It’s human nature to return to a strategy that has worked in the past.  But consider the caveman enjoying a hearty potato after a long day of club-carrying and grunting.  How many years were ancient cavemen and cavewomen munching down on raw potatoes before they realized that by dropping them in some boiling water or rolling them in some prehistoric tin foil and dropping them in a fire made them infinitely more desirable?  Clearly this is an exaggerated example, but the fact remains that it’s not uncommon to become complacent with a strategy or a process that has worked in the past, and SEO is no exception.  That brings us to the moral of today’s story: ADAPT.

Always Ask “Why”

“Why?” is perhaps the oldest question in our arsenal.  As kids, it was “why do I have to go to bed?!” As adolescents, it was “why does the world hate me?”  But as SEOs, “Why” is probably our most powerful weapon, provided it’s wielded properly.  First off, I must make it clear that there is an important distinction between questioning your strategies and processes, and second guessing yourself or your peers; the latter of which can be very damaging to a team atmosphere.  I’m not calling for everyone to walk up to your co-worker and interrogate his or her linking strategies, keyword selection, or competitive analysis – far from it.  What I’m calling for here is an internal register that determines what the real value is to any strategy.  Think about the last recommendation you made to a client and ask yourself: “Why should they dedicate their precious and finite time and resources to this?”  This sort of forward thinking benefits us in two ways; first, it allows us to better understand our clients, their needs, and their concerns.  If we know what is important to them and can accurately and correctly explain the rationale behind our thought processes, it builds their faith in us while at the same time reinforcing that they made the right investment in us.  On the other hand, by asking “Why” internally, you are able to see what aspects of your strategies can be improved; you must have faith in your processes, but at the same time maintain a healthy understanding that there may be a better way to do things.

Finally, we cannot talk about “Why” without touching on “Why’s” ugly stepsister: “Why Not.”  You should be able to tell a client why not to buy links (and “Because Matt Cutts Said So” is not an appropriate answer).  You should be able to explain why not to include white text on a white background and why a company that sells fax machines should not be targeting “Purple Giraffe on a Pogo Stick” as their primary keyword.  These examples may seem a bit outrageous, but the sentiment rings true; by asking “Why” you do what you do (and “Why Not”), it allows you to a) prepare for client questions and b) provide the most comprehensive consulting possible.

Don’t Rest on Your Laurels

Hooray, we’ve made it to page one!  Now what?  Time to call it a day and go out and celebrate, right?  WRONG!  Complacency has always been the enemy of innovation, and SEO is no exception.  Until you’ve done everything you can to achieve top rankings, capture all relevant local listings, create a robust GoogleBase feed (for eCommerce clients) and leverage relevant Universal results, your work is not fully finished.  Again, I want to be clear here that anything short of top rankings across the board does not necessarily indicate failure; on the contrary, I’m simply cautioning against growing complacent with success when there is room to improve.  Work constantly to improve your strategies, using past accomplishments as a springboard for continued success.  Run an eCommerce website?  Try conducting a brand audit to target specific products that may be underperforming.  Manage a blog?  Try running a contest for your readers.  Stuck with a linkbuilding writer’s block?  Digg up some new ideas.  What separates the good from the great is a constant drive to be the best, so put yourself in a position to be the best by learning not only from your failures, but also your success.

Adjust

Adjusting strategies doesn’t necessarily mean changing how you approach SEO best practices; it could mean something as simple as making sure you’re delivering the most complete portfolio possible.  The recent launch of Open Site Explorer, for example, has forced us to re-evaluate how we look at link data.  The information pulled into this database is not new information, but rather an improved medium through which to view the information.  In any industry, a refusal to adjust to changing times is a surefire way to pigeonhole yourself into a menial desk job with no prospect at advancing.  However, in the world of SEO, a refusal to adjust to advances in the industry won’t even secure that menial desk job.  Consider a telephone company that refuses to sell anything but rotary phones – how long before that business model implodes?  We are in a very unique space where we must constantly adjust to changing times, whether due to updates in the search algorithms, the merger of two search giants, or the introduction of new features such as Personalized Search.  While the social implications are certainly different, Bob Dylan’s words still ring true: As the present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fadin’.  And the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changin’.

