I got such great answers that I have taken the top 17 and made my 17 commandments of setting SEO expectations, then at the end of this piece I link over to the question and answer format for all of their answers. Thank you to Rhea Drysdale, Lee Odden, Rand Fishkin, Scott Skurnick, Melanie Nathan, Lindsay Wassell and Garrett French.

Here are the questions I asked:

1 – Can you give me a time when you didn’t set a clients expectation properly and it came back to bite you, and more importantly how did you recover from it / what processes have you put in place to keep that from happening again?

2 – I have found that one of the hardest conversations to have with prospective clients is the “you don’t deserve to rank #1 for that keyword” conversation, do you ever have to have those conversations, and if you do, how do you handle them in a way that helps the client realize you are trying to help them.

3 – When a client asks you to estimate ROI on an SEO project or asks where do you expect us to be in 12 months how do you handle those types of questions.

4 – When someone says something to you like, I read a report that shows that 60% of the clicks go to the first 3 listings, so I must be in the top 3 spots – it makes all of us cringe, how do you address that logical concern?

5 – How do you set expectations about the number of links / quality of links you are going to be able to procure for your clients?

6 – How do you handle the situation when a prospective client comes to you and has the budget, but they have few linkable assets, doesn’t have time to create content, weak PR, etc, etc?

7 – Any recommendations on questions to ask a prospective client before you take on a project to sniff out if they have the resources to create GOOD linkable assets?

Based on those questions here are the responses I got and the commandments I developed: (here’s the PDF to print out!)

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Can you give me a time when you didn’t set a clients expectation properly and it came back to bite you, and more importantly how did you recover from it / what processes have you put in place to keep that from happening again?
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Rhea
Outspoken Media is a small agency, which means we physically do the work ourselves. As COO and a worker, I often have to re-evaluate the time I spend communicating with clients about work and time I spend actually getting the work done. I always want to address a client’s concerns and questions, but I’ve had to learn the hard way that it isn’t rude to explain to a client that the more they need reassurance, the less time I’m going to have to get the job done and demonstrate ROI. In contracts we now clearly state how often we will be available for calls and that if a client needs more time from us, they will be billed x amount per hour beyond their current services. It’s the only way we can ensure a happy balance between communication and work.

COMMANDMENT #1: Thou shall explain the balance between time spent talking about SEO and time spent doing SEO.

Lee
Early on when I was with another agency doing web development projects and web marketing, we’d take on a variety of projects that would involve new territory for us. That kind of scenario creates expectations issues and recovery deals mostly with owning up to capabilities and timeframes. However, with the agency I’ve had the past 10 years, we pretty much stick to what we’re best at, knowing our capabilities and limits. Processes are essential for expectations management with everything to how you market your company, public and media relations efforts designed to build influence and credibility all the way to hiring, training and implementation. Reporting makes a big difference as well and including mutually agreed upon objectives front and center of every program performance report keeps everyone on the same page.

COMMANDMENT #2: Thou shall stick only to what thou REALLY knows to avoid unforeseen client expectations creeping up.

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I have found that one of the hardest conversations to have with prospective clients is the “you don’t deserve to rank #1 for that keyword” conversation, do you ever have to have those conversations, and if you do, how do you handle them in a way that helps the client realize you are trying to help them.
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Rhea
We’re often brutally honest with our clients, which they usually love. Of course there are times when I do have to explain that their services/products/content just aren’t up to par and in some cases, it might simply be a matter of them not meeting user intent for a particular keyword. I’ve found that it’s easier to explain the situation to a client by letting the competition or search results speak for themselves. Instead of us voicing an “opinion” that the client needs to do x, we give them examples what strategy the competition is using to earn their placement.

COMMANDMENT #3: Thous shall be Brutally Honest! Use the current SERPS to explain what is/isn’t attainable.

Scott
Absolutely. When we were relaunching the Edmunds site a number of years ago there was a desire to rank highly for “Make” terms such as Ford or GM. Due to the competitive nature of these terms I didn’t think we would be able to achieve this even though our site is authoritative in nature. The easiest way to support your argument is by showing examples. When you can show people that the results are dominated by sites which you won’t be able to displace because they are either official OEM sites or Wikipedia it goes a long way in helping your cause. The other argument that can be made as that the quality of traffic going to such general terms won’t help your revenue goals.

COMMANDMENT #4: Thou shall stay focused on revenue primarily, not rankings, links, or traffic.

Lee
A prospective client once asked about pursuing the word “brain” using a new web site. It’s a pretty straightforward thing to share a few datapoints about the search marketplace for any given topic as well as a few specifics for the sites that are already in the top spots. Sharing the resource allocation necessary for uber competitive and broad topics in the context of the prospects online resources vs going after topics that better reflect an intent to buy is pretty useful. But the conversation isn’t effective unless you share alternatives that show how the company can reach their goals. Spend huge resources chasing a unicorn or spend moderate resources going after hundreds or thousands of catchable fairies. (Bad metaphor) but we get it Lee.

COMMANDMENT #5: Take a resource allocation approach – articulate the expected time and resources required to target broad words, which may never rank even with extreme effort.

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When a client asks you to estimate ROI on an SEO project or asks where do you expect us to be in 12 months how do you handle those types of questions.
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Lindsay
These are REALLY tough to answer and I doubt my answer is going to be very helpful. At SEOmoz we came across this question very infrequently. Most of our clients had already experienced success in SEO and were contracting us to take them to the next level. They already understood the ROI from experience.

