SEO Consulting Beats an SEO Package Every Time

Brands who are interested in reaching a broader online audience can easily confuse SEO consultants with SEO packages. The word “consultant” might even be more intimidating, since it implies that your own business will be doing most of the work. In reality, SEO packages can, at best, only promise superficial results. SEO consultants are happy to pick up most of the marketing work, but they work together with their clients in order to meet business goals.

In short, SEO consultants are genuine marketers. SEO packages are content mills with little concern for real marketing. They have to be, because the promises they make aren’t based on your business goals, or even knowledge of the search engines. They are merely based on meeting a set of predefined requirements.

1. Packages Are Unnatural, By Necessity

When you buy an SEO package, you are buying a set of links. You pay for a specific number of links every month. You pay for a specific number of each kind of link each month. Perhaps you also pay for some other kind of promotional service as well, but once again, you’ll pay for some set quantity every month.

In what universe can such a package create a natural link profile?

A natural site attracts links from a wide variety of sources. The kinds of links you get from month to month are going to change. The number of links you get each month are going to change.

When you work with a reputable consultant, they aren’t going to guarantee a certain number of links, because any reputable consultant should be making some effort to help you build naturallinks. Natural links are outside of your direct control, so asking for a specific number of them is nonsensical.

Yes, even reputable consultants may manually build links, but they will only do so from high quality sources. And the fact of the matter is, links from top tier sites are hard to get. If you can be guaranteed a specific number of links every month, the links just aren’t hard enough.

Some packages promise that they only do “hand built” links, or that all of their links are of the highest quality. It’s undoubtedly a good thing that the links are created “manually,” rather than from some automated piece of software. It’s also encouraging to hear the word “quality,” but it’s not enough.

Serious link building involves more than just “hand built” links and guest posts from “quality” article directories. Long-lasting, genuine links are built on relationships and reputation. Since there’s no cookie-cutter process for building relationships and reputation, there’s no way to promise a specific number of serious links each month.

A consultant, on the other hand, can promise a certain number of hours spent on outreach, relationship building, and content creation, and report the results.

2. Packages Are Bad for Brands

When you visit a site that sells an SEO package, what do you see? Do you see a promise to learn about your company and your space in the market? Do you see any discussion of your target audience and what they care about? Do you see any talk of your business reputation, customer retention, or word of mouth?

Of course not. How could a package do any of that for you? As soon as an SEO package makes any promise to learn something about your brand, it ceases to be a package and it becomes a consultancy.

Packages are “hands-off SEO,” a phrase that is practically meaningless. SEO is all about building an online reputation that boosts your visibility in the search engines. Does it make sense for a brand to hand their reputation over to an SEO package that won’t even speak with them about their business goals?

No SEO knows your business better than you do. They simply know SEO better than you do.

For SEO to work, you need links from high profile sources. That means the content is going to be seen by quite a few people. In that context, a link isn’t just a link. It’s a place to build exposure and make an impression on your target audience.

An SEO package can easily end up sending the wrong message or appealing to the wrong audience, because they have no idea what your business goals are. All they know is that you want to rank in the search engines. And that’s all an SEO package can possibly “care” about.

3. Packages Can Only Promise Superficial Results

SEO packages are built around very simplistic goals. If an SEO package promises 100 links, that’s what you get: 100 links. If an SEO package promises 10 links from sites with a domain authority higher than fifty, then, well, you get 10 links from sites with a domain authority higher than 50. And so on.

These are not business goals.

SEOs who work for package companies have no incentive to measure the success of their efforts. They have no incentive to measure traffic, conversions, engagement, or social media activity. Very few of them will. There’s simply no reason for them to. Their only goal is to build a certain number of a certain kind of link. That’s it.

Yes, some of them will offer additional services like website audits, a specific number of on-site pages, and so on, but these are approached in the same way. You will get the number of pages they promised, and they will audit your site, but what’s the point? Will they test your landing pages for conversions or engagement? Will the audit be customized to your business needs?

The only goal an SEO package has is to meet the requirements of the package. They have no interest in your business goals and they will not design campaigns around them. The only results you can be sure to get are the results promised in the package.

Imagine a traditional marketer that tried to sell you on the benefits of their package: 10 classified ads, 5 magazine ads, and 1 radio spot each month, no questions asked about your business. You wouldn’t accept that. You’d ask for estimates of ROI or the number of people who would encounter the ad, and you’d want to talk to them about your business strategy, target audience, and brand image.

That’s how digital marketing works. Don’t let SEO packages suck you in with the allure of easy to keep promises. Hire an SEO consultancy and meet your real business goals.

