Lead Qualification & Strategy

SEO is a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) πŸ˜› often misused and misunderstood, despite being a subject of a good amount of hype. It's a safe bet that more people want it than are really ready for it.

Also, sometimes I feel a little bad when talking about SEO requirements. More than a few times, to avoid being clichι I've bitten my tongue when tempted to bust out with "Please don't kill the messenger." It's true that it touches just about everything about a given Web strategy and its realization; some disciplines more than others. Having worked a number of them to some degree at least, I'm always trying to make sure I don't accidentally misrepresent, i.e. make any unintended implications that certain other disciplines are an inherent problem for SEO or vice-versa... because that's totally not the case. Not at all.

Ours (SEOs) therefore is to educate prospects and clients on what it is exactly, and theirs is to then decide if they will be willing and/or can afford to commit to it or not. It's up to our clients mostly, how much we can effectively help them or not in the long run... and with SEO, not all client types are created equal.

To help illustrate, here's a snippet of recent chatter:

Session Start (blueman:harlequin): Fri Mar 16 13:25:02 2006
[13:25] blueman: feelin much better πŸ™‚

[13:25] blueman: still really sick but i can at least breath

[13:25] blueman: how have you been dude?

[13:35] harlequin: hanging in there thx; trying to stay healthy too.

[13:36] harlequin: barfed out another mfa site recently for experimental purposes.

[13:37] blueman: cool

[13:38] harlequin: not too spammy at the moment but possibly filtered for duplicate content; dunno yet. only yahoo's indexed; google and msn had taken in the domain fine but dropped it after i changed from a park page to an actual site. it's kinda fun though; whenever i do anything with ggl sitemaps; googlebot comes running like a puppy.

[13:42] blueman: hehe

[13:44] harlequin: figure sandboxed maybe? πŸ™‚

[13:46] harlequin: i'll let you know if anything entertaining happens. i just might flip a switch to make all its content more truly unique, just to see if it pops back into the indexes, without linking it from anywhere other than where it is already (like almost nowhere).

[13:47] blueman: right on

[15:58] harlequin: hey man

[15:58] harlequin: can i get yer opinion on something?

[15:59] blueman: sure whats up

[15:59] harlequin: in your mind, must every site on the web need optimization?

[16:00] harlequin: interested in your take in terms of basic philosophy.

[16:00] blueman: answer: nope just the ones that would benefit from search engine traffic

[16:01] harlequin: thank you!

[16:01] blueman: hehe np

[16:03] harlequin: my take is it's not just the ones that would benefit from search traffic

[16:04] harlequin: but the ones that would benefit from natural traffic specifically, moreover the ones that are prepared to do what it takes to earn (or deserve, whatever) it.

[16:05] blueman: agreed

[16:08] blueman: hey do you have a digg account?

[16:09] harlequin: why?

[16:12] blueman: heh it's nothing i'm just asking everyone. need more diggs.

The fact is that some clients and/or projects are much more in need of and viable for the investment than others. Selling SEO to a large degree therefore kicks off with making sure the client gets what it means to run in the marathon, and has thought carefully about if they're ready for the potential rigors of competing seriously. It's not always the case, sometimes not at all... and some tryouts approach the field bringing much more readiness and potential with them than others.

For example, to my knowledge we can generally always to more for clients who are ready to bring robust textual content life-cycles to the table. Media companies whose sites put out 10+ new articles every day for instance, are perfect. These poor souls should be feeling like they're drowning in their own output; most ripe. Also, e-commerce sites with huge inventories of products to advertise and move, they're harder but can be awesome challenges to take on. On the other end and less than ideal sit gigs like Consumer Product Group (CPG) companies who are all about tasking marketers to, via rich media, digitally simulate clinking soda bottles, skin cream, zooming sports cars, bouncing boobs, fun family meals, whatever etc. ...Sure, such sensory stimulation is content which can be made robust to the human experience, but it's all presentational. Lacking eyes with which to see or ears with which to hear, search engines though are systems of algorithms and robots that evolve in benign indifference to all that. Search marketing therefore is driven by informational content, so candidates for it need to have something not just important - but also verbose and articulate - to say if they're to be seen as relevant. If they can't be brought around to that, SEO can only do so much for them no matter how deep their pockets are.

Some marketers debate the virtues of optimizing for search engines vs. humans, including which is of greater importance. Google tells marketers to do both. My own opinion is that it's all just different ways of looking at the same problem: Search engine optimization is about optimizing for humans really, in that through it online brands are posed this simple challenge:

Mean more. If expanding your reach demands expanding your content scope, so be it, and have fun with it.

For clients hip to the concepts like

  • shift from broadcast to narrowcast
  • talk with customers instead of to them, and help them talk to one another
  • build out your brand "universe" with more primary and supplemental topics

...the need can get treated as a great opportunity. All it takes is creative thinking, then creative writing especially.

