Seems the world is obsessed with size. Every where I go people ask me how long should it be. A good piece of content should be as long as you need it to be. I often used the John Mayer line, say what you need to say. But yesterday I heard a far better explanation. The lady I was meeting with said a piece of content should be like the length of a skirt. Long enough to cover things, but short enough to keep ’em wanting more. And that is the perfect summation.
It can be argued that writing content for your website can be one of the hardest things to do, but the most important thing you can do. Now fortunately for me, writing content and having an opinion are perfectly in my wheel house. But I’m always amazed by businesses that tell me they don’t know what to write or to say. Once I get them to open up and start telling me they have world to offer.
I think the problem most have is what makes a good piece of content. I often have this discussion with our editorial department. I always try to write with a personality. And I dare to say that anything I write, most people know its me. But once I dispensed with the idea of how long something had to be or stopped being put off that i had to write something so long (as if 500 words is really a long thing), I found my writing started to flow much better. I stopped inserting flowery words just to bolster count and often now I find my self at well over 1,000 words before I even look down and see how many words we have.
Also we would try to assign keywords out, and now I find myself more topic oriented, meaning what do I want to talk about. This article for example has literally no keyword value to it. Its a conceptual post that talks more about how to create content and how long content should be rather than using a word like content marketing and focusing on it.
I do think the move away from a pat 500 word model was a good move to make. It allows pages to be better developed. This article and page will be sort of short because I’ve basically said all i need to say on this subject. Other than Say what you need to say. If you do it right, your page will have value and your readers will appreciate you!
I often read articles about what it takes to be successful at SEO. Content, Links, and Social are all the usual suspects. But the one thing that is constantly overlooked is a sound technical understanding. And I think this is where many SEOs are lacking, and to me the one benchmark that often shines a light on the pretenders. Here are some reasons why more than average technical skill is needed to make a page rank.
#1 Know How To Avoid a Hack –
I know it sounds so simple, right? But hacked websites are now denoted in the Google listings. See my example to the right. Who is going to click though to that site or pick them as their web host? How damaging is this? And it takes several weeks to process a re-inclusions request. Depending on the depth of the hack, you may have errant pages published to a directory that you end up with many bad links pointing to you. Some day I’m going to write a WordPress Security Survival guide, but one of the best tips I can give in the meantime is to keep your WordPress install up to date. A hacked website will definitely cause you problems, and having a good tech background will help you.
#2 Understand WordPress Plug In and Themes and the Impact They Have on Your Website
WordPress is a great, but it sometimes allows designers to exceed their expertise and sell a bad product to their client. Over bloating with plug-ins makes the site run slow. Simply cleaning up the saved copies of your posts will speed things up. But when there are too many plugins the site runs slow, and Google does not like slow running websites. Plugins also make more ways for your site to get hacked (Yoast has this last year), so it makes a lot to keep up with.
But even bigger is themes. You truly have to watch 3rd party themes. They are often bloated and have embedded links back to their own site that you can’t see unless you turn the style sheets off. Firefox still allows you to do that, and it’s a very easy thing to check. When I have done this on sites we are bidding I have found all sorts of trash. One in particular was funny because it had a built-in address in the stylesheet that had the address as the MilkyWay Galaxy and links to Apple. This was hurting that companies website as they asked me why they don’t rank here in Houston.
#3 A Programmer Can Make or Break You
I love to tell stories, because they always highlight the points I’m trying to make. And after 18 years, boy do I have alot of them! So, I have a customer who has about 350,000 products on his website, and it used to knock it out of the park on SEO. Now they wrote the site custom, it used Windows, and I think the last time the code was updated was 2003. So he hired an outside firm to rebuild this site, and he knew enough that the 301s needed to be set. But he never verified that they were working. So he flipped the site in May and by August the traffic was off by about 60%. So he calls us to see if we can help him. Yup, never checked that the 301s were being issued correctly on the server. The pages refreshed to the right place, but were issuing the 301s.
Many times Web Designers don’t even do a 301. Those are amateurs, in my opinion. I can’t tell you how many people walk though my SBDC class saying that they had a website that ranked really well and they converted it, made it mobile friendly, which is code speak for moved it in to WordPress, and the entire site vanishes from Google.