Perhaps more helpful is my experience starting out as an in-house SEO. I had to work extremely hard to get my projects into the development schedule. 80% of my job at the time was education and communication. I eventually won over the executive team by convincing them to make an investment in a ‘pilot project’. I was sure it would make a big difference, but I couldn’t exactly pinpoint how much of a difference. I got my pilot project and achieved more than 400% SE traffic growth in 6 months. That paved the way and I could always reference that case study as an example of the potential ROI.

COMMANDMENT #6: Thou shall have results that speak for themselves, even if you start with a small project.

Scott
Luckily I haven’t had to deal with a ROI discussion in a while. Once you are able to prove yourself as an in-house SEO, the doubters become few and far between. I have been very fortunate that I have had the support of upper management over most of my tenure at Edmunds. Regarding a 12 month outlook, I always do my best to give an honest estimate. Some projects are riskier than others and I make sure that is known upfront. I am also very clear that I will not make any guarantees and that every project has the potential to fail. If I think I can give a ballpark estimate I will, if I don’t think it is possible I explain why. As an in-house SEO I think we have much greater liberties when it comes to these types of questions vs. agency SEO’s.

COMMANDMENT #7: Thou shall prove thyself early, and always be honest about limitations.

Melanie
Firstly, I never estimate an actual dollar amount (cuz that’s impossible). Instead, I try to focus on what the SEO project will potentially do for their exposure and their website’s usability, which in turn can lead to more signups or conversions. I also offer a list of past clients, the results achieved and an invite to contact any of them in regards to their project.

In every case though, it’s better to promise little and produce huge than to promise huge and produce little.

COMMANDMENT #8: Thou shall always underpromise and overdeliver!

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When someone says something to you like, I read a report that shows that 60% of the clicks go to the first 3 listings, so I must be in the top 3 spots – it makes all of us cringe, how do you address that or other logical concerns?
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Rhea
We usually don’t cringe, it makes sense. However, is the keyword right? Before we start with a client, we need to see their conversion reports if they’re doing PPC and we need access to their analytics. We want to know what’s driving visitors to convert for them and we prioritize which keywords we go after from there. If a client is starting from scratch we do our homework and make educated decisions on which keywords we will target. Based on performance of those keywords we’ll tweak our strategy over time. When we’re billing a client for so many hours, it simply doesn’t make sense for us or them to go after keywords that won’t convert and we tell them that.

COMMANDMENT #9: Thou shall be practical and consider the other person’s point of view, they don’t know what you know so take time to educate and explain.

COMMANDMENT #10: Thou shall not make ROI judgments without conversion data.

Scott
Funny enough I haven’t had to deal with these kinds of comments. I have avoided using rankings as a success metric for a number of years now. For us it is all about driving unique visitors to the site, giving them the best user experience possible and then getting them to convert. It is much easier to optimize your conversion rate than search rankings because conversion is 100% within your control. Obviously good rankings and traffic are highly correlated but we drive so much traffic via long tail terms that it is nearly impossible to accurately track rankings. Luckily we do rank in the top 3 for many of our core terms but even a slight drop or increase in these rankings doesn’t have a large affect on our overall traffic.

COMMANDMENT #11: Thou shall always optimize conversion rates because that is 100% within your control.

Lindsay
I work really hard to steer clients away from keyword and rank focus and towards overall search referral traffic growth. That said, I have to agree that top three placement is the only place to be. Even the traffic difference between second and first position is substantial. Most of my clients obtain traffic from 10s or 100s of thousands of unique keywords every month. Looking at rank for individual terms isn’t real common amongst these folks. They are (thankfully) more interested in top level figures like the SE traffic volume overall.

COMMANDMENT #12: Thou shall never focus on only one individual keyword.

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How do you set expectations about the number of links / quality of links you are going to be able to procure for your clients?
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Rhea
Clients that have prior experience with paid links, sponsored posts or article syndication often expect a large sum of links with exact match anchor text. In those cases we again have to be brutally honest about the fact that it is going to take more time for a natural link development strategy to gain competitive rankings, but they will have built a defensible brand. We tell them that they are going to see less links, but better quality and there isn’t the risk of being smacked with a penalty or worse. We don’t require six or twelve month contracts with our clients, but we explain from the start that for us to demonstrate return, they need to stick with us for six to nine months. Of course time depends on the industry, so highly competitive terms will take longer than less competitive longtails or smaller industries.

COMMANDMENT #13: Thou shall create a DEFENSIBLE brand that any human could review and approve of.

Lee
We’ll work with companies that are focused on outcomes from marketing. Links are measured, no doubt. But the emphasis is on moving the conversion needle. Some programs call for simple linking programs and others are more like media relations engagements. It depends on the nature of the program, industry and audience we’re trying to reach. All that said, goals are important and they must be set in order to achieve efficiency so past performance tempered with the level of competition in an industry become useful for link quantity/quality expectations management.

COMMANDMENT #14: Thou shall articulate that different goals require different effort. Start with goals THEN develop your linking plan.

Rand
My take on link quantities and quality is generally based on the types of queries the client is seeking to rank for and the competition in those search results. As you know, we do lots of work here at SEOmoz to build a web crawl and metrics about links that can be leveraged to make competitive SEO more of a scientific process.