Along the way brands will find though that while SEOs help expose and promote content, and nowadays some even help clients brainstorm and develop it if/as tasked to link baiting, for the most part they don't create it much themselves. SEOs must be at least decent writers, but on whole they're more often about editing/re-writing copy than making it from the ground up. This may however keep gradually changing. They used to never make any original content for clients, but in recent years they've started to take it on a bit. Eye/ear candy is great but the writing is much of what sets a site's organic status apart, so it does need come from somewhere.

Regardless, for now direct SEO work remains slightly more of technical matter. It's not one of just adding in / optimizing a few lines of code on every page. It's about much more (informational content included) and that message hasn't reached all prospects and clients, or even all agencies yet. Any core SEO evaluation needs to be taken all the way back to identifying why a company is online in the first place, as that's what first should be referenced in starting to set and manage client expectations. It's part of why usually a mark of experienced SEOs, from hats White to Black, is that they're cautious about what clients they take on. Also, how much they feel they can responsibly do so in cases where they do accept new business, can vary greatly per account.

More thoughts on qualifying SEO leads TBA to come (Augh; them pesky TLAs).

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Less Bullshit, More Master Baiting

This is my New Year's Resolution. Here's why:

When blogger and former AOL/Weblogs exec Jason Calacanis reportedly pronounced "SEO is bullshit" at SES Chicago last year, it fanned the flames of the SEO scene, enough so that he had to post a follow-up explanation shortly afterward.
While it wasn't a particularly informed or informative post as much as it was a defensive one, he did admit in it that he's no SEO expert. He did make some valid points on the value of content, and valid layman's points on other items. What's especially noteworthy though was that it got him Dugg well, and other movement that gave him some infamy link love for a bit. While he got served backlash for his words, others in the industry came to his defense however (I'm tempted to say "it's all links, it's all good." If only it all were so simple!)...

Q: SEO is... what?

A: Calacanis was talking about and also indirectly referring to:

  1. how content is king, but to rule wisely means to have uniqueness, depth, breadth, relevancy, character and change frequency.
  2. core on-site best practices (crawler-friendliness) including fundamental on-page tasks like proper anchor text, linking structure, Titles and META description tags. I won't go as far as to totally agree with with Andy Hagans on his "all SEOs know META tags are dead," (META keywords tags are but META descriptions are anything but). I also won't totally concur with what sounded a little to me like light prodding of Aaron Wall's on-site SEO consulting when Shoemoney, fresh out of speaking with The New York Times himself, interviewed the man with the shadow plan, Quadzilla himself on Webmaster Radio. In spite of being sold through a stereotypically uglier-than-sin sales letter page, Aaron's book is one of the best on the market. I find that everything there is to know about on-page / on-site SEO is a lot to try to swallow in just one afternoon, especially for SEO n00bs. That's why I offer hefty, 30+ point site-side Best Practices audits that can take a day or two to turn around, so I also pass around condensed CliffsNotes-like versions of the most important items. I'm not sure SEOs selling basic on-page work as a service "really is trash" all the time, even if it's the kind of work I often advise clients learn to do for themselves as much as possible. However, I do agree on the point that charging people no more than $5K tops for some primer empowerment is a great call. So a) πŸ˜‰ SEOs are routinely baiting for buzz and b) we need to keep our sights trained on getting to where we're selling more than just strategy guidance, best practices, keywords research/analysis and titles/METAs work etc. ...Much of it is SEO 101 i.e. common sense work, largely about pragmatically demystifying and simplifying what might look on the surface to be complex, and we should avoid spending most of our SEO time dicking around with the production parts of it. It's not a question of resources. It's a matter of our being capable of bigger, better, more creative, advanced and innovative things with the craft... and at experienced SEOs' rates it's the honorable thing to do. So as a vegetarian SEO I say "Teach a man to fish, but don't eat so much fish."

All client types should be at least considering organic search, hard. In worst cases, companies who don't follow it but still want considerable traffic from engines will have to simply buy it outright (SEM). PPC and/or PI will be their only options.

This is why for example, clients who plant roots in being all about pushing their brand through dazzling sensory experiences (heavy on rich media eye / ear candy but low on hypertext and hyperlinks) are never great SEO prospects, if even prospects at all. When the information worthiness of what a company is online is eclipsed by what their presence "feels" like, and/or when the level of articulation required by what they have to say is eclipsed by the requirements of how they say it, chances are good that the company isn't all that qualified a lead yet. SEOs' respective challenges include helping clients understand and navigate disciplinary trade-offs and make smart investment allocations early on. Not just for their sake, but also for ours: We must protect ourselves by preventing dangerous assumptions ahead of time ("What do you mean my site can't be optimized because it's all Flash?!?" etc.), and online marketers certainly shouldn't let them creep in by not hitting all possible Discovery angles on new accounts in particular ("You built it that way, so why didn't you tell me about that limitation before we started the project?!?"). When priests surprise parishioners with offers of baptism by fire, parishioners start thinking about leaving the church. SEO really isn't for every client / project. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as we SEOs try to never let it bite anyone below the Bible belt.