I think we are very fortunate because we came of age in this industry. My system admin is a programmer too, and he not only helps ferret out code issues, but he makes the server dance. I can’t begin to tell you all the problems he fixes either with web servers, bad coding, or customers that are a bit befuddled as to what they are to do. I have customers that circumvent their own in-house people and come to Charlie first.
#4 Your Web Host Can Also Make or Break You
I always have trouble addressing this because I constructed a whole web hosting company because no one would do what I wanted and how I wanted it done. So maybe that tells you my opinion of web hosting companies. But let’s talk examples for a second because I don’t want this to be an infomercial for us.
I have an SEO company in Tampa that uses us because Google picks sites up and caches pages through us almost instantaneously. This company had tried Network Solutions (web.com), Godaddy, HostGator, and no matter what, by simply moving a site to us the site ranked and cached.
I took in a new client in the fall that flipped his site to WordPress and lost all his rankings. There really wasn’t anything wrong on the surface, other than out of 200 pages Google only picked up about 10 pages. He was with GoDaddy, and after a little digging, the server the guy was on had an overseas website on it and sites used for mail distribution. He moved to us and 199 out of 200 pages were indexed, with no other change made.
Because all we care about is Google, we built a great neighborhood. We don’t host porn, we don’t allow email distribution lists, we have firewalls that sit in front of the whole network that not only don’t allow the bad stuff in, it doesn’t let bad stuff out either. And then beyond that, I often see on SEO boards people trying to figure out ‘apache’ type things. Error in a 301 redirect. Site throwing a 403. And a myriad of other things that make you look bad. At most hosting companies your problems are your problems. Make sure your web host is willing to help you solve these problems or make sure you have in-house people that actually know how to do these things, where as we have run in to that too.
There are so many things that I do over the course of a day that I take for granted that require me to have a great tech background when it comes to SEO. I watch logs in real-time to help with conversion and to spot errors. This weekend I started to migrate an old website of ours and moved 40 pages, set up 40 301s directly in the .htaccess file. I know every page I’ve moved is issuing the right 301. I found several 403 errors that I need to fix. I have a few other places where the domain is appending itself to the end of the URL and creating 404 errors. These are all things that if left unfixed would affect how my site ranks, and most people don’t know how to find them let alone fix them. I truly believe that the SEO company needs to be a full-service company that understands all aspects from the pretty paint job on the website to what’s under the hood on the server level.
I love my job. I have the best possible job for who I am. I like to help people. Case in point, I was returning phone calls and one of my return calls was a young lady from class on Wednesday. I could tell from class she had a rudimentary SEO knowledge, you know, knows enough to know how not to step on a landmine and can run the basic SEO for her company. Light years ahead of most, but still has a rudimentary working knowledge.
The call went something like this. “I have a friend who hired a webmaster and the webmaster wants to build a microsite for each location. And I thought that was a red flag.” So lets say this, there are many many different opinions on microsites, but I personally have never been a fan of them. And I really don’t think Google is a fan of them either. Most people don’t use microsites right and often are using them to game the system.
There was a time that it could be argued to have a focused website, and there are still times that a client has too diverse an offering that two sites is the right decision, but three sites just because of three different locations is not a good reason. Each site will require the same amount of work, so it triples the resources needed. For a local business it seemed like overkill.
Next question on topic was the domain itself, and we agreed. The caller wanted to change the domain. Domain was from ’06 and has a DA of a 30, and reasonable links for a local site. We advised against it. The web designer did have the sense enough to know he needed to keep the domain. Now I wonder if it will get flipped properly. The objections had to do with the present domain not matching the Business’ name, and the way I left that one was that if you do your Google Local right, most of the problems would work themselves out. I told the caller based on our conversation I felt they were heading for a mess.
The next was the inclusion of keywords in the ‘new’ domain they wanted to purchase. So we have a 10 year old site that isn’t an exact match, and we have a brand spanking new domain that has no marketing, branding, or any other outside signals to support it. My opinion was that it was not a great idea. So they asked me about a variant that abbreviated the keywords, but then I said the domain out loud, it was obviously a very bad domain. And why make some weird variant when you have a perfectly good domain? So I said no to the EMD.