Proactively Seek Information

I was an avid procrastinator for the vast majority of my life up through and including college, and I got along fairly well.  However, the SEO industry is not one where you can sit back and wait for someone to clue you in.  “Wait, Yahoo! and MSN are doing what?!?” is not a statement that’s going to instill a lot of faith in your clients when they ask what the implications the impending merger has on their SEO and PPC efforts.  And the strategy of proactively seeking information is not one that requires much preparation on your part, just a thirst to learn.  Google Reader, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, and heck, just talking to friends and colleagues are some very simple ways to stay on top of trends and changes in the industry.  The trick, however, is knowing how to parse this information, how to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Read multiple opinions on the same topic to put yourself in a position to form an educated opinion.  The value of the nofollow tag, for example, is one that has caused the best of friends to glare menacingly at one another across the proverbial battlefield.  If there was a black-and-white handbook for SEO, we’d all be out of the job.  Our true value lies in our inherent need to proactively seek out information and, furthermore, to take this information and…

Test, Test, Test!

You can spend 4 hours of day reading the latest blog posts from SEO gurus across the country, but there has never been (nor ever will be, in my opinion) an adequate substitute for testing.  In fact, the experts in our field gained their well-deserved renown from constantly questioning, testing, and re-testing theories until they found what works.  Anyone holding out for that miraculous day when Google just tells us how to achieve page one rankings will be blue in the face for a very long time.  Successful SEOs know how to take their questions, their successes, and their failures and transform them into something that can truly be revolutionary in our field.  And remember what Thomas Edison said when attempting to invent the lightbulb: I have not failed.  I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

So there you have it: Always Ask Why, Don’t Rest on your Laurels, Adjust, Proactively Seek Information, and Test, Test, Test!  Five relatively simple strategies that allow SEOs young and old to ADAPT for success in the constantly changing world of SEO.

All of us have been there, we dig in and start troubleshooting, looking backwards, checking for things like:
1 – Did the client undo something? No.
2 – Is there less search volume for the keyword? No.
3 – Is Google caching the wrong page? No.
4 – Did a bunch of competitors do something to boost their sites? No.
5 – Did the client site get hacked with some kind of PHP injection cloaking scheme? No.
6 – are we in some kind of bad link neighborhood and got penalized? No.

UNIVERSAL SEARCH MONSTER gobbling up rankings?

Then you realize sometimes it is the UNIVERSAL SEARCH MONSTER gobbling up your rankings and leaving your #5, #8 or #10 ranking as a lifeless, useless, shadow of its former self.

The issue with universal search is that Google is changing it up all the time, for instance here is an SEO roundtable post on Google removing local results for SEO queries for the last 18 month or so that wasn’t the case.

Suddenly our same ranking for local queries has more value. the local results were gone.

Once Google incorporated local search results for words like “Philadelphia SEO company”, it immediately devalued our top ranking for that term because the 5 local results were above us (even though one of them was a Korean Man, 4 of the results were companies doing SEO). Depending on the day we’d be up there sometimes in the local and sometimes not.

The question you should be thinking, is how can I know when universal search changes are made and how do I determine the impact that that those changes had on rankings, clicks, and conversions?

You can use Raven or any SERP tracker that captures a copy of the Google/Yahoo/Bing results page to triangulate the data points and take a good educated guess. Here’s how.

STEP 1
Set up your analytics tool to alert you anytime conversions from a keyword drop by more than 25% over a 1 month period, this is quite easy with Google Analytics Intelligence (Beta)

I would recommend using no more than 20 or so keywords, at least in the beginning. You want to select only some of your top traffic driving keywords or you’ll end up with too many alerts sometimes for a word that drove 4 conversions last month and drove 3 this month – which if you have a site that has hundreds or thousands of conversions per month you’ll flood your own inbox. Rendering this kind of intelligence useless.

Note: use your own % decrease I just like 25% as a starter, in the same way 20 might not be the ideal number of keywords, but they are good places to start.