When we look at a given set of search results or a site’s position amongst a field of competitors, we can look at a number of metrics around quantity of links and linking root domains, raw importance (metrics like PageRank or mozRank), quality of links (via proxies like mozTrust & Domain Authority) and anchor text distribution. This helps inform us of where the missing pieces lie and what we need to do to catch up (or stay ahead).

I did a WB Friday on this topic.

COMMANDMENT #15: Analyze competitors linking before setting expectations on your linking efforts.

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How do you handle the situation when a prospective client comes to you and has the budget, but they have few linkable assets, doesn’t have time to create content, weak PR, etc, etc?
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Lindsay
Don’t use poor content as an excuse to fail. If their content stinks, be sure to include content creation in the scope of work.

COMMANDMENT #16: Thou shall include content creation in the scope of work!

Rhea
To be honest, we probably wouldn’t take them on. We’re in the business of building high quality, natural links. We need something to work with to do that. If there’s absolutely nothing available to us and no room for improvement, we’re being setup for failure. You can’t tie our hands and expect aggressive results.

COMMANDMENT #17: Thou shall set expectations on what is possible based on what you have been given to work with.

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Oh and here’s a special part: a ton of questions you can ask clients before taking on projects:
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Rhea (wow, thanks Rhea, these are awesome):
Do you have a media plan? If yes, we’ll need to see it.
Do you have a newsletter? If yes, how do you determine topics? If you have a calendar, we’ll need to see it.
Do you have any videos (interviews, commercials, how-to’s, etc)?
Do you have photos or graphics? If yes, how are those created?
Do you have a blog or podcast?
Who currently writes content for the site/blog or runs the podcast?
Do they have an editorial calendar? If yes, we’ll need to see it.
Do you speak at conferences or other industry events?
Will you be exhibiting at any conferences or industry events?
Do you donate to non-profits/charities or are you a sponsor of an organization?
Have you run or do you have plans to run a contest or giveaway?
Have you sent out or do you plan to send out any press releases?
Who is your target demographic? What questions do they typically have about your company/products/service?
Do you have client testimonials or reviews?
How do you manage customer service online?
Do you manage any social profiles? If yes, what is your approach with those?

Garrett
I like starting with: “what’s working for you now?” …in terms of both link building and of larger markteting initiatives.

We spoke with a link building prospect recently with not much content on site. We asked how they generated prospects currently and they off-handedly mentioned their 10k+ email list that they’d been building over the past 10-15 years. They estimated that 10% or so of the list were active, industry-facing publishers (bloggers/site owners etc). We recommended they begin engaging the list, publishing conversations (with permission) and start leveraging the conversations for links.

We’ve found that it’s usually easier to build from what’s working already in some way than to generate something brand new. Another important aspect though is how well positioned in the company is your immediate contact… If they have networked well internally you will have better success, whereas if they’re new or not well trusted or respected yet you will have trouble getting to the appropriate resources.

Lastly, it’s vital to have a sense of what’s actually linkable in their market space. You can look at what assets have been proven to attract links on competitors’ sites, as well as industry-facing publishers’ sites.

Melanie
What unique value does your web site offer? What needs does it satisfy better than your competitors?

Are they part of any groups or associations? Are they acquainted with owners of any related businesses? Do they volunteer for or contribute to any charities? You’d be surprised at how many link opportunities most sites are already sitting on yet they simply don’t realize it.

A question I sometimes have my clients ponder: “Who are the specific group of site owners that directly benefit when they link to my site?”

Lee
If their resources are online, it’s pretty easy to find those. Otherwise, ask what public relations, advertising or interactive marketing they’re doing. Inventory digital assets and find out what the marketing plan is for the next 6-12 months. If a company isn’t doing any of those things, maybe they’re not a good fit for SEO.

Huge Thank yous again to:
Melanie Nathan – “Canadian SEO” | @melanienathan
Rhea Drysdale – outspoken media (I endorse for reputation management) | @rhea
Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz.org – Go check out their link analysis tools | @randfish
Garret French – Go read the link building book, I got a ton of good tips | @garrettfrench
Lee Odden – Toprankblog.com @leeodden
Lindsay Perkin Wassell – Keyphraseology.com | @lindzie
Scott Skurnick – Edmunds.com | @sskurnick

The old webmaster tools lacked in link data, error reporting, & really letting you know the valuable pages on your site/those linking to your site. The new Bing webmaster tools are lacking. Below is a hot list of changes:

1. You have to install Microsoft Silverlight or you can’t view the data.

When your webmaster tools are bad to begin with, why make everyone download Silverlight & create another hassle for users? Below is the data you’ll see if you don’t download Silverlight:

You can add urls you want Bing to crawl, add a sitemap, view pages in Bing’s index, & alerts if you’ve received a message from Bing.

So to see your actual data, you’ve now downloaded Silverlight. What next?

2. Reporting % Changes Day to Day

Priority can be set to your websites through alerting you of daily changes in % of clicks, % of impressions, pages indexed, pages crawled. This is one semi-useful change I’m seeing so far. When we log into our account and see dozens of clients, we’re able to quickly see which ones Bing hated or showed the love. This defaults to day vs previous day rating, so it’s not going to be helpful when comparing low volume days like weekends vs weekdays depending on the industry.

3. History of Crawled Pages

You’re now able to see 6 months worth of data for pages crawled & pages indexed. While they are only showing back to June 3 right now, if it’s rolled out this data will be useful in troubleshooting or helpful when launching a site.

