing possible to a formal education in SEO: In the vast majority of cases, no. 301 redirects are only useful for SEO purposes if the domain being redirected already has a lot of its own SEO authority. So you must build a unique website, articles, and videos and then let it sit around for 30–90 days to attain the desired rankings for every individual phrase match domain name you buy. What’s almost always a far more efficient and cost-effective SEO strategy is to pay a little more for an excellent domain name and build out content sections on your site matching the various phrases you want to be ranked for.
She wants to get in your pants. Literally.
Talking about sexy marketing, mobile is hotter than a soaking wet supermodel right now. The smartphone and app developers are working faster than ever to integrate Google search into the smartphone experience. Consumers are spending more time than ever, hypnotized by the glow of those little screens, researching the next cool thing to buy and making purchase decisions. With a $35, fully-equipped Android smartphone coming soon to the continent of Africa in the coming years we will see literally billions of new internet users. It’s a very exciting time to be a mobile-savvy marketer. If you have a content management system-based website using a high-quality, professional template it will come with built-in iPhone and Android friendly mobile layouts.
She’s got “girl next door” charm
Google Local search results on mobile maps applications are a result of a special cocktail of the SEO algorithm, 3rd party credibility, and physical IP address triangulation. It goes like this: Claim and verify your Google Local listing (it’s free), make sure your Google local listing is completely filled out with all information and photos, now syndicate that listing information to about 25 of the web’s local directories (Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, Citysearch, TripAdvisor, online yellow pages, etc). Finally to dominate local-mobile search, make sure you have plenty of 5-star reviews from legitimate customers on the four most popular (Google Local, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp), with about 70% on your Google local listing.
She adores the silver screen.
SEO always fancied herself a starlet and she will be yours if you take her to the movies. Google in its perpetual quest to provide the searcher with the best experience loves to rank videos high in its search results, usually above the fold on the first page. Video is in many cases, for the marketer, the path of least resistance to getting ranked on the first page for a competitive search phrase. Interestingly, the Google search algorithms don’t actually have the pattern recognition sophistication to watch a video and determine if it is good or not — the only computer on this planet that can do that is in between your ears. So in this sense, SEO ranks the quality of your video not on the actual production value but things like video title, description, tags, watch time, votes, comments, etc. This means that amateurish video content is better than no video content.
She likes it fast.
Site load time is an important factor in the SEO algorithm. So it’s well worth spending extra on some high-speed VPS hosting. Also, use content delivery networks as much as possible; add a Gzip plugin to your site, compress the HTML, combine CSS style sheets and optimize your image sizes. I recommend using Yahoo’s speed test utility Yslow (I like the Yslow plugin for Google Chrome) to analyze and improve your site load times.
You can take mom’s advice and “just be yourself.”
She will spot a player from miles away and doesn’t care for cheesy pickup lines. Due to things like the recent PANDA update, Google’s search algorithms value original content more than ever. Time-consuming, unpredictable, and expensive “black hat” SEO tactics like link-baiting, forum spamming, etc are producing diminishing returns. This means that you can focus your efforts on doing what you are good at, and the organic, democratic nature of the search engines’ algorithm will push you towards the top of the search results. You still have to be a decent self-promoter and let others give you the credit you are due, but for the most part, this means that if a sushi chief is the best sushi chef in his or her town, they can focus their time on slicing and dicing (do sushi chiefs dice?) instead of trying to be an SEO guru.
Her reign shows no sign of ending.
With print and television media losing eyeballs every year while internet and smartphone use continues to increase drastically across the world, SEO is more relevant than ever. Despite the popularity of Facebook and the valiant marketing efforts of Bing, Google search is where people go to make their purchasing decisions. You don’t have to worry about SEO falling victim to the consistency/relevancy paradox since she is an unemotional, insentient algorithmic being that bases her ranking decisions upon the democratic landscape of backlinks.
Warning: Her girlfriend (Google keyword tool) is a lying snake!
Many naive marketers will head over to Google’s keyword search volume tool to begin their market research and SEO strategy planning. Unfortunately, about 90% of the time the Keyword Tool and the Traffic Estimator are way, way off from what the actual search volume is on a phrase. For example…
My website LimitlessMindet.com is ranked #1 for the search phrase “how to be Limitless,” this means that I should be getting approximately 40% of the traffic that searches this phrase.
According to the Google keyword tool, this phrase has 1,500,000 Global Monthly Searches — wow that sounds like a lot, right?
But, I know from monitoring my Google Analytics account that I have NEVER gotten more than a few hundred unique visitors a month from this keyword.
This inconsistency seems to be consistent across all my websites that are ranked in #1 positions for short-tail key phrases. I’ve heard several poor explanations of this phenomenon, that it has to do with direct match search vs categorical match. This explanation just doesn’t account for the massive disparity between what the keyword tool tells you and what the actual traffic is for a phrase. Either way, it’s quite deceptive, shame on you Google for being evil!
What’s the best content management system for SEO?
That would be Joomla! Quite simply, there’s not much that you can’t do with Joomla. Learn why…