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SEO Predictions for 2013

One of the keys to success, in almost any business discipline, is the ability to see things coming. Following trends and using your knowledge to extrapolate the future is a vital skill, and this is especially true for internet marketers. SEOs, in particular, need to understand how technology, commercial intent, and consumer expectations will influence Google, search engines, social networks, and influencers.

Here’s how we expect SEO to change in the year ahead. We hope this knowledge will help you stay ahead of the competition and find your corner of the market.

1. Gray-Hat Won’t Cut It Anymore

Gray-hat SEO walks the fine line between spam and Google’s webmaster guidelines. Gray-hats don’t use automated link building techniques and typically don’t buy links (there’s some debate on this).

However, a gray hat will engage in many link building techniques that aren’t justifiable as marketing separate from the search engines. For example, they’ll build links from obscure websites that are rarely visited and have little chance of growing. They’ll build links from directories that nobody uses. They’ll fill their sites and guest posts with content about a keyword, instead of content meant to be helpful for users. And so on.

The Penguin and Panda updates have already robbed gray-hat tactics of much of their value, and we expect this trend to continue. While it will likely still be possible to rank using gray-hat tactics, you will struggle more frequently, lose past results, and play catch-up quite often.

Focus on SEO tactics that have direct benefits which aren’t directly related to rankings and search traffic. Link building efforts should also be brand building efforts, and SEO campaigns should be designed so that they are profitable even in the absence of search engine benefit.

2. Website Structure, UI, and UX Will Be Primary Ranking Factors

We don’t expect these factors to overtake links as a ranking factor, but we do expect them to have an increasingly notable impact on your search traffic.

Google used a combination of human quality raters and machine learning to develop Panda, and now they are asking searchers directly to compare search results for their quality as well. We expect more updates to come, and the user interface and user experience are going to play a big part in this.

Why would Google care? Searchers think of the search results as part of the Google experience. If sites rank well with poor UI and UX, users think Google has a poor UI and UX. That’s bad branding for Google.

3. Bounce Rate and Loading Time Will Matter

It’s already been over two years since Google announced that loading time was a ranking factor, and we expect more emphasis on it this year, especially for one particular reason: mobile. The number of people who access the web from their mobile device is now nearly half the number who access from PC. Most people who access the web from their mobile device have a comparatively slow connection, meaning loading time is more noticeable.

Users tend to bounce off of a site if it doesn’t load within seconds. Eighty percent of users expect a web page to load within 5 seconds, and 60 percent expect it to load in just 3 seconds. Google has incentives to devalue these pages when there are other relevant alternatives.

Speaking of bouncing off a site, we also expect bounce rate to factor into the rankings. Yes, we know, when Danny Sullivan asked Matt Cutts about bounce rate, he appeared to say that they don’t use it. However, Matt Cutts’ answer was actually a bit evasive:

“Webspam doesn’t use Google Analytics. I asked again before this conference and was told, No, Google does not use analytics in its rankings.”

We never suspected Google was using Analytics to rank pages, at least not directly. But we arecertain Google is tracking user behavior through its search engine. How else could Google Suggest work?

We are confident that Google can and will track bounce rate by measuring when users return to the SERP. If they return to the SERP and click on a different search result, this could indicate that they didn’t find what they were looking for from the page. This is what we mean when we say that bounce rate will become a primary ranking factor.

4. Content that Solves no Problem for Users Will Rarely Rank

With all the machine learning and surveys being done at Google, they will only get better at spotting useless content. We expect this type of content to rank only in cases where there is simply no other option, where there are literally only low quality results for the topic in question.

This is especially true for topics that have a social component. Social sharing has become an activity that far more people are involved in compared to link building. The search engines can’t ignore these signals, and if there is an on topic page with social metrics, it is most likely going to outrank a page without the social networks by the end of this year.

We’re not claiming that social metrics will become more important than links. We are simply stating that they will be a necessary component in all but the most stale topics on the web.

5. Who Shares Will Matter

Perhaps more important than a growing emphasis on social metrics, we expect power influencers to have more impact on the search results. If Rand tweets something or shares it in Google+, this will have more influence on search results than if a brand new profile or somebody with few followers shares the same page.

6. Google Will Be Even More Strict About Link Manipulation

We almost feel like we shouldn’t even have to say it at this point, but links from link directories, article directories, forums, blog comments, low quality guest posts, social bookmarking sites, and so on will be essentially useless by the end of 2013. These types of links won’t likely get you penalized, but they will pass very little value and do nothing for your long term rankings.

7. Authorship Will Influence Rankings

Authorship will allow Google to follow a single writer across all the properties that they have contributed to. By tracking the results of each piece of content, the search engine will be able to issue a score to each writer. This will be factored into Google’s quality score for each page, which will in turn have an impact on rankings. Authorship will also play a part in which social shares matter the most, since influencers will tend to have a higher author rank.