This story did highlight to me how different the levels of SEO knowledge is out there. And that for the end user, how DOES he know what the guy knows what he’s talking about? I hear so many convoluted theories of what SEO is or isn’t. Everyone has an opinion, but there is really no guidepost to help people determine who does and doesn’t know.
I walked away from my conversation today feeling pretty good. The caller had enough information not to make a bad decision, and they told me they would be attending my SEO classes. So I’m going to open this up for opinion. Did the designer guy tell the caller right? Did I tell the caller right? Feel free to weigh in.
There is a new disease emerging in the web design world. It affects web designers, who through the power of WordPress, makes them look like programmers. It’s called Plug-initus, or the over use of plug-ins on a website. Fortunately there is a cure. First let me say we love WordPress and are one of the most knowledgable WordPress web hosting companies in the market place. Luckily, we have a programmer here that can repair many of the symptoms caused by those with Plug-initus. Some of the side effects of this disease are security threats, downtime, website slowness, and Google just hating you (this one can be fatal!).
What is a WordPress plug-in?
By way of a small history lesson, WordPress is an open source platform that allows developers to build elements of the website that are not included in the basic build and plug them into the website, thus the name plug-ins, and in fact really has become an entire cottage industry on its own. As I write this I realize I am showing how long I’ve been in this business. Initially WordPress had no guidelines to do this, so you would install one plug-in from one vendor and it would crash the website because it conflicted with another plug-in from a different vendor. You always had to make sure you backed your site up, because sometimes this would make the repair unrecoverable.
The reason for this is that the code is appended to the basic WordPress files, and because all the plug-ins were written by different people, they often would overwrite code that was needed by the others. This also made updating a WordPress install extremely difficult because the core files were changed, and an upgrade with the wrong plug-ins and Bam, no more website.
So WordPress came up with a core build and an API that standardized the plug-ins across the board, and the world of at least the web hosting company dramatically improved. And the end user could start adding standard type plug-ins with little thought of compatibility or affects on security, because WordPress themselves already stabilized a bunch of it.
As with any other “itus” type disease, the patient doesn’t realize they are causing their own issues. Many of these folks are younger webmasters or new business owners that weren’t around in the days before WordPress stabilized situation, so they just go crazy and install every plugin they can find that does something cool.
WordPress Plug-in Guide to help Cure Plug-intus:
#1 Stick to standard plugins
The way to tell a standard plugin is usually that they have thousands and thousands of installs. Yoast, Ninja Forms Silder Revolution, and W3 Cache are a few good ones. One exception, Jet Pack, in our opinion is insecure and should be avoided. There are some really good plug-ins out there, but you have to be smart when you select them.
#2 Add ONLY what you need This little tip will be hard because to an addict to plug-ins person, you need them all. But understand the more that are added, the more there is to keep track of when the site is slow. You will likely also forget why you put the plugin there. So the best advice is to only use the most important ones. I will eventually share what we think are the needed plug-ins and the ones most sites will need. We know it will be hard, but it is important.
#3 Learn to Backup –
I can’t tell you how many would-be’s call me because they blew up their site and they did not back it up. If your going to experiment with plug-ins, then please, please back up your site. We like Updraft. It does a great job. Backs up to your dropbox or Google Drive and will rotate for you if you set it up right.
#4 Set Up a Dev Site
This will allow the recreational plug-in addict a place to test a plug-in before they break their site. And when it all goes sideways it can easily be restored from a backup.
#5 Do not Customize Plug-ins Until You Kick the Habit
We have run into some folks who try to customize their plug-ins or use a developer to enhance a plug-in they have written. The issue with this is that the second you start to make customizations, you invalidate the API that keeps everything in compatibility. So the next plug-in explodes the site. So if you intend to have any custom plug-ins written, your days of a plug-in junkie need to be in the rearview mirror.
And remember, all these plug-ins easily can cause security issues. This is why Google will hate you and go as far as to mark your site as hacked. And remember to check your themes too. Often purchased themes have embedded issues as well. The best tip of all is use only what you absolutely need.
There has always been a lot of talk about whether site structure is a ranking factor, and if so, how do you properly set up the structure of a site in order to send the right signals to the search engine?
