For a long time it was true that the more traffic that your website got the better. No more. Not exactly. Coders have been spoofing Google Analytics accounts to make it appear that visits are coming from what seems to be a never-ending list of websites. These “visits” are fake. No one is visiting your site from these “sites”. These fake visits provide no benefit to you. We’ve seen statistics in which the fake visits outnumber legitimate ones by a factor of ten to one. This type of activity is known as “referrer spam”. It is done by malicious hackers to game the link-counting algorithms that search engines use to create rankings.
What’s the harm is this?
It wouldn’t be called “spam” if it were something that you wanted. Just like with email spam there are a number of costs that you will likely pay for these fake visits:
While there are a number of techniques to mitigate the effect of referrer spam none of them is a complete solution. Like so many threats to the security of your website, keeping referrer spam under control requires monitoring and an advanced understanding of Google Analytics and the underlying structure of your website.
It might be helpful for you to think of maintaining the “health” of your website. There are a number of components to this:
A technically contemporary and secure website platform
Fresh, relevant content
Active (not dead) links to and from well-regarded sites (not referrer spam) that are pertinent to your business
A workable social media presence
Google has a short article about the importance of the above items called “Steps to a Google-friendly site”. The SEO practices followed by sem[c] have always conformed to the guidelines set by Google. Contact us if you have any questions about your website and how it’s looking in Search. We can help you make your website healthier.
Rarely does a day go by without my receiving at least one email pitching the benefits of getting my site to the front page of Google.
For example:
“My name is David. I am a SEO and Internet Marketing expert. I am in this profession from since last 4 years.
I will be happy to promote your website and bring this on the top page of Google. My plan of action is to promote your website through local Google and your website to be promoted in the combination of Geo location with your selected keywords.”
How many things has David got wrong in just four sentences? Let’s begin at the end of his statement and work our way to the beginning.
1. The idea of “your selected keywords” being the basis of his promotion is an ineffective approach to SEO. When sem[c] begins a promotion we discover which keywords are being most frequently used by a business’ best prospects. These keywords are frequently not obvious. Figuring this out is our job NOT our clients.
2. The importance of “Geo location” is determined by the nature of the business and is not appropriate for businesses that might be limited by that kind of perception. Recently an sem[c] client in Iowa was approached by two prospects in Ireland and several in China. Their physical location was not important in the least. What would have been the benefit to them of localizing to Iowa?
3. Does it matter to you that he would “be happy to promote your website”? Of course he would be happy to take your money. How happy will you be?
4. Does his being “in this profession from since last 4 years” impress you? This sounds like it was written in fractured grammar by someone who is not a native American English speaker. The importance of understanding how people use language to find what they are looking for is of the absolutely highest importance not only in finding the right keywords but also in eliciting buying action from them.
5. He writes that “I am a SEO and Internet Marketing expert”. I am skipping yet another grammatical error here only to ask the question this begs: In whose opinion? He is writing to me hoping to promote http://SearchEngineMarketingChicago.com on my behalf. It should be obvious to him that my site is about Internet marketing. He completely missed that point.
His targeting is so wildly inappropriate that he brings to mind the old joke: “The word ‘expert’ consists of two parts, ‘X’ which is ‘the unknown’ and ‘spurt’ meaning ‘a short burst’.”
In the spirit of that joke is this guy’s name even ‘David’? The the reply-to email address belongs to ‘Bob’ at Gmail.com.
Your digital reputation consists of everything about you that is visible online.
SEO by sem[c] is all about getting you found more effectively online. Branded SEO is concerned with how you are found for your name. Non-branded SEO involves getting you found for what you do. The process of discovering and implementing this is a process of enhancing your reputation online so that it becomes an effective marketing tool.
What do you do if a search for your name prominently displays negative comments? What do you do if the statements are true? What is they’re false? How do you hide stuff on the Internet?
There are a number of terms for this being bandied about like “negative SEO” but we prefer “digital reputation repair” because we really believe that SEO should enhance your brand by clearly and ubiquitously linking it online with the most relevant non-brand terms in every possible way. These terms are the words that most people use when looking for your goods or services.
One of tricky parts of my writing about clients with these type of needs is that I can’t reveal anything about them other than their circumstances and those only in general terms. One of our clients wanted to erase all trace of themselves; their children, references linking them to specific businesses… everything. Another client found themselves attacked on Yelp! This was a bit unusual since their business wasn’t a restaurant, salon or any kind of retail operation. They found out the hard way that you can’t ignore it when a very likely prospect was unsatisfied over the initial dismissive approach.
