Renegade Search

Here at Digital Third Coast, we take providing measurable value to our clients seriously.  So seriously, in fact, that it's the first thing listed on our Core Values. We recognize that one of the biggest challenges facing businesses is figuring out a way to evaluate if their SEO campaign is successful. Ultimately, the only factor that determines success is the bottom-line; like any investment, we do not think that our services are truly successful unless we can provide positive ROI.

At the same time, we recognize that SEO is a long-term investment, and it simply isn't possible to provide positive ROI right out of the gate. So with that in mind, we usually focus on three distinct indicators of SEO success:

Keyphrase Ranking Improvements
Non-Branded Organic Search Traffic
Conversions

At different stages of our campaigns, we tend to focus on these indicators to varying degrees. Because search engine rankings tend to improve relatively quickly to quality SEO, we can use rankings for individual keywords to measure our earliest efforts. Later on in the process, the additional data that trickles in over time allows us to evaluate success based on organic traffic and conversions.

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As we have mentioned before in this blog, the world of SEO is constantly evolving.  Just to prove my point, I originally started this blog post three weeks ago.  It dove into my hypothesis on the effects of social media on SEO and how Google was slowly changing the playing field.  And as soon as it was ready to publish, Google rolled out Google Search plus Your World (SPYW) and made my post, in a blink, outdated.

Social media is becoming a larger piece of the SEO puzzle.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, Google Search plus Your World incorporates personalized search results from its own social network among normal SERP results.  Depending on your search, results will now be preceded by links of your Google+ friend’s updates and photos (if you are even using Google+) that relate to your query.

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It's happened more times than I can count. I get a phone call from a relatively new client (a month along in the SEO process) and they are ecstatic because they are ranking #1 for just about every phrase we are targeting. Here at DTC, we're awesome at SEO - but no one is that good.

This usually happens because A) the client is logged in to their gmail account and Google is showing them personalized search results for their account, or B) The client has visited their site via Google on their computer and Google is personalizing results for that individual piece of hardware. If you are using your own computer to check your rankings, they are possibly tainted. The solution: use a different computer by way of proxy.

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Have you ever watched a baseball player pick up his bat and point it to the fences? Calling his shot?

You probably only really saw something like that in the movies…because it doesn’t really happen.

Besides the famous Babe Ruth moment where he called out his home run, professional baseball players aren’t arrogant enough to call their shot (even Barry Bonds).

The same concept applies to SEO and predicting how long it will take to rank for a keyword.

I do understand why someone would want to know how long it will take…if you’re paying good money for a service, you’d like to know when you’re going to see a return...this is by far the most popular question that we get asked by new prospects.

The problem is, like Baseball, SEO is not very precise.

You can make educated guesses based on current competition and market conditions, but predicting how long it will take to rank for a set of keywords is arrogant, if not downright stupid.

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You've been working on SEO for your site for months. You've done your research, and your site is perfectly optimized for high-volume, highly-relevant keyphrases. You've gone out of your way to make sure that everything you're doing is ethical and your site should be firmly in Google's good graces.

After a few months of diligent promotion, you've greatly improved your visibility, and your site's traffic and conversions have been exploding.

And then one day, without warning, it's all gone. For reasons you can't fathom, your site has dropped off from Google results like a rock. Your traffic disappears.

If you care about SEO, this is the stuff that nightmares are made of. But if you've been working in internet marketing long enough, and you've been around enough sites, chances are that you might have seen a similar situation. But there are plenty of causes for this terrifying prospect, so the most important thing is to take a deep breath, relax, and figure out the cause of the problem. While it is always possible that something bad has happened (such as your site being hacked), most of the time the problem will be much more inocuous.

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