Well, if you are familiar with the term silo it will play in to this. Basically what you are doing when you layout a site is silo information so that all of the like content and information lives in one focused area of your website.
So here is another way to think of making silos in your website, and honestly the way I have always thought of this is as mini websites within the website. So let’s say we are selling widgets, so the focus of our website is on widgets. Let’s also say we have widgets made from steel, plastic, rubber or wood.
Okay, so lets look at different types of content based on the fact that we are going to silo our site. I like to think of things in terms of topics pages, which in my way of looking at things are mini homepages for that section and articles which I would consider supporting content on the subject.
So if we were going to layout our site based on the widget model we talked about, we would have:
The main Homepage, and then we would have a topic page for each material – steel, plastic, rubber or wood. They would then in turn have supporting articles under each one of those topics.
So doing this will lay out the site structure in a way where every little section will have all the like-content contained within it, and then the content in that section will need to link back to the other content in that area.
As an example, this is what the steel section would look like.
Topic Page: Steel Widgets
Articles to support Steel Widgets:
How steel widgets are made.
Why choose a steel widget?
Why choose a steel widget versus a plastic one?
So here you would now have a topics page and 3 pages that are supporting it. So you would have Steel Widgets as the main topics page which you would link in to your main navigation to give it importance, and the three articles would link to each other for support and also link to the topics page, giving it supporting content.
My main navigation for the site would look like:
Home | Steel |Plastic | Rubber | Wood | About Us | Contact Us
Each of the other sections would be laid out just like the steel section. This type of site structure will support your main content that is important for the search engines spiders to pick up, as well as sending the right signals with the content and the focused sections.
One of the best things to do this sort of thing, especially if you have a large site, is to use a mind map tool that will let you flow it out in detail before you ever build the site.
In closing, I will also caution anyone that is having a site built by a developer and then after the fact involving a SEO expert, you are likely going to have to trash your site and start over. Many developers will build a site exactly the way you want it and not worry one bit about your site actually ranking. That is not their job, and most of them lack the know-how to achieve SEO for a site, so they will build it and then when it’s time to get traffic to it you will be faced with having to scratch the site, or at best spend more money to get it right. So I will say the best course of action is to get your marketing and SEO team involved from the ground floor, that way when you are building the site all the necessary components are in place and resources are not wasted.
In class on Wednesday night, I started asking my students how they handled social media. Its always interesting to me to hear what people perceive they should be doing. Those of you that know me personally know when I teach about SEO in Houston, I often talk about not putting up hanging cats, old lady meme’s, or complaining about your job or thanking God it’s Friday. Today I was hit with people posting happy Friday the 13th. For my purposes, that is not the right path in moving forward.
So what is good? Once nice lady in the back stuck her hand up and outlined a great plan. Her plan was to go read stuff on education, which was her business, and post those article to her Facebook wall. And although there are some of you social media managers that will say “Yeah, what’s wrong with that?” I told her its not how I would do it.
Now I’m often accused of making it seem easy. And I admit that being an editor in a former life, when there was things called newspapers, it helps, but I play a game with students to see how many content ideas I can give them about their business in 30 seconds. Its fun and they are shocked.
So here are a few tips and strategies when you have writers block:
#1 Read Your Email
Every day we sit and answer emails. Sometimes it’s as simple as the word done. And other times its a long, complex answer. In both cases, each email you reply to should be evaluated to see if you can use it for a blog post or a page on your website. If I find the question is complex, I make sure when I answer my customer or vendor, that answer can be reconstituted or repurposed to our website in a way that makes sense. Every business that answers a customer has an endless supply of content ideas.
#2 Read Industry Articles
My mom always said I wasn’t good at sharing as a kid. So the lady in the back of my class that said she shares interesting articles she finds, after I told her it’s not the way I would have handled it, I went on to explain how I would. Everything you read you have an opinion on. I know everything I read I have an opinion on. Sometimes I agree, and most times I find the bone of contention to the article. It’s a variation of my 81 year old father arguing with the talking heads on the TV, just in writing. I admit that when I don’t agree, it’s much easier to write the article. But even when I find articles or people I agree with, I write a page on that too.