Q: What is "Master Baiting?"

A: Link Baiting done right, every time.

"Master Baiting" is a running joke in the SEO community. Whomever thought it up, just like who the Master Baiters are, depends on who you ask. As far as I know it was Quads.

Q: How delightfully juvenile. Fine, so what then is Link Baiting, already?

A:

For a long time much of SEO - aside from on-site matters and keyword research to inform content - was all about link building: getting links to one's site(s) from out on the greater Web, with both quality and quantity in mind. For example, a link from a popular page on a popular site is great, but normally hard or very hard to get (unless you rent or buy it from the site owner which IMHO somewhat misses the point of SEO, almost like cheating). On the other end of the spectrum, dropping a comment into someone's blog or signing their guestbook might let you place a link back to yourself, but by itself it might not help much. Perhaps it's being force-set to NOFOLLOW by the site owner to try to discourage spammers, and/or their site simply may not carry much relevancy and/or trust with the engines (there are many blogs and guestbooks out there that have been and are continually spammed to death, so engines are constantly working to improve their detection capabilities). With low quality links, many are needed to make impact on rankings: from thousands to millions of them depending on the competitiveness of a given subject.

Often using their own software made specifically for it, freelancers can always be found on ScriptLance and similar sites selling different kinds of link building. Like many of them, firms like iProspect do too. With or without good tools though, effective manual link building can become a bit of a PITA: time consuming, tedious, and at toughening failure ratios making it harder than ever. I've noticed SEOs in the West increasingly sending this work to contractors in India and Eastern Europe. In scaling and optimizing for profitability, SEOs are getting more fetishistic about the potential of automations and outsourcing and link building is a prime example of it.

Recent years have raised the sister concept of link baiting: The development and deployment of content made specifically to make people feel compelled to link to it, of their own volition and publicly. Think of it as the most famous form of viral SEO.

Link baiting can be done in many different ways, on just about any topic, and it's exceptionally hot right now. Blogging about link baiting is in itself link bait at the moment. Everyone and their unborn grandchildren is putting out how-to information on it, touting their "Top 20 Types of Linkbait" etc. lists (lists are the most common tactic), each with their own sets of suggested angles i.e. "hooks" (humor, contrary, attack, tools, news, etc.).

Link Baiting & Building: The Yin & Yang of SEO

Building is to baiting as pushing is to pulling. Balanced natural trafficking demands both.

Q: Why must we all start Master Baiting now?

A:

  • As SEM continues on the up and up, steadily up will go average CPCs and levels of competition. The more entry barriers develop SEM, the more clients will turn their attention toward SEO as a potential alternative, despite its comparatively greater complexity and often slower, harder-to-measure returns. The more they do, the more prepared we'll need to be with a bag of great ideas to bring to the table.
  • The notion that SEO is a squarely technical concern without very creative needs is a Web 1.0 myth. Dated = death; when it comes to being able stay in any kind of business even Black Hat is better than being Old Hat here. Embracing link baiting is an effective and fun way to keep up with where things are headed.
  • Web 2.0 poses a new level of technical challenge for SEO per all its user-generated content, rich media proliferation, and increasing adoption of AJAX which poses URL complications. As the Web gets more technical SEO gets more technical, granted... but it also gets more trained on social engineering, also sometimes more stealth. Great bait will be needed filling between areas of sites that can only be optimized so much, and it will also be needed to snag audiences numbed by and/or adverse to more traditional marketing (Note I didn't say "advertising").


Q: Next Steps?

A: Get Organized, and Get Out There.

Aggregate, evaluate and add to all the link baiting ideas feeding the space now. Core methodology, with best practices breakout for blogging and perhaps other vitals, are in progress. Be part of the process.

Great bait can be anything from widgets to video parodies to list types. The production crux is there must always some kind of element where there's some attractive machine readable content, serving as the bait itself otherwise at a minimum, the bait hook and descriptor. Title methods BTW are especially important to build out (Ex: "10 Things I Love About [SUBJECT]", "Why [SUBJECT-VERB] is a Waste of Time", etc.).

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Based out of Northern California, bl.asphemo.us is a bl.og dedicated to the advocacy and study of high-impact, data driven marketing disciplines and related concerns: Analytics and Data Mining, Marketing Automation, Integrated Advertising (targeting, retargeting), Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing, Social Media / Social Engineering (Crowd-hacking) and the new PR, Privacy, Security, CRM, SEO / SEM, CRO, ROI... more TLAs (three letter acronyms) than any sane person's daily lexicon should include.

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