81 replies to this topic

[Black_Knight]

And if you look at what clients really are asking SEOs to do - they are asking for top rankings to drive more traffic to increase sales.

That's an interesting point, and sad that it is still too often true. Many people looking for SEO still make the foolish assumption that the optimal position in the SERPs is at the top.

It isn't always true.

I often skip the first result. It is quite often a poor one, with a Title that is keyword-stuffed to excess and reads to a human like it was purely spam-machine generated. The snippet often doesn't convince me that my assessment of the title might have been hasty.

Nope. I usually scan the results before selecting the one that looks like the best/closest match to my objectives. That may be in position 1 sometimes, but I'm just as likely to find it at position 3, or 6, or 15 (I have a default of 50 results per SERP).

If a brand I trust or like is in the SERPs, I'm quite likely to skip all the listings above it and go straight to the 'trusted' store. Market research into surfer behaviour shows that most other people follow the same thinking and behaviour.

Top position can only ever mean that your listing is seen, not that your site will be seen. That's not the only reason that top ranking is too often the objective of someone who doesn't really understand search or search behaviour.

Let's imagine ourselves shopping. Our first search is often to see what products are out there and give ourselves some options. We're nowhere near ready to buy yet, and at this stage are often more likely to buy offline than on.

Being top here will get a company seen and considered, but the surfer is pretty much certain to go on and visit many others too, looking for the range of options and products. If I find that the later results have much the same offers, am I going to go back to the first site just for the same deal? No, I'm gonna say "Ah, they're all the same, might as well buy here then"

In that case, the optimal position in SERPs will be where most people are facing the point at which they decide to go no further if the offerings are no different. You really will get more conversions and profits by dropping down the SERPs enough to be the third or fourth site visited by most searchers in this scenario.

I could go on, but I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, and that most of us here already know these basics. Its educating the SEO customers that takes these explanations.

[projectphp]

Pity we don't have hard evidence of a lot of what you posted, Ammon.

IMHO, if the behaviour of users interacting with a SERP were better understood, and even better documented, then a lot of the problems with SEO as an industry, and in part the wider SEM, being taken seriously by Marketers would disappear.

SEM needs to be, and should be, all that existing Marketing expects in a format that it understands, i.e. a broad statistical and pshychological understanding of customer behaviour, combined with an understanding of issues Unique to SEM, like the value of keywords and conversions and a new understanding of teh level of accuracy of SEM metrics.

Currently, we have a lot to back up the power of SEM in relation to traffic and the value of such traffic, but not a lot of understanding of how Users interact with a SERP, or how they make their decisions.

The general response to Gord Hotchkiss of http://www.enquiro.com whitepaper on this issue (http://www.sempo.org/research/searcher-mind.pdf) was generally pretty appalling, IMHO. Rather than being seen as the first step in understanding how different users interact with a SERP, it was taken up and run with on Forums as gospel truth. It wasn't and isn't, and was never intended to be. Instead it was, a starting point. I really agree with Mr Hotchkiss article here, http://www.searcheng...ofsearcher2.asp, in which he says:

Yet, to date, as Danny Sullivan has said, “I always find it amazing that with all the importance of search engines, including the advertising money going to them, there''s seemingly little research done on how we interact with them.”  This isn’t acceptable. It’s incumbent on our industry to take up this challenge and deliver.

Some SEOs create this scenario, simply because this sort of research is outside their comfort zone. Others simply have never considered the wider implication of the M in SEM, and instead focusing on the small, technical issues that make up SEM.

I loved Ammon's post on SEW about the position as a Mini-me Ammon because, IMHO, that is what SEM is all about:

...(bridging) the communication gap that often exists between the Marketing and Technical Departments of Client Companies.

Unfortunately, that gap is often hard to bridge, and in some cases, without the required research and with a sceptical know-it-all Marketing manager, impossible.

I look forward to the day when an industry body sponsors research that I can quote in just such a situation. Research with not only a solid methodlogy, but also a large enough sample size for teh conclusions drawn to be statistically valid.

Edited by projectphp, 13 February 2005 - 07:08 PM.