8. Content Marketing and Social Media Optimization Will Be Key Ingredients

While it’s not easy or successful in the long term, it’s still possible for sites to rank without genuine content marketing or a social media strategy. We don’t expect this to remain true by the end of the year.

We expect the search engine to increasingly filter out the influence of low quality sites. There will be a threshold of quality. Sites that have no links from sites below this threshold will simply not rank for anything competitive.

The same will be true for social media. Sites that have little or no social activity associated with them will fail to turn up in the search results for any competitive search term.

None of this is to say that sites without content marketing and social media will never turn up in the search results. We just don’t expect them to show up in cases where relevant pages that dohave content marketing and social metrics exist.

9. Co-Citations Will Replace Anchor Text

Anchor text is simply too easy to manipulate, and Google no longer has any reason to use it as an important ranking signal. Google will instead look for correlations between brand names and keyword phrases. It will pull this information from search queries and it’s massive database of crawled pages throughout the web. Similar factors, like the proximity of keywords to links, as well as their synonyms, will also play a part.

10. Pinterest Will See Continued Growth

This social photo sharing site lost a bit of steam in the second half of 2012. Pinterest will most likely go through some re-branding in an effort to expand it’s audience beyond the rural homemakers that helped build the network, allowing Pinterest to break into a more mainstream market. This will reduce the click through rate a bit, but the overall referral numbers will get higher as traffic grows on the site. We expect it to be hard to ignore Pinterest as a marketing channel in 2013, although not necessarily impossible.

Conclusion

For those who have become accustomed to sub-part marketing techniques, 2013 is going to be a difficult year. We expect to see some players leave the industry in search of other short-term strategies.

For those who stick around, the focus is going to shift toward brand building and profitability even in the absence of rankings. This is going to make it a tougher industry to work in, but a more lucrative one as well. As online activity continues to grow in the US and the world, more opportunities will open up and we’ll see our earning potentials grow.

That’s our take on things. Where do you think things are headed in 2013? Let us know in the comments, and pass this along if you liked what we had to say.

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Why SEO For Startups ?

Just a second, don’t be surprised by this data! 2.24 million Americans search for the term “SEO” every month. Out of them, 52% are men and 46% of men are ages 35-44. 

Most importantly, 3.5 million people look up SEO on Google. Definitely, there is something powerful about SEO, and this is why so many people want it.

SEO is like an elixir for startups. We’ll try to give you a detailed analysis of why.

We are all aware these days of the rapid development of startups all over the world, thanks to the accelerated growth and accessibility of technology and the Internet. The exchange of ideas has become so simple and instantaneous; people have been encouraged to formulate new creative ideas and translate them into meaningful businesses, giving birth to startups.

These days, we see the rise of new startups almost every single day. Funding firms such as Kickstarter infuse millions of dollars every few days just to get a project up and running, and to prove its worth.

But not all startups live long enough to prove their worth. Some prosper, while others perish before they can even get their ideas to market. One reason why these startups didn’t see the light of day, especially Internet startups, is because they lacked not the funding, but the visibility they deserved. It’s sad to note that many Internet startups have neglected to carry out a strategic Internet marketing plan.

What’s ironic is that while many startups lack the budget necessary to get widespread recognition, some tend to ignore the most cost-effective yet extremely effective marketing strategies of all; suitable Internet marketing strategies.

Indeed, the Internet has opened the doors for many startups to acquire the tools they need to compete with businesses that are beyond their league.

Viable ways to get the word out about Startups

Thanks to the Internet, and Internet marketing methods, startups now have an even more powerful way of getting the word out about their ideas. Below are some of the Internet marketing strategies that work extremely well for a lot of startups:

• Press Release: Gone are the days when using a press release to announce a product launch are only taken advantage of by big corporations. Today, there are now a significant number of online services that allow startups to distribute their own press release material. These services are being offered by PRWeb, PRLog and many others.

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Companies have had tremendous success with online pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This performance-based advertising proved to be an extremely cost-effective means for advertisers to precisely target their audience. PPC strategy works well at different stages of the startup process, including pre-launch, during launch, post launch and beyond.

• Display Advertising: Advertisers now have a convenient way of targeting their audience, based on the context and surrounding content, or the audience’s behavior. This is accomplished with display advertising. This has proven to be a powerful promotional method that precisely targets people who are more strongly influenced by visual stimuli like banner ads.