STEP 2
Once the alert catches a keyword that is not performing as well as it once did (in terms of driving traffic) do your regular checks as mentioned above, for changes the client didn’t tell you about, decreases in search volume, hacks, etc. If none of them are the culprit then move on to step 3.

STEP 3
You got a keyword that fits the criteria no one; this is where your SERP tracker that captures images of the actual results page becomes a critical feature in your reverse engineering of what happened. I would start looking back historically at the previous SERPS. This hopefully will illustrate if universal search has become more prevalent over time, which could cause your same ranking to not drive the traffic and sales it once did, even though the ranking is the same. This is precisely why analyzing rankings is sooo 2002. The ranking NEVER moves, the impact that ranking had just fell through the floor.

If you are only analyzing rankings you’ll never catch this.

One very important thing to keep in mind in this analysis is to use top converting keywords, not top traffic driving keywords. Why? Simple, take the word motorcycle, which is a HUGE universal search result.

If you had the #5 result a year ago you are probably on page 2 now, which will hurt traffic tremendously.

Should you go out and create a ton of new content, shoot videos, develop link bait strategies, etc to get back on page 1 for the word motorcycle? Probably not, if that keyword didn’t convert well for you. That is the big IF.

So be smart with it, don’t go out wasting your time, but when universal starts impacting rankings, traffic, and conversions you’ll need to get crackin’ and hopefully I’ve just given you some ways to battle the universal search monster.

• Yahoo SERPS will be powered by Microsoft’s search algorithm.
• Rather than managing Yahoo and MSN paid search accounts in two separate interfaces, the MSN adCenter interface will power Yahoo paid search accounts as well.
• By combining the Yahoo and MSN networks, market share is expected to grow to an estimated 150 million searchers, a whopping 62% increase in search volume (estimates provided by Yahoo).

Yahoo and MSN partnering in paid search is super exciting because, to be frank, both of the current interfaces and reporting capabilities leave much to be desired. For example, according to an email I received from Yahoo explaining the deal, one of the featured benefits will be having one interface in order to help achieve a better ROI, which leads me to item #1 in my wish list!

Wish #1: Revenue Tracking

I would like to know exactly how I will be able to achieve a better ROI when I’m now working with a platform that does not support revenue tracking (i.e. does not support ROI reporting)?

The Yahoo paid search interface reports quite nicely on Revenue and ROAS metrics:

The MSN Interface, however, does not report on neither revenue nor ROAS:

Unless MSN and Yahoo get their acts together and support e-commerce KPIs, we will have to pull revenue data from both Yahoo and MSN via Google Analytics. This makes our job harder, not easier. See below the three step process we will not have to repeat over and over again to measure revenue metrics.

Wish #2: Increased Capacity for Negative Keywords in Multiple Match Types.

According to the MSN adCenter learning center, the following restrictions are placed on using negative keywords:

• Negative keyword lists are limited to 1,022 characters. You can have up to 1,022 characters at the keyword level, ad group level and campaign level.
• Each negative keyword can contain up to 100 characters.
• Negative keywords or negative keyword phrases must be separated by commas.
• Including the commas, the entire negative keywords list cannot exceed 1,022 characters.

My main beef with the list above is the character limit. For example, I have a B2B client that offers a GIS and demographic mapping service. Here is an example of why a high volume of negative keywords is vital for this account:

• Data is unavailable only for certain years (2000-2011 projections, for example). As it happens, there are lots of queries like “1850 united states demographic data”. In AdWords, the easy fix was to negative match every year prior to 2000. For this particular account, I have around 12,000 characters in my campaign negatives. MSN’s negative keyword character limit would make this impossible.

Wish #3: Reporting by Day of Week

Google, Yahoo and MSN were all kind enough to allow us marketers to adjust our bids by hour and day of the week. While you may have a suspicion as to when your audience is searching the most, you’ll never know that for sure unless you harvest some data and really dive deep yourself. Google wraps this up in a beautiful little package by offering Day of Week reporting in the AdWords interface.