Fingers crossed we’ll be able to view more than one month at a time, something you’re not able to do right now.

4. History of Pages Indexed

Slightly different from crawled pages, where the bots could visit a single page numerous times during the day, indexed pages refers to the number of unique pages Bing has indexed. Unlike the history of crawled pages, indexed pages does not state that a certain time period will be available. Current history goes as far back as June 3.

5. THERE IS ZERO BACKLINK DATA

Biggest shocker is the lack of any backlink data WHATSOEVER.

Dashboard, Crawl, Index, & Traffic show ZERO backlink data points. I thought I had gone through it too fast & missed the backlink tab. Nope, there’s nothing about the number of links, trending number of links over time (more important to me than number of pages crawled daily), quality of sites linking to your site, quality of sites your site is linking to, etc.

Forget my complaints about the vagueness of the green bars in my previous post. I’d take the green bars back compared to no data at all.

While Yahoo has a better backlink analysis, Bing needs to use that or come up with a 2.0 release of their webmaster tools with link data. Without it, Bing Webmaster Tools remains obsolete compared to GA.

I have been interviewing a bunch of potential hopefuls and I have started thinking how lucky these college students are to have the chance to enter the internet marketing world fresh out of college. If I would have had the same opportunity, it would have saved me a few years of few years of ‘aimlessness’, so to speak, figuring out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

After my first gig in the Health Insurance Industry, I took a job with the marketing team of a startup online dating site. The dating site never took off, but the experience gave me my first taste of internet marketing. At the dating site, the clouds parted, and I found my path towards a career in internet marketing.

If your struggling to figure out what you want to do when you grow up, below are 5 traits that if you possess may mean that internet marketing is a good fit for you.

1. Possess a Competitive Spirit: In the summer of 1992, when I was 11 years old, I wanted to be an Olympic Gymnast. The one problem was that I had no formal gymnastic training, but that did not stop me from practicing by doing flips over my couch. For Amanda my colleague at SEER, who is 5 years younger than me, it was the summer of 1996, when she too dreamt of Olympic gold. Ok, so it is not necessary to have had the Olympic gold dream, like Amanda and me, but you do need to have a competitive spirit and an internal drive to be the best. Both Paid Search and SEO is about beating your competitors to maximize web real estate on the coveted first page of Google.

2. Love Puzzles & Games: I know when I was a kid, my mom could not buy puzzles fast enough for me. Now I love a good game of Scrabble. Aaron another fellow Paid Search member enjoys a good game of poker. Games also tie into a competitive spirit, as I still hate to lose, but have matured a bit from throwing the cards in my brother’s face and leaving the table crying. Both SEO and PPC are big puzzles. For SEO, you are spending your time figuring out how to understand the Google Algorithm. PPC is a puzzle in itself. Try fitting a keyword, benefit, distinguishing feature and a call to action into an ad of just 95 characters.

3. Enjoy(ed) and Excel(ed) in Analytical Classes, such as Economics, Math or Science classes. Wil actually wanted to be economics teacher before he found his way into Internet Marketing. For Paid Search you can’t be afraid of numbers and have to be comfortable analyzing data. Sure, you need creativity to write ads and help wireframe landing pages, but we are data junkies and spend a great portion of our day determining statistical significance, analyzing trends and calculating ROI. For SEO sure you need creativity to come up with link bait ideas, but you have to enjoy analyzing a sites architecture, monitoring your sites traffic and monitoring your site’s conversions. We know colors and design have their place, but as a team we care more about calls to actions, usability and content with relevant keywords.

4. Love using Excel to figure out better ways to do things: This is similar to number 2. If you actually enjoy learning about pivot tables and neat new Excel formulas, then you will probably also enjoy a life as an internet marketer.

5. Enjoy being a lifelong student: The web is constantly changing. You have to enjoy continual learning because what works well today may not work well tomorrow. Everyone at SEER loves learning about the web and staying on top of industry trends and news. We are constantly sharing blogs and ideas. We even started a SEER Internet Marketing book club, so that we are always growing and learning together.

I hope this helps provide a good gut check to help you figure out if a career in Internet Marketing would be a good fit for you. To other experienced Internet Marketers out there, please add additional traits that you think are common among you and your colleagues.

1. Returning Accurate Results

You’ve Googled yourself. Possibly several times over the course of a year. For a Google search for some guy like Wil Reynolds, you would expect SEER Interactive to show up as a top result. It does, and has for years. Only since March has Bing brought back www.seerinteractive.com in the first 30 results. This is one instance of many where Bing brings back tons of fillers like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, even Classmates before the company website.

While Rand posted an extremely detailed good read that concluded with Google & Bing being extremely similar, results do not always show this trend.

2. Handling of 301 redirects

With cold hard facts in our hands, we can absolutely say Bing has trouble with 301 redirects. It could be that more value is lost through the Bing algorithm. Bing could be having trouble accurately following 301 redirects. Bing may have extreme difficulties accurately following multiple redirects. Whichever the reason, after @marklavoritano pushed out his 301 redirect post we know there are big issues.

3. Site Domain Scores

These are a joke. It might as well be a 1-5 bar scale of how many preschoolers think the screen looks shiny when the website is loaded.

Just as SEER has a 5/5 score, all of the outbound links from our site have a 5/5 bar score. Going through Bing Webmaster Tools for 10 clients, I have never seen a score that was less than 5/5 bars. PR0 or PR8, two inbound links or 10,000, 5/5 is the score we’re seeing. It looks like the only qualification for your site to receive a 5/5 is to not have white text or you don’t give your visitors spyware.