Dealing with issues like these requires a custom strategy in each case that will ease the problems with your online reputation by emphasizing the positive using the target terms from the non-branded identity and exploring all the possibilities for correction.
Google has created a map of the buying process that positions each type of online channel in relation to a purchase:
Google shows where the influence of various channels is closest to the sale in the buying process.
You can click on the graphic to adjust the display to show how this relationship varies from industry to industry.
This quantifies the delay in time between marketing and sales. The effects of SEO take months to realize but its value is seen by its proximity to an actual sale in the chart. The only channel that is closer is a direct click which means the prospect can go to the URL of the item of interest directly.
We have seen a lot of consternation about the direct effect one can expect from social media marketing. The chart proposes that it and display advertising are at the far end of assisting interaction whereas successful SEO and its benefit to organic results are closest to the last interaction or sale.
The DISC model of behavioral types can be a valuable way to help identify how to best communicate with a person to generate the most leads. If you speak in a way that is most accessible to a person they are much more likely to understand your point. The DISC model can be visualized as a set of axis: This model predicts a dichotomy between “Task oriented” and “People oriented” behaviors. Another popular behavior model, Myers-Briggs, identifies a very similar thinking/feeling axis.
In ZMOT: Winning the Zero Moment of Truth we read: “The truth is that for many shoppers, the single most powerful impetus to buy is someone else’s endorsement.” The DISC model predicts that this would be most especially true for those on the “People Oriented” side. The Target Training International, Inc. DISC manual Chapter 11 shows the overall mean averages for each behavioral group as well as details when comparing gender and other variables. In general, the types of behavior models are fairly evenly distributed across the population.
The statement about endorsements in no way dismisses the probability that for around half of all shoppers the facts pertaining to their buying decision would be “the most powerful impetus to buy” because they are more “Task Oriented”. Equally true.
The point of this discussion is to underscore how important it is for marketing to speak effectively to all pertinent behavioral types.
The actual weighting of how important this dichotomy is for any particular business depends additionally on the type of business. For example the above average up-time stats for an ISP may be just as effective for that business as a Pinterest following is for sales of a particular dress.
The complexity of all this tends to increase over time. ZMOT shows an ever-increasing number of online influences involved in many types of buying decisions. Yet, confusion still exists in the business community about how this works.
sem[c] had a client who convinced himself that his 4.5/5 overall Yelp average was not valuable to his business because he couldn’t get Yelp to remove the reviews that he found offensive. His sales figures showed that females were an important demographic to his car repair business. He removed all website references to his business’ Yelp rating out of anger and against our very vocal objections. Almost immediately, he began reporting that he was getting fewer prospects from website contact. According to TTI, Inc. data, females are more frequently identified in “People Oriented” behavior patterns and consequently we would predict that endorsements would be particularly effective in influencing their buying decisions. Implementing a new AdWords campaign specifically targeted to a female audience more than doubled traffic to his sites but he reported no change in sales. Despite the obvious conclusion, he saw no reason to resume using the Yelp reviews as a sales tool.
In another Yelp anecdote, I had a personal response from a restaurant owner who offered me a $100 gift certificate to his place if I would “take down” my Yelp description of an unpleasant evening there because it lowered his average down to 4.5. Both of these examples show the desire of business owners to manipulate endorsements as well as the value to the consumer of a supplier like Yelp who resists being manipulated. Yelp realizes that impartiality is of the utmost importance to validity of their content. Both car repair and restaurants are types of businesses that are very influenced by Yelp for better or worse.
It remains important to practice the discipline of SEO which is to clearly identify your business NOT in the terms which you think of it but, rather, how others are looking for the benefits that your business offers. This will meld into the social media aspects of your business. A good record at Yelp can be an influential sales tool but you need to visibility from online marketing to build the lead generation that will allow prospects to see your ratings and to discover the facts about what your business offers them.
Wouldn’t it be great if SEO got you sales the day you started? While that is frequently the expectation, it ain’t gonna happen in the real world. The effect of successful SEO will increase the number of qualified prospects knowing about you. SEO takes time to achieve this level of success that is measured in months… a length of time that is far from instantaneous.
But even though a prospect is qualified they will be somewhere along the time line in their buying cycle. This is to say that they may not be at what the Google commissioned study “Winning the Zero Moment of Truth” refers to as ZMOT or the point at which the prospects decides to buy. Our friends at the Samurai Business Group teach that it is at this point that the prospect’s apparent reason is re-defined by their compelling reason and they make their purchase.