#3 Understand Who Your Customer Is
I know my customer and I know what they need from my company. So I often come up with topics that will help them. It may be their pain points. For example I have several hundred people still using FrontPage, so I put up a page that talks about what we recommend as FrontPage Alternatives. Regardless of whether it’s something at my web hosting company that I can control, or just something that I know is out there that I can help them with, I use our blog as a profile for that. Most business owners do try to stay ahead of their customers, so just remember to sit down and write it out.
#4 Keep a List
Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But I can’t tell you how many folks I say that to, and you might have thought I said something like Aliens landed in New Jersey to them. Yup, keep a note pad, a note pad app, use the notes on your iPhone, write on your bathroom mirror with lipstick (yup, true story from a customer). Store your ideas, so when the rainy day comes, you have a backlog to pull from.
#5 Call Me
No not really, but I have people call me all the time to come up with a new content idea. If you get stuck, add a comment to this post and i’ll get you an idea. Or email me and I’ll get you an idea. Now if your question is on nuclear psychics, I don’t know much about it other than the top 10 Sheldon Cooper string theory experiements, but if you sell commercial doors…
Although web designer and web developer are often used interchangeable, they couldn’t be more different than an apple and a banana. Sure, both involved setting up a website but that is where the similarities stop. Web Designers are more artistic and graphical, where web developers are the programmers that make the web work.
Initially everyone who could operate a website, was a web designer. Heck our company name started as Acreative Touch Web Design (ACTWD). There were easy to use software like FrontPage or you could simply write a little HTML code and that was that. But as time has gone on and the internet is more sophisticated, these rudimentary methods have transformed themselves in one of two ways.
The web designer has become a graphic artists, and is exactly what the name implies. They are involved in the pretty. They help develop the brand and feed the development group to make sure that the website has a wow factor to it.
The other type of web designer is someone with a computer that knows how to use Dreamweaver or can manipulate WordPress to some degree and build a website. Those people are also called web designers. They are often cheaper and normally work with small business owners setting up a website, For someone looking for a brochure website, these type web designers are okay. But for someone who wants effective vehicle to market their business they probably need to make a different decision.
Really option one is the first step in having a website built. But sadly most small business and inexperienced business owners pick option two not understanding the scope of the job. Then they bemoan the quality, functionally or effectiveness of their website. We work with a lot of web designers though our web hosting company and we appreciate the job they do. For the most part, their customers only need the brochure type website with no expectation for the website to rank.
So what exactly is a web developer?
This is what most businesses actually need. Sure it costs more but these folks write the code that makes the web run. Every time you place an order on Amazon or push the link button on FaceBook, a web developer wrote that. These folks should not be confused with a computer programmer, that’s Bill Gates or maybe Linus Torvalds. Web Developers program websites. They set up the technical interactions that a website needs to interact with Google properly. They understand that you don’t just take down all the pages on an existing website. Moreover those pages need to be redirected.
Web designers and web developers are two different jobs but they should work together. When planning a website its always advisable t first work with a designer to get the blueprint for the developer. Then move to a developer. It is common for larger firms to have both of these disciplines in house but it is incumbent on the business owner to find out if that is the case by asking the questions.
Few Guidelines to help choose designer vs. developer
These are questions we would recommend asking to determine which path to take:
Do you want a brochure/business card on the internet? A place to send people if they ask (designer)
Do you want a shopping card or a way for clients to interact with you on the internet? (developer)
Do you want a marketing campaign including SEO, SEM with lead tracking? (developer)
Do you want a shopping cart? (most cases developer)
Do you have any custom requirement for you business website? (developer)
Do you need graphics created? Do you have a Brand (designer)
How long have you been in business?
Who is your biggest client?
How many sites do you simultaneously work on?
These few basic questions should start to help clarify the picture what the scope of the job is and who to hire. But most of all this should highlight the fact that there is a world of difference between a web designer and a web developer.
So we met a web designer that says image size doesn’t matter anymore in terms of SEO. Interesting thought. Well let’s look at that idea some and then we can see what the reality of that statement might be.
When we are talking about SEO let’s keep in mind the majority of our focus is on Google these days and it’s most likely going to continue to be since they deliver the majority of traffic and control the biggest market share when it comes to search engine traffic.