[mdisanto10]

I think SEO has gotten so boring b/c all the press I see on it, all the discussion I see on it is so 101ish/best practices. It's boring for all of us who have been in the game forever. However, to a new comer, it's still exciting, still challenging - but I also agree that more and more, people are focusing on the entire marketing mix and not on search engines alone - a very good thing IMHO.

[cline]

One thing I've come to realize is that I much prefer PPC to SEO -- as a business. I like doing SEO as much as PPC with regard to the technical work, but the client side of SEO is not nearly as desirable as with PPC. I now don't even like to sell SEO except to select PPC clients.

With PPC it's a straightforward, though not necessarily easy, analysis of their business goals, the competitive situation, and what they need to do to be successful. If the client will sign on to the numbers, then I can deliver them.

With SEO I'm in the situation of telling the client that they have to change their content. Oh the resistance! If I can get clients to do what I tell them to do, it works. But it is oh so painful to get them to do what I tell them to do. For one client it took me 2 years to get them to approve my recommendations. They now dominate the SERPs for their terms. Another client has fought me so much about this stuff I've nearly given up. I now simply forecast what's going to happen to their rankings due to their decisions and tell them to hire a copywriter to fix their problems.

[nuthin]

the day I get bored of SEO is the day I get another job

I don't ever seeing that happening, thankfully.

[Jesper B.]

The main reason for my interest in SEO is that even experienced marketers told me this area (or internet marketing as such) was impossible to learn from others, through books and so on. They let me to believe that SEO was some kind of mystical area of expertise consisting of strange people in cloaks (like a SEO round table...). Buhuu to that. I understand that there are some problems giving scientific evidence in the SEO area, but I have given up on strict scientific evidence a long time ago and will be happy to accept evidence on experts experience consensus which is plentiful.

After spending some time on the subject it seems to me now, that SEO is more or less minimum requirements to web design (thought of as more than a visual task!). It's also "a must know basics" in a multi channelled marketing strategy. Knowledge of SEO is very powerful in combination with general marketing knowledge. The last thing being said, I also believe that SEO must be thought of as one tactical element in a much wider internet marketing strategy or even a marketing strategy in the full meaning of the words.

I guess the reason for the success of SEO it that it has brought remarkable results, so there was no real need for many SEO experts to engage in broader marketing thinking. And as usual almost any discipline concerned with digital technology is dominated by technicians in the beginning. But SEO seems to have come a lot further already with people like Jill, maybe because they insist that the real deal about SEO is not technical (though it's not gonna harm you to know it) but rather it's about knowing your targets in every way and then putting all your skills into reaching them, fulfilling them etc. Now IMHO that’s getting into the fun and exciting game.

None of the old timers here seem to hide their knowledge but are more than happy to help out the newbies - and thanks for that. Perhaps the reason why this tend to bore many of you, is that you don't get too much back. Which is actually a shame, since many of the so called newbies here come from very different backgrounds perhaps with some kind of new approach to the SEO field. It happens that they speak of it, but mostly I would guess they would not speak of it, because they are insecure and afraid it would be of topic.

So one suggestion could be to really broaden this SEO-forum, so that SEO is also discussed in relation to overall marketing issues – for example how to implement an internet branding strategy as a part of a multi channelled marketing strategy on these on those terms?. This might actually be exciting for the SEO-experts as it would get them on more thin ice thus they could be learning too (or at least forced to think for more than 2 sec.) instead of repeating their knowledge over and over again. There are at least two problems in doing that though: firstly not many people dare present marketing strategies to the public before the actual campaign takes of and secondly it could run out of hand (read out of topic). The first issue can be resolved I guess by keeping it general and also study cases after campaigns are finished and measured for effect etc. The second issue is really in the hands of Jill and the moderators – IMO it looks like this forum is more than mature for a broader scope and reading through this great thread: is that not what many of you are actually thinking about?…just an

[Scottie]

I think if you'll do some reading, you'll find that we nearly always address SEO as part of the marketing mix here and often talk about offline and online marketing outside of search engines.

If you have some other topics in that arena you'd like to bring up, be sure to start a few threads on them! We love that sort of thing. As a group, we are more marketing-based SEO's than formula-algo studying SEO's.