To better understand this let’s use a real-life example of a car repair shop. It’s easy to see that anyone that owns a car would have an apparent reason to buy car repair at some point. The ZMOT study shows that online research in the Automotive category can be intense months before a purchase. This suggests that there is great benefit in having your marketing make you one of the “usual suspects” for future customers that will buy several months in the future. SEO marketing in this case is an investment in the future success of your business. The ZMOT process also details the increasingly large number of online interactions now involved in many if not all buying decisions. It is no longer enough to simply have a good website. There is an entire virtual landscape in which your digital reputation is recorded. It has become a very good business priority to tend this landscape. Social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and others are all little gardens in this landscape.
It is only when a prospect’s compelling reason asserts itself that they will make a purchase. Samurai teaches that those reasons include pain, fear of future pain or the prospect of gain. In our example of car repair the prospect of gain is probably the least persuasive. It could figure in when someone is about to sell a car on their own. Otherwise, a purchase will be made when the car is broken or likely to break soon. Once again, it’s easy to see that these two options have different degrees of urgency. The worse the problem the more quickly a purchase will be made. With proliferation of smart phones the research at the zero moment of truth may be done from the broken down car. It is only in this last resort that marketing might lead to a quick sale.
SEO marketing is our business. Contact us to find out more.
If it’s the Googlebot you really want to say something meaningful. “Take me to your leader” (position) would be nice wouldn’t it? But seriously, your website is visited on a regular basis by it and other ‘bots or crawlers and that leads to your site being catalogued. You can facilitate or impede this process fairly simply if you know what to do. That is the basis of the search engine optimization process.
Several of our clients have come to us recently with problems related to establishing proper communications with the Googlebot and the others. Your website’s robot conversation happens via a text file on your website called robots.txt and even not having one can cause problems.
We found one misconfigured example that resulted in Google’s description of the site being blocked and Google said so publicly. This is not a result you want clients and prospects to see. This misconfiguration had also had a negative effect on the search returns for this site. We corrected the problem and within several weeks the description appeared correctly and the site resumed moving upwards in search rankings.
This robots.txt file has a variety of uses. It can block access to all or parts of your site. It can block some or all ‘bots. One of our clients is using an older ecommerce system that changes expired product listings into pages that look like an error to Google. When Google indicates that your site is exhibiting hundreds of errors it will negatively affect your search rankings. We fixed this problem by using the robots.txt file to instruct the Googlebot and other ‘bots to not catalogue the problem pages related to expired listings from the crawl. Once again this had a positive effect on the site’s search rankings.
If you have questions about robots or anything to do with making your website a more effective business tool call me, text me, email me or tweet me.
“SEO is going to die in two years” asserts no less an expert than “one of the top SEO consultants in Utah”. This must be true because Utah, as everyone knows, is the center of the online marketing industry. Actually, when you read what was written after the headline the only thing being said is that SEO is changing due to the inclusion of social media statistics. What a surprise!
The same reason that led Mark Twain to say: ” The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” exists today. The death of something makes a great headline. The truth really isn’t a factor in a great headline. Unless you confused “truth” with Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”. This “death of SEO” headline is especially popular with purveyors of social media marketing and content marketing who would like people to think that their specialty is more important than SEO.
But when they include phrases like “To be clear, keyword research and internal linking strategy still matter, but they probably only control 15% of your website’s overall ranking” it doesn’t really seem anything has died, does it? They are talking about how important a tool SEO is in social media and content marketing. They are using the word “probably” in an unsupported guess about rankings. Google doesn’t share the weighting percentages of their ranking algorithm so where does this weaselly “stat” of 15% come from? Thin air evidently. They go on to say that external links are more important but now include links from social media. None of this is anything very new. None of it suggest that SEO is “dying”.
So, we are to believe without any evidence that the “death of SEO” is going to be the result of including social media more in the weighting of links from other sites? Even though the giant Facebook is a walled garden that search penetrates in a small way and inconsistently at that? Actually, not at all. The fact is that social media and content have been parts of SEO since the days of AOL.
SEO, at least as practiced by sem[c], is about clearly stating online what your business does so that people know that they can buy what they need from you. This is easier said than done. So many businesses talk about who they think they are and why they are proficient without ever touching on “what’s in it for me?”. SEO by sem[c] helps businesses answer that question in the most effective way using all the tools of online communication: SEO, SMM & PPC in a unified and effective campaign.
