What is SEO? (In Easy To Understand Words)

Diving into the world of Search Engine Optimization (known as ‘SEO’) can be terrifying. The industry itself is a mystery to most people and the profession has changed so drastically over the past decade that it’s borderline unrecognizable. To help you better understand what SEO is in a simple and easy-to-understand fashion, we’re going to break it down into the bare basics. And we’ll try not to use any scary sounding terms to confuse you.

The Golden Rule of SEO

Simply put: the goal of an SEO is to improve a user’s experience on a website. Yes, there are other tasks that SEOs do. Yes, that’s an oversimplification. However, that is the very core of what we do as SEOs. It’s a simple reward system where you improve a user’s experience and Google, Bing, Yahoo and whoever else give you a reward. That reward is better rankings and more trust (which is a metric known as ‘authority’, they’re synonyms).

Think of Google as an omnipotent person. They need to decide how to rank websites and in what order to list them, but they don’t know any of these websites. So how do they know what to do? Well, think about what you would do if tasked with listing websites based on the most trustworthy ones.

Product websites? You’d list the sites with the biggest inventory.

Informational websites? You’d look for ones with a good track record of telling the truth.

Service websites? Well, what do their previous customers think of their service?

And in all of those cases you’d also want to make sure the site is safe, secure and user friendly.

Putting yourselves in Google’s shoes is something people rarely do because they’re still stuck in the early 2000s when SEO was all about ‘gaming’ the search engines. Those days are over and Google is smarter than that. In fact, they’ll penalize you for trying to game the system now, so don’t believe anyone who tells you that’s the way to go.

I want to do SEO myself, what do I do?

While we offer SEO plans ranging from small buckets of time to recurring monthly programs, many people want to try SEO on their own and we encourage everyone to at least dip a toe in the water to better understand the industry. There are a few options here:

1) You can get training from professionals. This includes individual training as well as business consulting.

2) You can start learning SEO on your own. A great resource to start out with is Moz. They have a segment called “Whiteboard Fridays” (I’d recommend the ones done by Rand Fishkin, the previous owner).

3) You can find a different website that looks nice to you and see what they’re doing right, then try to replicate that. Remember, as long as you’re improving a user’s experience or improving your visibility on search engines (Google My Business page, getting reviews from customers, etc.) then you’re doing SEO. It’s a very random field that’s essentially a laundry list of hundreds (if not thousands) of tasks.

Someone cold-called or cold-emailed me offering SEO services, should I take them?

No, run away. If someone is cold-calling you or cold-emailing you then there’s a 100% chance that they’re absolutely terrible at SEO. Ask local businesses and friends/family who they’ve used that they trust. Worst case scenario, we’ll point you towards someone. The industry has been plagued by terrible SEOs and we’ve watched countless clients get hurt and waste enormous amounts of money.

The SEO industry is hard to navigate for a business because there’s no formal training. Colleges don’t teach it and the self-taught people usually only get as far in as learning Metadata, which is the bare basics you need to know. If you plan on contracting an SEO then use your network and ask around or contact us and we’ll push you in the right direction.

What's The Difference Between SEO and PPC?

One of the most common questions we see in the digital marketing world is simply: what’s the difference between SEO and PPC? This one’s fairly straightforward and best explained using the tomato analogy.

When You Need Targeted Traffic Immediately

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click Marketing and is controlled using Google Ads or Bing Adcenter, though Google is far more widely used due to the extra volume that Google has. It’s an excellent channel (in my opinion the second best behind SEO) and gives you some benefits but has some downsides associated for it. Let’s use the tomato analogy as an example:

Say you need tomatoes. You can grow them or you can go to the market and buy them. If you go to the market and buy them then you’re able to choose the shape and size as well as exactly how many you want and how much you want to spend. The downside? You have to pay for every single tomato.