While another pagerank type of score would not be very helpful, giving every site a 5/5 score has no use at the moment.

4. Blocking a Site and Indexed Pages

I have a client who doesn’t rank for their own name in Bing. WMTools shows the following information:

The site has been around for ten years. It ranks on the first page of Google for the industry’s most competitive keyword. They have links from credible resources. They link to credible resources. They publish fresh content. Bing hates them.

If you do not rank for your own name, Bing has 2000+ pages indexed, and rankings fell from being superb to nothing, it sounds like the site is getting blocked. After contacting support three times, Bing definitively said that the site was not being blocked or penalized. The issue was that validator.w3.org reported numerous errors with the site and if those errors are fixed, the site should be indexed more thoroughly.

a. the site used to rank extremely well
b. it is not doing anything shady, especially compared to others in the industry ranking well
c. the site has history, backlinks, & links to credible sites (all 5/5 bars, so they must be credible?)
d. no major changes were made to the site architecturally

So Bing suddenly flipped a switch because errors were reported at validator.w3.org? Strange.

Being more helpful with information would be great for the indexed pages & the “blocked” notification area. If there are 2000+ pages and zero show up for ANY searches, there is something very very wrong with Bing indexing the site.

5. Select Issue Type

Bing has a terrible time reporting 404s. There are a handful of clients with some major 404 lists in Google Webmaster Tools and it has been extremely helpful to find a few of these with some major links pointing to them. Bing reports the same sites as having no data available. One site had 300+ 404 pages reported by Google, but zero were reported in Bing.

Finding site issues & identifying them in WMT would be extremely beneficial. Is Bing currently unable to find these, or just unwilling to thoroughly report on them right now?

These are five big items that came to mind where I experienced Bing to be lacking. While a monster upcoming change like using Bing SERPs is exciting for SEO, it could just exacerbate the issues we’re already seeing.

I’ve read many accounts of the effects that this update has had on sites, many of which are negative in nature.  About 2 weeks ago, SEORoundtable conducted a poll which concluded that around 42% of respondents reported that search visits had declined since the update, 41% saw no change, and 13% saw their traffic increase.  This was a very revealing study, but it didn’t quench my thirst for down and dirty comparative traffic metrics.  I wanted an answer to the question that most SEOs were asking but no one was answering: how much long-tail traffic did we really lose??

I took a look at the search traffic for 25 of SEER’s clients (brands removed to protect anonymity) comparing the month of April (we’ll call this pre-Mayday) to the month of May (appropriately, post-Mayday).  It is also important to point out that the pre-Mayday data takes into account the last day in March (3.31) as well as the entire month of April in order to compare an equal number of days in each period.  Clients were chosen from a variety of niches, including (but not limited to) eCommerce, finance, education, tourism, and B2B.  This was done in an attempt to remove any bias according to industry.  Finally, actually traffic numbers were removed from the example data as the true value comes from comparative percentages.  Now, onward to the results!

How Much of an Effect did the Mayday Update Really Cause?

First, let’s take a look at non-branded search traffic, the reason being that this is the traffic that would be most likely associated with your “virgin searcher,” or person unfamiliar with your brand.  This is the purest target audience for SEO, as you’re trying to place a site before an audience that has no allegiances or loyalties to any particular brand.  Traffic numbers were compared, and the percentage differences calculated.  That data is available below:

As you can see, despite a small handful of clients seeing a significant decrease in non-branded search traffic, the split is a pretty even 50-50.  In fact, if we assume a deviation of +/- 5% to be “No Change,” only 16 of these companies saw any change at all, whether positive or negative.

Next, and more importantly, we will look at the number of referring keywords to each site pre- and post-Mayday.  Now, accordingly to the general perception around the web and Matt Cutts, the majority of this data should reflect a decrease in the overall number of referring keywords.  However, our data supports a different conclusion:

As you can see, only about half of our clients saw any decrease in the number of referring keywords.  More specifically, 20% of clients saw a decrease, 52% saw no change, and 28% actually saw an increase in the number of referring KWs.

So What?

Why is this relevant?  Why should you care?  Well, according to most qualitative sources the majority of sites saw a loss of traffic as a result of the Mayday Update.  However, quantitatively, this doesn’t actually appear to be the case.  In fact, looking at the total non-branded traffic driven to all 25 sites from search pre- and post-Mayday, there was a +0.68% difference in visits.  0.68%!! Furthermore, the percentage difference between the number of referring keywords pre- and post-Mayday? +0.44%.  Now, I know that some critics will argue that any one outlier in raw data could throw off the average.  Who’s to say that the decreases seen by Client13 or Client2 are not completely washed out by the positive month for Client16?  Well, when you take the average percentage change across all clients, there was only a -1.28% difference in visits and a -0.66% difference in referring keywords.  Pretty underwhelming if you ask me, especially considering the prevailing perception is that most sites were significantly damaged by the update.  This shows us that, although certain sites definitely saw a decrease in their traffic and referring keywords, this was not necessarily a trend that was reflected across the entire web, as most qualitative studies may have suggested.

Finally, I’m sure some people are also interested in how incorporating branded traffic into this analysis may have affected the overall results.  On the whole, although our site traffic actually fared worse when branded queries were included in the analysis, the number of referring keywords was consistent with our previous analysis.  Despite a similar breakdown of referring keywords, many of our sites received less traffic when branded queries were included in the analysis.

