Taking the Magic & Mystery out of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the biggest buzz phrases in our industry right now, and nearly every client we talk to has questions about SEO. Unfortunately, many of the people within the web development community have done a great job at making SEO sound like something magical and mysterious. Hopefully, I can shed some light on Search Engine Optimization and answer some of the most popular questions.

You might ask, why would the sales guy write a blog about search engine optimization? Shouldn’t the programmer or developer talk about SEO? True, Matt D. and Cale know more about optimization than I’ll ever know, but this blog is more about translating some of the information into a language that business owners and managers can understand and relate to. If you want the technical side of things, feel free to contact Matt and/or Cale, and prepare yourself for an avalanche of information that will leave your head spinning.

Let’s start with the Magic of SEO. Many of the people I speak with about optimization seem to think that in order to have a successful business, all that they need to do is achieve that number one ranking in Google. If they’re number one for their main keyword, the orders will fly in the door, and dump trucks will deliver full loads of cash to their front door. SEO, however, is really just advertising. If you owned a retail store, and ran thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising driving people to your store, but the store was unorganized, poorly stocked, and your staff was unfriendly and rude, you wouldn’t do much business. Traffic only matters if you can convert it to sales in any situation – traditional, non-traditional, or through search engine optimization.

If your website does a poor job of converting prospects into clients, then don’t spend the money “optimizing” your site. A recent study showed that the average website has about 10 seconds to load before a visitor abandons it. Personally, I think your website has less than 20 seconds to convince someone that you’re who they’re looking for. If your website is number one in Google, but people find it hard to navigate, it takes too long to load, looks unprofessional or unsecure, they’ll hit the back button and try Google’s number two result.
The first thing you should look at when considering hiring a company for their SEO services is the conversion rate of your website. Does the site really work? Is it easy to navigate? What’s the goal of your website (purchase a product, call to speak with a salesperson, etc.), and how quickly does the website get people to that goal?

And what about the mystery surrounding search engine optimization? Many of our customers ask us about optimizing their websites, and I think many of them don’t have a clue what they’re even asking us to do. Our inside joke is that Loggerhead Marketing owns “The Optimizer 3000,” which is a microwave like device that we plug websites into, run it for 3 minutes on high, and number one Google ranks come out of it when the timer dings. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing (yet) as “The Optimizer 3000”.

So what is it that companies who offer optimization services do? Well, without giving away too many of our secrets, we do a lot of research – evaluating your website, your competitors websites, the mindset of your potential customers, your keywords and content, etc. – and we make changes to various elements of your website based on this research. We evaluate and edit your content, meta descriptions, keywords, page names and more. We look at 10-20 (or more) elements of your website, which affect the performance of your website in search engines. We evaluate the back links to your website, and work to increase and improve those backlinks. We also use a pretty sophisticated software package that allows us to analyze this information and run reports at various intervals so that we can evaluate the changes that we make to your website.

A large part of what we do has to do with staying informed about the changes that Google makes to how they rank websites. We generally know what elements of a website they look at, however, they don’t tell us the weight that each of those elements carries, and they make lots of changes to their formula. For us, it’s like trying to bake a cake with just a pile of ingredients. We know the cake needs eggs, but we don’t know if it needs one egg or a dozen.

As always, my advice for purchasing SEO services is the same as purchasing just about anything else. Do your homework, get multiple quotes, ask a lot of questions, compare apples to apples, and make sure that you’re comfortable with the company you select to do business with.