• Content Marketing: The Internet is teeming with all sorts of content that cater to every type of audience. Blogging, Podcasts, Comment Marketing, White Papers, Infographics, Email newsletters, Videos, Brochure and Data sheets, eBooks, Reference Guides, Microsites, Webinars, Reports, Case studies, Tools & Widgets, presentations, and online courses all proved to be powerful content marketing methods, as long as they are catered to the right audience.

• Organic Search (Search Engine Optimization): Billions of people use the search engine each day, and a staggering 92% of Internet users turn to search engines for products or information. That’s why Search Engine Optimization plays a huge part in every startup marketing effort, by helping establish strong visibility in search results.

• Email Marketing: Most of the billions of Internet users still use email for sending and receiving personal and business messages, as well as for obtaining their daily dose of information. The staggering number of people using email has made it a lush market for Internet-savvy companies to gather leads and produce new customers.

• Affiliate Marketing: Also known as Referral Marketing, affiliate marketing proved to be an extremely powerful way of getting a word out about a new product. Advertisers pay publishers, or affiliates, a certain percentage or commission from the sale of products. Affiliates are provided with several marketing tools directly by advertisers or via an affiliate network such as ShareASale or Commission Junction.

These and other Internet marketing strategies have proven very lucrative for many business, but one has emerged as having the biggest impact on traffic and revenue, both short and long-term. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a strategy that has leveled the playing field, allowing small businesses to compete with big businesses.

Why SEO is indispensable for startups

If a startup doesn’t invest in SEO, it’s chances of success are relatively low.

For a startup to snag a million dollar funding, it must first show proof of sustainability and revenue potential. SEO can take care of both. Excellent visibility on search, a viable and significant amount of traffic, and engagement (especially conversions) help establish a startup’s image of being a promising enterprise that effectively lures investors.

In a broader sense, SEO is a long term investment, and if done properly, virtually guarantees high ROI over time.

The online market is a cutthroat environment. That’s why no matter how tempting and lucrative your products or services are, if your customers can’t find you on Google’s first page, they’ll find your competitors instead.

Link Building Misconception – Link Building process is more than just link acquisition

Link acquisition, one of the most important factors for SEO, offers tremendous advantages to startups.

But if you run a startup, don’t look at link acquisition solely from an SEO perspective. Instead, look at it as a powerful form of reaching out to potential prospects.

SEO is especially important for early-stage startups to help them more effectively and cost-efficiently promote their products or services to their target audience. Effective and high quality link building processes play a vital role in building awareness about the startup’s offerings for many tech savvy people.

Ultimately, Link Building, SEO’s most crucial aspect, helps increase new startup awareness as well as improving visibility in the search results.

Below are some of the common SEO tactics that startups should take advantage of if they were to create a viable and cost-effective presence on the web.

• Press Release Distribution
  Syndicating and distributing news that relates to a startup’s launch or product and service announcements are a common but proven SEO tactic. Press release and news sites like PRWeb.com, local news websites (City, County, and State level) bring exposure and links.

• Content Marketing
  Developing great real-time content related to your startup for publishing on major blogs within your industry is another great SEO tactic that seems to be getting a lot of traction these days. For most tech startups, getting published on top tech blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb, BusinessInsider is high on their list. When creating content for your startup, do not forget to explain HOW and WHY your startup can help your target audience in their real life. It’s a sure way to pull in more leads for your business.

• Guest Blogging
  Identify the top blogs that are visited by your target audience and reach out to them. Ask if you could write a guest post and point a link back to your startup website. When linking back to your website, be sure to use a combination of your startup’s brand name and keywords as anchor text (the text of the link itself). Keep in mind that this may not be an easy process. Creating great content could take time, and getting published on an industry-related blog could take a lot of patience and outreach on your end.

• Infographics Marketing
  Infographics are more than just today’s ”in” thing. They offer a very engaging way to capture an audience. When preparing an infographic, highlight points that are specific to your industry, and submit to as many sites as possible for greater exposure.

SEO also allows startups to build a solid search engine reputation

Proper SEO could propel startups not only to the top of the search engines, but, most importantly, help them build a solid reputation online. If you are running a startup, imagine this; a customer is looking for a product or service that your startup is offering. If you don’t have a solid SEO in place for your startup, chances are they’ll find your competitors while your site is shoved several pages deep into the search results.

What does it mean for your customer to find your business on the top of the search engine results page? It means you are doing something right, and that the search engines are giving you a favorable ranking for your good reputation.

Conclusion

Finally, have your say – is SEO a must for startups? The answer is a resounding “Yes!” SEO can make or break a startup. In all likelihood, as experience and real-life cases have shown, a startup that has established a solid online presence can take advantage of massive traffic and better conversions, ultimately resulting in astounding revenue.

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