Ask the SEO Guru

I don’t believe the customer is always right. I believe as humans, we are all capable of being wrong at any time about anything. In an environment as ambiguous as the misnomer many refer to as SEO, the potential for mistakes is virtually boundless.

BUT, I do believe you can win the battle and lose the war. You can convince a customer that you are right and he is wrong but trust me, you very likely just lost that customer.

The smart thing to do is LISTEN to what they are demanding until you understand their concerns and then deliver!

When dealing with demanding clients it is easy to become frustrated and it is only human nature to blame the client as the cause of your frustration. The truth is that YOU are the reason the customer is being demanding in the first place.

If any reasonable client is demanding, it is only because they are expecting something they thought you could deliver. Why did they think you could deliver it? Because YOU gave them that impression in the first place.

I’m ashamed to admit that I failed to take my own advice. You don’t become a guru by always being right. You are able to teach only by sharing the mistakes and failures as well as the successes.

I was fortunate to have a client late last year that was demanding and completely honest and professional. We tried hard to satisfy his demands but the truth is I lacked the quality resources I he was expecting and that was my fault.

Until I had the chance to work with him, I thought I did have the quality. I had spent a great deal of time and effort trying to better than my direct competitors and I did that. My mistake was in thinking that was good enough.

I forgot I wasn’t selling my services to my competitors, I was selling them to a person who made their expectations very clear, was 100% open and frank about their expectations and I was the one who didn’t hear him.

I spent over two months trying hard to understand what he was telling us in plain English but to my great disappointment, I didn’t “get it” until it was too late and this client, who could have been a huge boost for my business, had lost faith and given up on trying to help me and he canceled.

Only after he canceled did I really put forth the effort to understand. He and I had an arrangement that could have been EXTREMELY beneficial to us both and I knew that if he canceled, he wasn’t being demanding, he was trying incredibly hard to get me to understand and perform at the level he believed I was capable of from the beginning.

The ONLY issue he ever had was over the quality of my Indian content developers when they were producing articles, blog posts etc. I would look and each time convince myself the content was far better than my Indian counterparts and think that was good enough. I was wrong.

I am very disappointed in myself that I failed this person. He deserved better. But I am grateful that it made me finally understand.

I’ve since spent a sizeable sum of money and resources to set up a completely different set of procedures and it taught me a lesson I’ve been preaching to you about all along.

I hired as good of talent as I could find in Ahmedabad, THEN I set up an editorial department back in the states. Now everything that gets written by our content developers in India gets sent to an American editor who reads the entire document and corrects any grammatical as well conceptual errors against American English standards.

This takes a great deal of more time and money but the quality is now excellent. Every time.

And do you know what I found? All the extra time and expense is not an expense at all because I learned AGAIN, that one quality article/post/blog is worth 100 automated ones. One piece of excellent quality content is worth more than 50 posts that are better than my competitors.  

Had I not been brought to task by this demanding client, I have no idea how long I would have kept disappointing clients who were less vocal about their expectations. But thanks to him, we are already seeing increased satisfaction from our clients, increased traffic from improved placements and increased conversions from better content!

I know it sounds trite but I’m telling you the truth from experience,(and of course experience is what you get when you’re expecting something else); -------

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BAD CUSTOMER !

When you find yourself getting frustrated and defensive with a demanding client, stop and think for just a moment and try to avoid the mistake I made. Those demanding clients are the best and they are trying very hard to help you! Those are the ones you NEED to satisfy and the all the rest come easy.

Peach Y’all

Da guru

Stop Jumpin on the damn bed or I’ll come in there with my belt and give you sumpin to jump about!                           

I’d say one of the biggest problems SEOs struggle with is that it is all about rankings and traffic, rather than conversions. It’s easy to keep focusing on trying to work the extremes to bring in more visitors when the time might be better spent on ensuring you’re doing better to convert your existing visitors.

Danny Sullivan  Internet Consulting firm Calafia

I can understand the world paying little attention  to my soapbox preaching about the need for conversions as the ONLY metric of value, BUT when someone in the search marketing industry of Danny Sullivan’s caliber says it, maybe it’s time the world realized the winds of change are blowing.

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How Small a Part SEO Plays In Getting a New Site to Dominate SERPs

I have a VERY strict policy of never revealing clients placements or the strategies/techniques I use for their online marketing to a third party without the express permission of my client.  What you and I do is our business and no one else’s. How would you feel if you knew that a competitor had called me and I discussed you and your business with them? Wouldn’t trust me much would you?

With that said, I hope it comes through on my blog that my intention is not to make myself look smart,(I’m pretty sure that’s obvious at least), or just to toot my own horn.  It is to offer real, from the trenches advise on how to get results in a complicated, information overloaded environment.

That is not to say I don’t attempt to market myself and Techndu.  I just do it a little differently because I really do believe the more you give, the more you get.  The secret to giving details in terms of generating business for yourself  is  the more details you give, the more sense it makes to outsource the difficult or unappealing processes to someone better suited to the task.

So, I’m going to share a question I got from a client last week because I think it is a topic that deserves more air time than it gets and I also think few actually know some of the things that I have tested and proven to myself and my clients. I think I can help but I can’t divulge the client or their site or their target terms. Sorry.