This is equivalent to PPC. We can control the traffic that comes in with great detail (including even age, gender and income levels). We can also press start as soon as it’s set up and get you running quickly and it’s great for gap fillers (nights that need filling in a hotel, for example) and also works great as a long-term strategy to pair with SEO. However, it is not sustainable. If you turn off that campaign or cut the spend, all that traffic disappears overnight as well.

Our other marketing channel compliments this strategy perfectly.

From Seed To Farm

Back to the tomato analogy, but let’s look at the other method this time.

If you have a bit of time to spare and want your own huge, sustainable farm full of tomatoes then you can plant seeds in the ground. These seeds need to be watered and fed and there will be both rainy days and sunny days, but if you keep nurturing the crops then you’ll get a mostly self-sustaining farm of tomatoes. You may not be able to carefully control the shape and size of them, but they’ll be in the ballpark.

This is akin to SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Our work doing SEO will take 3-6 months to start taking off and will be based off percentage increases. A 50% increase of 20 users is 10 users, while a 50% increase of 10,000 users is 5,000 users, meaning growth tends to seem slower right at the start. However, if you have an SEO tackling things every month then you’ll eventually have a steady stream of people coming in through the channel.

SEO is simply the strongest digital marketing channel and it’s generally not very close. It has the best engagement, the best conversion rates, the best everything. The only downside is that it’s slow and inflexible and takes a while to build. Even if you quit SEO down the road and take a break from it, the traffic won’t disappear. It might taper off slowly, but it will have a much higher ‘floor’ so to speak.

So What’s The Strategy?

If you desperately need traffic right now (particularly startups), then go with PPC. You can always get SEO rolling later, but SEO isn’t very useful if your company doesn’t survive long enough.

Not worried about short-term survival? Prioritize SEO. This channel will get you the long-term success if you stick with it and grow it up.

We understand how tough the world of digital marketing is to navigate as a business owner (we’ve heard it from plenty of them), so reach out if you need guidance on where to go next using the form below.

What Does Good SEO Look LIke?

SEO is undoubtedly the hardest internet marketing channel to determine the success of. One of the reasons, as we cover in our SEO section, is that the job is basically a laundry list of hundreds (if not thousands) of different tasks. These tasks are prioritized in a way to have the maximum possible effect, but it’s often VERY confusing to clients what is actually going on.

Transparency is the key

This brings us to the biggest indicator of what a good SEO looks like: transparency. Simply put, bad SEOs don’t want to show you what’s going on behind the hood. Up to this point, we’ve only done word-of-mouth marketing because we believe that’s the most transparent and honest way of gaining clients. Do a good job, the client tells their friends and everyone wins. Bad SEOs don’t play like this because they don’t get results.

In regards to transparency, bad SEOs will often not send out monthly reports. Let’s make this crystal clear: If an SEO is not sending out monthly reports, you need to dump them immediately. Request a report if you wish and see what their response is, but this is the biggest red flag we see. If they’re too afraid to show you the results; run for the hills.

The Breakdown

A good SEO will:

• Send monthly reports

• Not leave emails unanswered

• Come to you through word of mouth marketing or a recommendation (or sometimes just really good reviews, though those are easily manipulatable)

• Request a monthly call to review the report together

The really, really good ones will:

• Be able to tell you what to expect in the upcoming 1-3 months (this is due to a ‘lag’ period where tasks we do today take 1-3 months to have an effect)

• Ask you about your success metrics: revenue, conversion rate, etc.

• Give you homework to help out with SEO efforts. There are some tasks that SEOs can’t do as well as a company such as Google My Business postings, garnering reviews and establishing connections with local businesses and chambers of commerce.

Need more warning signs of a bad SEO? Aside from a lack of transparency, watch these red flags:

• If they cold called/cold emailed you or claimed to be referenced by someone (I.E. “I was referenced by your head of marketing), then that’s a huge red flag that they might be vulturing you. Avoid poachers at all costs.

• If they instantly bad mouth any other marketers and seem “defensive” then that can be a warning sign, though good SEOs have to do this to some degree to combat vultures.