Superb! In just a few minutes, I’ve discovered that Mondays are my most expensive days and have the poorest conversion rates, while Wednesdays perform best and deserve the bulk of the budget. Now I just have to check on my MSN/Yahoo account to optimize! Day of week reporting is a simple enough feature. I mean, every engine definitely has it….right?

Wrong. Sorry folks. If you want to see which day of the week performed better on MSN/Bing/Yahoo in the future, you’ll have to do it the good old fashioned way. Pull the report by day, use Excel’s Weekday formula to change all of the dates to a number, find-replace that number to the correct day of the week, subtotal and pit those numbers against Revenue and ROAS numbers (see Wish #1).

Wish #4: Multiple Browser Capability

Microsoft never taught AdCenter how to play well with others. As I’m sure many of you have found, the AdCenter interface doesn’t work with Firefox. Or Chrome. Or Opera. Or Safari.

According to the W3schools’ January browser usage figures, IE only has a 36.2% market share. I would venture to guess IE usage hovers around 2% among search professionals. That means every time you want to login to your adCenter account, you must revert to a browser that you more than likely abandoned in November 2004.

Wish #5: Keyword Cost & Traffic Estimator Tool for Yahoo Search Marketing

Two of my favorite tools offered by Google are the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator. While these tools are not perfect (check out this experiment I did a few months back to test the accuracy of the Traffic Estimator), they are invaluable when launching a new account, since more often than not clients have budget restrictions that limit the volume and type of keywords they can target via PPC.

Let’s say, for example, that a client selling Repetto ballet flats wants to launch PPC accounts across Google, Yahoo and MSN with a monthly budget cap of $5,000. The Google Keyword Tool provides keyword suggestions that are most likely to drive relevant traffic for this client, based on historical Google search data:

Now I have a list to work with that will help me begin building the account. Once I have the list of keywords I’d like to target and I can use the Traffic Estimator to pull cost and traffic estimates.

This particular set of keywords can be expected to spend somewhere between $12 and $20/day. With a monthly cost estimate of between $360 and $600, these are feasible target keywords given the $5,000 monthly budget cap.

MSN offers the Microsoft adCenter Intelligence Excel Plugin, which provides similar data.

But, since this hypothetical client also wants to advertise on Yahoo, I basically have to cross my fingers and hope that these keywords will drive relevant traffic at a cost that fits in the budget. Since queries tend to differ across Google, Yahoo and MSN, this is clearly not an ideal strategy.

Wish #6: Search Query Reports that Include Conversion Data

Below is a look at the data available in the MSN adCenter Search query performance report. Simply put, MSN can do a lot better. A great start would be to add conversion data, which would make the data already in these reports much more actionable.

Wish #7: A More Accessible MSN adCenter Agency Interface

The Google AdWords Agency MCC makes switching back and forth between accounts seamless, which is a huge advantage when managing multiple accounts in terms of convenience.

In order to qualify for a MSN adCenter Agency Interface, SEER would have to pay the engine directly and invoice each individual client for their monthly spend. Because SEER does not work this way, we must log into each account manually. This is an inconvenience in general, not to mention that keeping updated lists of dozens and dozens of login/password credentials can become tedious. Another repercussion of having our clients pay the engines directly for their advertising spend is that our accounts do not qualify for premium service.

Wish #8: Support of Multiple Conversion Types

MSN adCenter only supports one conversion code per account. This is a major drawback when clients want to target and track multiple conversion actions because there is limited transparency into which keywords drive which types of conversions.

For example, let say that a hypothetical B2B client offers a marketing automation solution and wants to target and track the following conversion actions:

• Webinar Signups
• Contact us Form Completions
• Free Trial Signups
• Recorded Demo Signups
• Whitepaper Signups

With MSN, the same code would need to be installed on all of the confirmation URLs for the actions above, which doesn’t provide a whole lot of insight into which actions are the most successful.

Google, however, does support multiple conversion action tracking and provides corresponding conversion data down to the keyword level.