The SEO Guru helped put the Sandbox debate to bed well over a year ago with this post:

http://massa.techndu.com/2007/08/19/FinallyTheSandboxDebateIsDEADAndTheSEOGuruKilledIt.aspx

But there still remains the challenge of how to get a brand new site trusted enough to start ranking for it’s top tier terms and how to do it fast. 

Question for the Week of September 25th, 2008

I need to get an estimated time frame and hours estimate for a brand new website. 

My brother is a salesperson for a city Based Moving Company and he is looking to bring in additional leads on his own…separate from the main website. 

I plan to create a website for him and then want to and optimize it for the following list of keywords:

City movers

city moving companies

city mover

city moving company

city state movers

movers in city

city state movers

moving companies in city

moving companies city

moving company city state

city local movers

city st  moving companies

 I know this is a pretty competitive market so I want to see if you think we could get top ranking for a brand new website and how long you think it may take.

 Thanks

Hi David. I'm the only one in the office today due to a holiday here in India called Uttarayan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttarayana. It's a kite flying celebration and EVERYONE closes and flies kites for two days!

Anyway, I have a LOT of experience with this type of challenge and actually played a pretty big role in dis-spelling the myth that there was a sandbox. I know a little secret that can get the site producing from brand new to generating traffic within a matter of 8 to 12 weeks.

Secret #1 is to register the domain for more than 1 year. At least 3
Secret #2 is to get people searching for the target

You can expect about 400 -600 hours taking a minimum of 2-3 months. If the budget is there the best option is 200 hours per month so that it is pretty well established and trusted within 3 months but if that is too much strain on the budget then it still works at 50 or 100 hours a month it just takes more months to reach the same objective. Anyway you do it,  you're looking at about 400 -600 hours online/offline.

Also you need to figure some $1500 - $2000 for hi end directory submissions. Yahoo/ business.com and about 50 or so other paid directories.

the trick to getting people to search for the company is to NOT think SEO and instead think marketing. keep in mind I know NOTHING about the company or it's goals so these things I'm about to mention are only examples for the purpose of illustration.

Get  your name and a very strong offer in front of as many people as possible and make it ONLY available from the website.
Here are a couple of things I've done with clients in the past that worked VERY well

we gave away $200 to local high school seniors that we termed most valuable player of the week and  we would announce the winner on the site every Monday. Then we would give the award AND MAKE SURE THE PRESS WAS THERE. At first we had to shoot our own photos and interview ourselves and write the stories and send it to the papers and all local and neighborhood publications including shoppers and weeklies but within 4 weeks the press was always there. We did a 15 week campaign and by the end of the 15 weeks not only were they getting some 2000 hits EVERY monday, they won some award from the Chamber of commerce, (getting front page press again), and they were placed #1 on dozens of keywords and dominated their local market.

another one we did was for a  extermination business. They gave away a trip to cozumel to the person who could guess the temperature of a Caribbean resort the day their house was to be scheduled for the  spraying because you had to be out of your house for several hours when they sprayed so the idea was why not take a vacation on us while you have to be gone anyway.

All they did to advertise was put flyers on bulletin boards at grocery stores and they took a booth at a home show.  Within one year they became the undisputed leader for pest control services in a market of about 2 million.

I should also mention that they also offered a healthy referral program and set up an email system to send b day greetings and they started a blog about the benefits of pest control by educating people on what to look for to keep bugs and rodents out and not spreading disease. VERY EFFECTIVE ! Several of those articles got picked up online and off.

So, that is the trick. If people start searching for a specific term or company name that is NOT in the index, trust me, the search engine will start looking for it and put it in! Once it becomes trusted, it will start placing for target terms. This process doesn’t take long either. Especially in local markets.

Massa

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I had suspected that in a “family deal”, there may be some low end expectations in terms of investment and sure enough, the next day I got this response.

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Hi Massa,

Thank you very much for the information.  I will have to get with my brother on this, but I think we will probably have to take much longer on this one because he cannot put that much money into it up front.  So it might be a year long project as opposed to getting rankings within 3.4 months. 

Thanks

I figured that David. That's why I mentioned the offline stuff.  If you can think of low cost things to get people hunting you, that is going to cut those online hours needed to about half. I mean it's close to impossible to give solid numbers like 400 hours or cut in half  but the more things you can do that gets people searching for you the less you need the online hours.

What I suggest is  to come up with 2-3 plans of how to get people hunting for you, (I had a friend in Scotland a few years back that went around Edinburgh putting post it notes in toilets that said BEWARE! and his url. He had over 2000 hits in a week), then do the paid directory submissions then pay us to handle the on site stuff like titles and H tags and that COULD be all it takes.

sponsor a local special ed sports team in the special Olympics

shoot moving videos and get them on you tube and then promote it locally

give coupons to local churches and have them  mention you in their newsletters

Actually, I believe the best advice I can give ANYBODY is

Think more marketing – less SEO

That is actually the secret to traffic AND conversions

Peach Y’all

The anti seo-SEO Guru

Your gonna go blind if ya don’t quit sittin so close to that TV damnit!