Renegade Search

One of the things that motivated me to go into SEO professionally in the first place was an interest in how search engines actually work. Like almost everyone not in Academia or working in Silicon Valley, I had always thought of search engines as something almost magical; some robot wizards must be flying around in cyberspace making all of this work.

If you're reading this, there's probably a good chance that you think of search engines the same way that I did. In this post, I'm going to tell a very basic story of how a search engine actually approaches and views a given website. Hopefully this will de-mystify part of the process, and give you a few pointers on how you can make sure that your site can be properly viewed and understood by engines.

In all of this, the key thing to remember is that search engines are run by computer programs, and not people. As a result, any site that wants to be visible in search results needs to be able to communicate with computers first and foremost.

 

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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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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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