So ask yourself this, If Google does not care about how big your images are why do they have a Google site speed tool that concerns itself with how fast a site loads? You can see how this tool function for yourself by following this link https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ . This tool is designed to give you insight in to what you can do to speed up your site. So it would make sense that large images that slow down a site might not be the best idea. Load time has been a ranking variable and continues to be one.
Here is a little screen cap of what this Google tool has to say about the home page of southwest airlines.
As you can see there is a whole section dedicated to optimizing images and the tool will even tell you the savings you will get by downloading the file that it produces for you which you can take and upload to your site to help speed things up.
So just based on this data alone I would venture to say it’s pretty safe to say that Google cares about the size of your images.
So why would they care you ask?
Well large bloated images slow down a site’s load time which when it comes to crawling the site slows down the spiders which is bad for search engine spiders and uses more of their resources then necessary.
Google is foremost concerned about their customers and the experience they will have when they use the search engine and follow a search result. What does that mean to anyone trying to rank in the organic Serp’s? Well it means that if you do not conform to providing the user experience that Google wants their customers to have you will get pushed out of prominent search results.
User experience has become a ranking variable and if your site experiences an excessive amount of bounces because let’s say your site images do not load fast enough and people click thru to the site and then leave because its taking too long to load you will be impacted.
Therefore, if the spider comes thru and sees excessively large images likely you will not ever get top rankings because Google will try and provide the best user experience possible and since they know people do not wait around for sites that load slow you will likely be dinged from the very beginning and never rank just to avoid a bad user experience. Let’s say you do get some rankings, be prepared to lose them once your bounce rate goes up because of excessive load times.
The struggle to offer quality images as well as good load time has been a real dilemma for about as long as the internet has been around. It’s especially difficult when we are talking about product images. Everyone knows users want to see good quality detailed images of products they are going to buy.
So how do we achieve the best of both worlds then?
Well the answer is use compression software
Get a web developer or a plugin that can help compress larger images
Reduce your image sizes by optimizing them before they go on the web using an image tool.
Isolate larger images to product pages and use thumbnails on pages and click thru to a larger image to reduce the initial load time of a page. Once someone clicks on a larger image they expect to wait a bit to get the detail they want.
Us the images the compressed images Google gives you.
Just remember the biggest part of all of this is user experience. If the user does not have a good experience using your site those signals will come thru to Google and good rankings may soon be lost.
So use your own best judgement and think about the logic of why larger images are not the way you want to go unless they can be isolated.
Also keep in mind that not everyone even in America has access to a high speed connection and therefore what maybe just a short 5 second delay could be as long as 20 to 30 seconds to someone else and as we all know the attention span on the web is not very long.
I attended an internet conference this last week and the question came up Is SEO dead? Now every few year Google comes out with a new penalty named after some zoo animal and everyone starts howling SEO is dead. And not that there have been any new animals added to the Google Zoo lately, but SEO does continue to change and evolve.
So let me say this. SEO is not dead nor will it be for many years to come. But, if you run your website only based on chasing what Google wants without any understand or investment to a long term marketing strategy, it would be easy to see how one could infer that a death had occurred. And if you run a website without any consideration of your end user SEO is dead to you. SEO is no longer just one thing, which is the common misconception. The problem is anyone caught sitting on the one-legged stool will fall over.
There are many less experienced marketers that boil the problem down to SEO vs. SEM or is it simply the days of SEO are over? I don’t believe either of those two statements are true, rather, I would rather say that how through evolution, SEM supports the Brand and to have organic rankings, you must have a brand. Both are completely integrated into each other and really 2 sides of the same coin on some levels.
The natural inclination is to pit SEO against SEM But all of this now is integrated along with social media. Where is the user in the sales funnel? Most purchases start out as informational search and that is a far different part of the funnel than the actual conversion. It is a whole separate blog topic really but for now, it’s not an either or conversation. The better question is where is the end user in the sales process vs. how to create brand awareness in the information search with the SEO and the SEM working in tandem.
Now, I will readily admit that SEO has changed since the very first website that I put up in 1998. It was pretty easy back in those days. A sprinkle of keywords here, a dash of title tags there add in an Exact Match Domain and you had a #1 ranking website in about 6 days. Yup that type of SEO is dead for sure. Heck most of the engines from those days are dead also, or like Yahoo on life support. These practices needed to die honestly and should have been killed off years ago.