Total Organic Visits (Including Branded Queries)

Total Number of Organic Keywords (Including Branded Queries)

As for total organic traffic (including branded queries) across all 25 sites, we noticed a 0.31% decrease pre- versus post-Mayday, and for total organic referring keywords we saw a 0.28% increase after the update.  Taking the average of all percentage changes across 25 sites, we saw an average of -5.13% difference in our search traffic and -2.45% difference in the number of referring keywords.

Conclusions

Before we close, I’d like to address some concerns readers may have regarding this analysis.  Yes, these metrics are reflective of SEER clients and only SEER clients; it’s wholly possible that our data is not indicative of the Web as a whole.  However, this is exactly the reason why I tried to remove any industry-bias by analyzing sites from a wide variety of niches.  Next, the analysis did look at the raw number of referring keywords, rather than simply long-tail terms.  This was done so that holistic conclusions were drawn from the referring keyword report without having to arbitrarily determine what defines long-tail.  Matt Cutts and the good folks at Google just told us that the update affected long-tail traffic, not what is considered long-tail.  By viewing the total number of keywords across the board, I hoped to normalize the data and neutralize this variable as best we could.  Finally, our data also reflects ongoing SEO efforts by the SEER team.  However, I would argue that this is not a variable that should be excluded even if it were possible to do that.  All companies looking to turn a profit are constantly optimizing, whether actively or passively, for improved visibility on the web.  This could be through SEO, external marketing, site redesign, product updates, etc.  The fact that these numbers reflect ongoing marketing efforts is a trend that will always continue even if Google decides never to change the algorithm again, and therefore are an intricate part of any analysis.

Remember that Google will never change their algorithm to become less relevant, so it’s a constant battle of future-proofing your site for the inevitable.  Whether Google wants to become more relevant for the head terms or the long-tail, singular or plural, branded or non-branded, you will never go wrong with creating quality content, valuable links, and streamlined architecture, so keep that in mind next time (and there most certainly will be a next time) Google decides to roll out an update.

There are hundreds of things you can check. Today, our list goes to 11.

1. Get webmaster tools installed & keep them there

I’m a fan of Google WMT, Bing, & Yahoo in that order. These are key to finding out why those search engine bullies dropped your rankings.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/
http://www.bing.com/webmaster
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

2. Robots.txt

Did you recently make changes to yoursite.com/robots.txt? Check whether you disallowed your entire site or significant group of pages. Need info on robots.txt? Find everything you need to know at http://www.robotstxt.org.

3. Redirects

Two big questions: Did you use a 301 redirect and is the redirect pointing to the correct page? If we’re in the copywriting business, one missing letter equals a misspelled word among thousands. One missing letter in a redirect means your linkjuice & history from that old site are left in limbo. You’ll use a 301 redirect 100% of the time when you want to pass value on to another domain. Now just make sure the url is is pointing to is correct.

Open Site Explorer can show you most of the 301 redirects to a site. If thre’s only one or two you’re worried about, try one of the redirect checkers below.

http://www.seologic.com/webmaster-tools/url-redirect.php
http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

4. Who are you linking to?

Bing has an exportable list of outbound links from your site. Do any of your links have less than 5 bars? If so, it could be a bad neighborhood and you’ll probably want to remove it. In the same theme, are any of your links broken? Use the Link Checker plugin to find out if you are linking to dead sites. One or two poor outbound links probably won’t drop your rankings significantly, but keeping it clean is always good.

5. Search for your site

If you’re New Standard Corporation, you’d expect to show up in the first result or two for your three word brand name. Showing up? Great! The issue is probably less severe/complicated than you thought.

Not showing up? Do a site:newstandard.com search to see if Google still has your pages indexed. You can also find total number of pages indexed in Google WMT.

No pages indexed? Definitely not good. You’ll have to find out the issue, fix it, then submit a reinclusion request to the engines. This can be done at:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_urlstatus
https://support.discoverbing.com/eform.aspx?productKey=bingcontentremoval&ct=eformts&scrx=1

6. Check Your Other Domains

Do you own other domains that were 301 redirecting to your current site? It’s possible the redirect no longer exists or the domain was not renewed. This is especially crucial if your company changed domains a few years ago, purchased competitors & had those domains 301 redirected over, or had a contest site that 301 redirected to your current domain.

7. Did you recently do a site redesign?

Use the WebDeveloper toolbar to verify your links & dropdowns are active when javascript is disabled. I would also check two different spider simulators to make sure these are indexing all of your content & links. All these links are below:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/

Another item to check is site speed. Did your redesign implement Flash, tons of pictures to load, or something else that’s going to slow your site down? Listen to what Google WMT is saying about this in their Labs Site Speed section.

8. Is your content being copied?

While there is no duplicate content penalty, if you own a blog and a larger, more valuable site decides it likes your latest post & publishes it on their site, they could outrank you. They’ll be crawled more often, Google will find the content faster on the more valuable site & you might be listed further down or in the omitted results.

You can either drop a chunk of content from your site into quotes in Google to see who else is using it or try http://www.copyscape.com/ that pretty much does the same thing.

9. The Obvious Offenses

Cloaking, keyword stuffing, white text white background, etc. Fire those who suggest it. The end.

