It is interesting as an SEO to track the correlation between what Google wants and what works on Google…
What?
How is it then that every damn marketer is trying to find the achilles heel, the secret sauce, the “make money while you sleep” hack, that can enable the creation of a product that can be sold to an eager market of lazy marketers representing businesses that have no right to be on page one anyway!
This is the way of the web and unfortunately Google has to allocate a huge proportion of its resources to fending off thousands of very smart and very hungry product creators.
Hell, you can build a list, set up engaging auto-responders, build <sarcasm>posture</sarcasm> and lead a willing multitude to the holy grail of quick, free cash from the mega-search-giant known as Google.
So Google said
HELL NO!
And went to war with the spammers, black hats, opportunists, crooks, porn merchants, ponzi scheme runners, casino scammers, MLM dreamers…
And actually did quite a good job of closing up every little loophole
one by one
little by little
Including some pretty cool little techniques we used to use back in the day to get people to our thin affiliate landing pages!
So, guess what?
The days of search engine results hacking, of using high volume spam techniques, of using little chinks in the armour to sneak through are over.
An extremely high profile business opportunity “guru” has been linking to our main blog over the last couple of weeks as a source of SEO information. It appears that now the doctrine is “learn white hat SEO” (but, hey, keep paying me your monthly subscriptions – even while you frantically use the Google disavow tool to regain all that lost ground! Because now I’ll show you how to get rid of all those links I taught you how to build)
It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic for the poor followers.
Anyway I digress!
It is very clear to me based on data I have been tracking over the last 6 months in particular that there is one true way to make Google happy…
and any SEOs reading this will go “Duh”!
It is as simple as having a good quality blog on a business site (I mean a real business here – not some keyword based, recently incorporated whim or business opportunity driven site).
Our clients who have a content strategy are seeing impressive or outstanding growth in organic visitors.
Our clients who have a static website are seeing some or OK growth.
Easy as that!
One is even seeing growth as high as 60% month on month – crazy figures (this is a comprehensive multi-author strategy with intensive social media action)
The smaller businesses are also seeing real growth through a regular commitment to new, engaging content.
I mean when you look at it like this:
A small business creates one post a week – 500 words of keyword relevant content.
- that’s 2000 keyword focused words added to the site per month
- that’s at least 4 new pages per month
- each comment is another page – how many new pages per month?
- that’s 24,000 keyword focused words per annum
- that’s at least 48 quality new pages per year at the least – I won’t go into comment possibilities
- that’s regular, quality content for the search engines to index
It isn’t exactly rocket science is it?
You have 4 businesses vying for positions in the market.
One has a 10 page site and has spent some money optimising it.
One has a pretty high public presence but has ignored optimisation
One has built a new site, has blogged a handful of times then didn’t see the point – no measurable ROI
The last one decides to go for it.
It gets buy-in from management and staff and everyone who has something insightful, informative, fun, community building, or solutions based for their customers and creates good quality content.
This is scheduled over the next 12 months and regular reporting on progress, social shares, increases in visitors, most popular posts and so on is shared with contributors at regular intervals.
And a competition is set up for the most successful authors.
What happens?
Who do you think is getting the most new business of the 4?
The correlation between this sort of activity and business growth is pretty impressive.
So, about that title about web developers
Right!
Today I had a long conversation with a client and talked a lot about what I have alluded to above.
And the client totally understood what I was talking about (we have been tracking growth closely and adjusting strategies for over a year now).
So the client said – time to up the game with our 3 businesses in 2013.
If our web development company is not up to this we will build 3 new sites with someone who gets it.
Cool!
So I contact the web developers and ask the question.
I explained the features needed for a content strategy in today’s environment:
- ability to shorten permalinks
- title tag creation
- meta description creation
- tags
- archives
- categories
- ability to use H1, H2, H3 tags
- ability to optimise images
- a robust commenting function
- spam filters
This without any of the dozens of WordPress plugins to improve search performance – these are the basics!
And you know what the reply was?
“Regarding integrating a blog. xxxxxxxx will not be adding a blog to our system anytime in the near future”.
Deathly silence…
Holy shit!
Are these guys serious?
“Web” developers means (I would have thought) developing sites for the web!
Yet these guys are quite happy to ignore the web (oh yes, Google only takes about 90% of search in Australasia)
I love it when web providers say “we don’t do SEO” as if that is some excuse for not keeping up with how their websites can be found on the web.
Google says “we want you to produce high quality content and to be an authority to gain top page positions”.
And content is the way to do this – no hack, no spam, totally sanctioned and welcomed.
“Hey, we just build websites – we don’t do blogs. If you want a blog we will build one off your domain and link to it”.
Right. Amazing.
Will these guys still be in business in a couple of years time?