Ever since Google entered the search scene, every step along the way has been geared towards this one concept. How do you service the end-user? Links were the life-blood of Google until they got co-oped forcing Google to raise the bar. Now fast-forward. Engagement, click through rates, social media all starting with really great content that benefits the end-user. And companies need to act like companies. Press Releases, community involvement are all things normal businesses do. And it’s seems to me that SEO has morphed into a labor intensive juggernaut called digital marketing.
Does that mean SEO is dead? No, not at all. It’s just means it has evolved. It’s more complicated and there is a real expense attached to it. What it means is you really have to know what you’re doing to get results. So as I have been saying for about the last 18 months…SEO is dead. Long live SEO!
I’m sitting at my desk answering emails, starting to write a press release for a client and here comes a Linkedin update, CRO vs. SEO. So my first thought was CRO? So I clicked on it and sure enough the first comment was “great another acronym.” So it wasn’t just me that had a WTH moment. (Note: effective use of an acronym, where you don’t need an urban dictionary to figure out what the person is trying to say).
So I started into this article that had the premise of you should be paying attention to CRO, conversion rate optimization for the rest of us, vs. SEO. /insert sound of tires screeching to a halt here.
Really, why would anyone ever write an article that pits the two of these things against each other? What is the point of SEO if not to create a conversion? Well, I read the article over and I wish there was not only a dislike button but a BS button. The article was trying to say these were two separate disciplines, which some can argue they are. But that you should look at the ROI (yet another acronym) independently and which gains you more.
Now I get that conversion management is something that is talked a lot about by PPC SEM types (keeping the acronyms going). But a good SEO type should also be concerned with connversion. What are you serving the user when they land on your page? And how do you take that informational page that often falls in another part of the funnel and acutally monetize the page? But yeah, that is not what this article was about. It wasn’t even about SEM vs. SEO.
Everything I read these days is trying to make the case that SEO lives in solitary confinement. I think that’s a very old-school view of things. SEO is labor intensive across multiple disciplines. PPC is different, labor intensive, but usually its one guy running the whole thing. The statement that I’ll put traffic at your door but its up to you to make them buy is so 2002. CRO is only one more thing an SEO firm needs to be concerned with. If the site ranks but can’t convert, there is a huge issue there. Users are getting smarter, and if the page doesn’t address the needs of the user, almost immediately the user has bounced back to Google, hopped over to Amazon, or sprinted to a niche site that better aligns with what they want.
SEO and CRO are soulmates. Every click you get on great content must have a plan for conversion. Every page you put up must have a targeted audience in mind. Take me for a minute. I write my blog with several purposes. First and foremost it is to provide information on everything web site related in hopes that someone may see the article, become educated, and not make huge dollar mistakes by hiring the wrong person. I am convinced that there are very few people that know how to do this all correcly. And I’m even more convinced that we are one of a few that will deal with smaller business, and actually know what we are doing. So I guess you could say my blog helps me demonstrate our 20+ years of experience. And third, my blog is so that I can gain social engagement, so that it helps my SEO business. As time passes our phone rings more and more with people asking if we can help them solve their problems. A ringing phone is also known as a conversion.
There must be a balance on a website, and everything you do should’t be done just to chase Google (which is what SEO implies), more over it should be for your end user. Ah, you say that is CRO. No, it’s just good SEO, and now Google is looking at all of those things and has raised the bar yet again.
There are so many things that I do over the course of a day that I take for granted that require me to have a great tech background when it comes to SEO. I watch logs in real-time to help with conversion and to spot errors. This weekend I started to migrate an old website of ours and moved 40 pages, set up 40 301s directly in the .htaccess file. I know every page I’ve moved is issuing the right 301. I found several 403 errors that I need to fix. I have a few other places where the domain is appending itself to the end of the URL and creating 404 errors. These are all things that if left unfixed would affect how my site ranks, and most people don’t know how to find them let alone fix them. I truly believe that the SEO company needs to be a full-service company that understands all aspects from the pretty paint job on the website to what’s under the hood on the server level.
In class on Wednesday night, I started asking my students how they handled 