10. Bing most valuable pages

Bing lets you see the most valuable pages, or so it thinks, for your site. It will list out the top 5. Some issues can be thwarted here like affiliate homepage links showing up ahead of your actual homepage or jacked up cms created links like example.com/dept_id?=13098. Check into here to see what Bing thinks is important.

11. Keep it clean

Just like your car, desk, or house, keeping a clean website helps prevent future issues. Some items to keep especially clean are:

a. Be consistent in your linking – stick with either http://example.com or the www version.
b. URL capitalization – keep all letters small or all caps.
c. Keep sitemaps up to date – make sure your sitemaps are updated when new pages are launched or removed.

Another 3 posts could be written about troubleshooting when rankings drop (and it might happen) but go ahead & comment with your best troubleshooting ideas.

In order to create the ROI Calculator we first needed to know how much each successful conversion was worth to a client. For example if a conversion was worth $10 dollars to a client and SEER got our client 100 conversions, SEER could then say these conversions we were responsible for profited the client $1,000 dollars. Using the number of search conversions along with their value, and the client’s contract information we could calculate the actual ROI for investment in SEO.

At first this seemed like a fantastic idea, after all who wouldn’t be happy with a report that says your investment was a profitable one. However during the implementation of the Calculator a number of issues were discovered which made it’s creation far more difficult. Below are the two major problems in the creation of our ROI Calculator.

Existing Search Traffic

When SEER begins a project with a client we create a Google Analytics profile which captures only organic search traffic. The ROI Calculator then used the Google Analytics API to get the number of organic search conversions (excluding the company’s brand name) and used that number to calculate the ROI. However it was quickly discovered that this would only work for clients that had little to no search traffic to begin with. If a client already had search traffic, there is no way to separate which search visits were a result of SEO efforts, compared to which search visits would have reached the client without SEO, therefore attributing conversions would be near impossible.

This meant any client which already had search traffic would need to have an average search revenue calculated before the ROI calculator could be applied. Not only does this add a significant level of complexity to the calculator itself, but calculating average search revenue is often very difficult. What if the client recently changed domains, or launched a new website? What if the client is seasonal? Calculating an average search revenue before SEO efforts can be very difficult, or even impossible and without that information the ROI Calculator would be very inaccurate.

Lifetime Value of a Customer

The other difficulty in the creation of the calculator was the difficult concept of “Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer.” Often times once a visitor has found a website and completed a conversion, they will come back in the future and do it again. Therefore you can’t simply say, “This conversion was worth $10,” since that person could return and complete the same transaction 5 times, making that new customer worth $50 instead of $10.

The first problem with this concept is that it is somewhat difficult to understand or explain. This resulted in a large amount of confusion and time spent explaining what we were looking for and why. The second and much more significant problem with this concept is that this number is almost always an approximation, as the data necessary to calculate an exact value is almost always unavailable.

Realizing it was time to pull the plug

Here at SEER Interactive we evaluate ongoing and new programming projects every couple of weeks to determine their priority. SEER takes into account the estimated time needed to complete the project, the value to customers, and how much help it will be to SEER employees.

After a careful analysis of the ROI Calculator’s obstacles we realized: The initial time estimates of the project skyrocketed after these problems were discovered, our calculations were going to be based on approximations, and the project was causing a significant amount of confusion, taking up a lot of our client’s time.

Knowing the cost of the project was far higher than originally anticipated we wanted to make sure the project was still of value to our clients. However since these issues resulted in several approximated values, and the ROI Calculator relied on these approximated values, our ROI calculation would compound the inaccuracies of these approximations making the final result even less accurate. Therefore SEER decided that it would be better to spend our time improving our client’s ROI even more, rather than creating a report that shows them an approximated dollar value of returns.

After Pulling the Plug

Once it was decided that the project was no longer of value to clients and it needed to be scraped, the question became what next? We have some of this data already, is there anything we can do with it? After all, we didn’t want to see the project become a total waste.

Our answer: Use the goal values already built into the Google Analytics system. While it won’t allow us to calculate an ROI due to several of the same issues, it will give us additional information for analytics purposes and will require almost zero setup time and maintenance. Furthermore clients will no longer have to compute LTV since we will be using the conversion values to optimize the site and analyze trends rather than compute an actual monetary result.

Do you have any projects which are causing more problems than they are solving? Would you know if you did?

Any comments or feedback is more than welcome!

Here is a (simplified) overview of how linkbuilding works

• I have a site
• I promote it
• People see it as a valuable resource and then link to it
• The more quality links I get, the more the search engines like my site
• The more the engines like my site, the higher I should rank
• The higher my site ranks, the more traffic/conversions I should get

Okay, so now I have my site, my tasty products and the above information that the SEO fairy whispered in my ear. Now, all I have to do is get some quality links, but where do I start? I don’t know any bloggers that I can reach out to. I don’t know any directories where I can submit my site. All I know is that I want to compete in the coconut water industry and that I have access to some cool SEOmoz tools.

The first thing that I do is type in “coconut water” in Google to get a list of competitors. I’m pretty familiar with the industry so I know that Zico, VitaCoco and O.N.E are the big boys/girls in the space. So, let’s see what they are (or are not) doing that I may be able to learn from. Running each of these competitors through the top pages tool, I can see that I caught each of these competitors sleeping a little bit.