• If the tracking goes out for an extended period of time (3+ weeks is certainly plenty) without a notice then that' shows that they probably aren’t looking at the account

• If you ask them what they did for the month and they just mention a ton of “analysis and reports” then that’s a red flag. Actual SEOs need to execute on their findings every single month.

• Watch for bad contracts that tie you in for a long time. Good SEOs will typically have month-to-month contracts with opt-outs at any time or, at worst, a 3-month contract. 3-month contracts are fine because it generally takes 3+ months to see movement.

Help, I Need Guidance!

The world of Search Engine Optimization is incredibly challenging for businesses to navigate due to a wealth of bad players and a general lack of understanding that opens the door for manipulation. If you need guidance on finding a good SEO then reach out to us. If we don’t have someone in network available, we can certainly reach out to agencies and top freelancers as many of us know one another.

And if you get scammed: don’t fret. Every single client we currently have was scammed in the past and had horror stories of their first experience with an SEO. It happens.. to almost everyone. This industry is 95% bad and 5% excellent, and once you find someone in the 5% it’s much easier to find the rest.

Stay safe and happy marketing!

Businesses, Beware! How to identify and avoid SEO Poachers

In the professional world, some call them "SEO Vultures". You might hear them referred to as "Basement Dwellers" or just simply "Poachers," but they are everywhere. Eventually, as a business owner, you're going to have an encounter with them.

Their goal? To steal your trust, your business and your money.

Good SEOs are referred to by word of mouth or through a network. The best referrals generally come from other businesses saying "you should contact my SEO, they're really good.' However, as high as the demand for SEO is, the supply is even greater.

The reason for this is that clients often don't know what SEO is. It's a foreign language to them, so they don't know how to look for one or what makes someone an SEO. That leaves the door open for:

• College graduates who need money

• Bad SEOs who can't find business and are getting desperate

• Genuinely evil people who just want your money

How to Spot a Bad SEO

The first question you should ask yourself is: "how did they contact me?" If they reached out to you and use the following strategy, you should run for your life. The most used poaching strategy is:

1. Get an audience with the client
Often through cold calling or random emails. They might even make a vague claim that they were "referred to you" even though they weren't.

2. Present a list of 'errors' the site has. These might be nonexistent, meaningless or nitpicky.
If they mention image tags, site spacing, meta keywords or optimization of useless pages (FAQs, Policies, etc) then that's an easy red flag.

3. Paint an armageddon scenario
"Your SEO hasn't addressed these!? What HAS he been doing?"

4. Convince the client to fire their SEO without communication
"It's not worth talking to them, you should just send them an email cancelling your agreement right away."

Sound familiar? Yea, you've been vultured.

You might be saying to yourself "how on earth does this actually work?" Well, it stems from most clients not understanding SEO. Because of that, they don't want to host calls because it just ends up confusing them. They don't know what minification, disavows or even Search Console are and they often don't care as long as they get results.

The problem is, that lack of communication leads to a lack of trust and opens the door for engagements like this. Let it go on the record: SEO Poachers are dangerous. I can't tell you how many battered, bruised clients have come to me because they fell for the wrong SEO and ended up with a penalty or a huge dip in traffic. Since poachers aren't good at their practice, they will effectively ruin your organic presence by either utilizing some outdated technique or doing nothing at all.

How to Avoid SEO Poachers

This is more simple than you might imagine. If someone cold calls you or emails you out of nowhere in regards to SEO, just don't respond. Block them, ignore them, do whatever it takes because you're going to get a lot of people doing that.

Need a good SEO? Ask local businesses, ask others in the chamber of commerce and do your research. Also, you're welcome to reach out to us as well. The best SEOs come from personal referrals or long-standing relationships.

Poachers are easier to fall for than some might think. Keep yourself informed and keep yourself safe, because a bad SEO can do more damage in 1 hour than a good one can fix in a lifetime.