Wish #9: A (much) More Flexible Interface

The adCenter Interface leaves a lot to be desired in general. For example, maybe I just want to take a quick look at the top spending keywords in the account over the past 7 days. Not possible. I have to click through to each individual Campaign and Ad Group to see keywords – no account wide view is made available, forcing me to run a report, which is both tedious and time consuming.

As one of my coworkers put it: “Basically, please copy AdWords”. I couldn’t agree more, Crystal!

Wish #10: Superior Agency Support

Since SEER is an AdWords Qualified Company, we work with a team of dedicated account reps at Google. The nice thing about all of the Account Managers at SEER working with the same Google reps is that we are all on the same page with product updates, betas, and other general information that is passed along to us by our Google team.

With MSN, on the other hand, we work with various different reps for our PPC accounts, creating a disconnect in the information flow from MSN to SEER as an agency.

Do you have any particular improvements that you would like to see follow the Yahoo/MSN Search Alliance? Post them here!

A post recently flew out and received some attention about getting a link from the New York Times. This link was the end result of a linkbait exercise by the wordstream team, the proud owners of a shiny new link from a noteworthy national publication.

Links were the goal of the exercise, primarily one from a national publication. SEER would be fired by clients if we brought them zero sales, but let them know they were linked by The New York Times, WSJ, or another national publication.

This type of exercise creates a lot questions from clients about how many links their site gained this week/month. Companies that constantly ask how many links we’ve landed for them are companies that have a short history with SEER, because the focus on links is a performance indicator where 3 link that drive traffic & sales are better than 1000 links that don’t.

A linkbait plan with poor goals is also a poor use of time. In 2008, SEER had Friday linkbait/alcoholic refreshment linkbait brainstorm meetings that lasted all of about 2 weeks because we found they were a giant waste of time. They produced a few ideas, but there were several other more productive routes to get links that provided solid traffic that also converted.

Linkbait that creates links but no traffic or conversions is like fishing and constantly having your bait stripped from the line.

True story, SEER recently had a client that received a link from The New York Times. Within a few days, this link was buried in the site beneath hundreds of new articles. We saw no uptick in traffic and no increase in sales. For SEO purposes, I would have taken a link from a subpar mommy blog in exchange for the NYT link.

Creating a plan for linkbait is not the first step to take in linkbuilding efforts. Unless there is a great case for jumping into a linkbait, talking with your client will provide far better results. Some of the GREATEST links you can achieve for clients are through using what your clients already have, but looking at it from a different perspective.

Time and time again, we ask clients in depth questions about items that would go unnoticed if they were to try & get links on their own (and hopefully they don’t read that they need backlinks and go out & buy 5000 directory links:).

- I don’t need to know names, but what universities did your VPs attend?

- What goes on at your offices that is unique?

- What are some companies you have worked for/with in the past where you still have a good relationship?

- You sell a lot of items. What would you be willing to give away?

How did our client get a link from About.com? Find out where their employees have previously worked.

How did our client get a link from 3 of the top 20 magazines in the US (that drove traffic & sales)? Find products your client can give away & write them.

How do I get a link from an ivy league school? Ask where your clients went to school, where their bosses went to school, where the CEO went to school, where their interns go to school.

These are some basic questions that create TRAFFIC, LEADS and SALES which are some pretty typical performance indicators. Without asking detailed questions and taking an interest in activities inside & outside the business, these achievable linking opportunities would not be uncovered.

Linkbait has a place in SEO, but our clients don’t pay the bills with links from the New York Times that don’t bring traffic & sales.

The great thing when you are dealing with a company that does solely focus on SEO or PPC (at least in the case of SEER), is that we are committed to pointing potential clients in the right direction (the one that gives them RESULTS), whether that is focusing on SEO or PPC (with SEER or without), or another means of advertising outside of SEER. It’s certainly a tough call, but when you’re in the trenches of search day in and day out you know what type of clients will and will not succeed and let’s be honest, who wants to take a project on that you have that “gut” feeling from the start may fail? (Check out one of Wil’s latest posts for more on Avoiding Client SEO Failures)

So, how do you convince a client who is dead set on an SEO Campaign that, at this moment, PPC is their best approach?