VitaCoCo 404 Pages

Zico 404 Pages

O.N.E 404 Pages

• VitaCoCo is not getting credit for (at least) 3 links since the linked to pages return 404 status code
• Zico isn’t receiving credit for (at least) 5 links
• O.N.E isn’t receiving credit for (at least) 16 links
• I use “at least” here because there were more examples of these types of pages for each one, but I couldn’t screenshot multiple pages

So, the easy part is done. I know that my competitors have links pointing to pages that don’t exist, but how do I take advantage of that? I know if I had a website and I was linking to a page that didn’t exist, my readers would be upset with me and may not read anything else on my site. So, are you thinking what I’m thinking? What if I contacted the sites that are linking to these pages as a “courtesy” and said something like, “Hey blogger, I noticed that you were linking to a page about coconut water that doesn’t exist. Since you will already be editing that post anyway, I wanted to let you know that I also have a company that sells coconut water and the product is delicious and nutritious. Would you mind linking to my site instead?” Now this won’t work all the time, but it sure beats the heck out of “hey blogger, can you link to me, I’m neat-o?”

So, you are probably saying to yourself, “that’s a cool idea, but how do I know which pages are linking to these 404’ed ones.” For that, I will be using OpenSiteExplorer (OSE). Let’s take the O.N.E example since the most links are pointing to that one:

• I copy the link location of the 404’ed page that has received 8 external links
• I drop that into OSE to find out which sites are linking to it
• I filter the results to only include the followed external links pointing to this page only
• I take the top result and I end up on this page

Coconut Porridge Recipe

It looks like this blogger has included a link to O.N.E’s coconut water site as part of a recipe. Think about how upset I would be as a reader if I was making a Coconut Date Porridge for my in-laws and I couldn’t access the page to see which coconut water I should buy. I would be devastated. So, I would shoot an email to this blogger and say “hey, you’re readers can’t view that page because it no longer exists. You should update it and, oh, by the way, I sell coconut water and it’s freakin’ sweet. Would you mind linking to mine instead?” I would recommend going down the top pages list and compiling a spreadsheet of all of the 404 pages for each competitor. Once you have that, you can start digging. Even if you don’t get all of them, you will still get a few and you will at least make the web a better place.

Now, this strategy won’t work every time, of course, but when thinking about where to start your linkbuilding, it’s always a good idea to take a look at what the competition is or isn’t doing. You just may learn something. Do you have any other ways that you use competitors for linkbuilding? Feel free to tell us about it in the comments section!

Given that no definitive answer has been provided about the exact percentage lost, we decided that the only way to determine the true value of a 301 was to analyze a site that had recently changed domains.  Fortunately, one of our clients moved domains in the beginning of 2010 and had implemented a 301 on their old site.  We managed this account before and after the switch, so data from both the old and the new sites was available for analysis.  The following case quickly outlines what we’ve seen with these domains in particular, and how the 301 is functioning.

In the first graphic we can see the Open Site Explorer data for both sites.  This was where we started our research because we wanted to see how an independent tool was evaluating the two domains and what type of link juice was being passed through.

While it is clear that the 301 appeared to be passing significant value through this analysis, the most important factor was how the engines were treating the redirect.

This next graphic shows the total amount of organic search traffic to the two sites – before and after the switch was made.  As you can see, total traffic normalized fairly quickly once the switch was made.

It is important to note two things about the above graphic.  First, the same number of keywords were tracked for each site – keeping the KWs as a controlled variable.  Second, the site being analyzed experienced a fairly significant jump in traffic around the holidays.  So while this data is not ideal given the peaks in the graph, it does help demonstrate the overall results since the switch and the relative speed with which traffic stabilized.

The next graphs show the organic search traffic in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing for this site’s top keyword.  For reference, this word gets approximately 550k searches on exact match per month.

Clearly Google is passing value from the 301, and traffic numbers have actually improved since the switch.  Yahoo! showed an initial spike, however traffic dropped significantly and has not returned to previous levels.  Bing does not appear to be passing any significant value and traffic levels remain low.

…So what does this all mean?  With this quick analysis we were able to reach the following conclusions:

• It is safe to say that 301 redirects do pass value – Our OSE analysis shows that the new domain has picked up a significant portion of the linking domains, as well as relative authority.
• In addition, we saw through our KW traffic analysis that the 301 seems to be working quite well in Google.  We have not seen any substantial drop since the domain switch – and in fact, traffic has steadily increased.  Whether or not there has been a measurable drop, or PageRank decay, is hard to say at this point.  Our data indicates that the 301 is passing value, and our traffic numbers say the same thing – if there is some value being lost, it is not affecting the bottom line.
• The same cannot be said for Yahoo! and Bing.  Our data showed that Yahoo! and Bing are not passing adequate value from the redirect and that total traffic numbers may be impacted by this drop.  Although Bing has said that it can take two or three re-crawls for value to register, it does not look like the full value has been passed with the redirect.   When analyzing the impact of 301s in your future campaigns keep this test in mind and be sure to check how each engine’s traffic is affected.

If you have any questions about the information provided above, please leave them below in the comments section.  In addition, a great review of the entire interview with Matt Cutts (complete with helpful illustrations) can be found on the SEOMoz Blog.

Anyway this video is a good one for affiliates to watch, but also for any SEO to watch as I discuss the types of queries that bring up universal search results, which often affiliates may have a hard time getting into (especially Google products). But I also talk about the types of queries that often have a lot less product feed distractions and still create opportunities. Take a look at the part where I discuss algorithmic results in product feeds for buying guides here’s an example for “ski boots“.

Well here’s the video, thanks for your support people!