Communicate you are PROTECTING their downside!

Often times when a client is approaching you for an SEO campaign, the thought of engaging in PPC instead scares them.

From a financial standpoint, investing in an SEO may seem like a better solution for a potential new client; they look at SEO as a 12-month investment that they no longer pay for after the contract expires but continue to reap the benefits from.

And at initial glance, PPC appears to have a higher ONGOING price tag – there is the ad-spend, the agency management fee, potentially a setup fee, landing page development fees, etc.

However, what happens if you are dealing with a company who has ZERO online presence or better yet, one that is introducing a new product/service?

If you are anything like the SEER team, taking a (educated) guess that you are choosing the correct terms to optimize a site around based solely on volume, relevancy, etc.for a brand new business/product/service does NOT sound like a good idea .

Why? Because what happens when you get your client all page one rankings and the conversions DON’T COME IN?

Well, here’s the other million dollar question that now your client will be asking YOU: Where are the customers?

So, to avoid the “Where are the customers” question, turn the tables on the client in the discovery stage and push them down the PPC path (But again, do so by communicating you are PROTECTING their downside!).

Use PPC to TEST what terms ACTUALLY do drive the conversions!

And don’t just test the terms haphazardly – Structure your PPC account in the same way you would be driving organic traffic to the clients’ site.

1. Set up a unique Campaign for every page you will likely target in your SEO campaign.

2. Your ad groups will then house the terms you will target to each unique page.

3. Your “landing pages” should be the actual page on the site that you would optimize the targeted terms for.

4. Finally, ensure your campaign settings best match an “SEO” campaign. For instance, target the US (assuming that is your market); target Google Search only (vs. Google Search & Search Partners), etc.

Granted, there will be uncontrollable variances to how organic and paid traffic perform; however, wouldn’t it be great to gather statistically significant data for a client on terms that are PROVEN to (or not to) work! Not to mention, imagine how much more at ease the client will be throughout the SEO campaign knowing that there they already generated some new customers through the PPC tests and are confident they will achieve the ROI from SEO they desire!

Once you have your statistically significant data to base your decision off of, you can then push forward with an SEO campaign that you have CONFIDENCE in will drive the results your client desires. And as long as your PPC account is returning a positive ROI, you may have just helped a potential client grow their business exponentially just by doing some smart marketing research (and hey, picked up a PPC client for yourself!).

And if your statistically significant PPC data leads you to have the tough conversation with you potential client that “this is not going to drive the results you need,” don’t you think your potential client will thank you (and who knows, maybe even refer you to other potential clients) for not wasting their money OR time?

As my colleague Bonnie mentioned in a previous blog, Want to Avoid a Million Dollar mistake, use PPC for the benefits it brings – Do the research (fairly quickly) for your potential client before you waste their time (and yours) and money!

I’ll be speaking at SES NYC, SXSW on major client screw ups, and Pubcon South all in the next few months, come say hello!

As I set down over lunch with the guys and girl above, I started thinking about what I could share, given that my last post on hiring difficulties was well received I figured I’d write something that combines both. It begins with story of one of our biggest clients, who I at one time turned away…

I turned this client away the first time they came to us, I had met with the owner over breakfast. He found us through a search and had done a ton of research on what to ask a potential SEO firm. During our breakfast it became obvious that his expectations for how search worked and what it could contribute to his bottom line were off from how I understood them. So at the end of our conversation, I told him that we wouldn’t be able to work on these projects because I didn’t honestly feel like I could set realistic expectations. BOY WAS THAT ALMOST a MISTAKE – 2-3 people would not have jobs at SEER if he walked, but instead he didn’t…

He called me the next day and said…”you were the only guy who wouldn’t promise me they could give what I wanted, and instead took time to educate me on what to expect, you tell me what I can expect.” As a result, he asked me to come in and set his teams expectation on what search can do, which I did, and sure enough over the course of our 3 year relationship, its been fruitful for both sides, and this company is one of my favorites to look back at how we were able to help – the relationship has grown over the years, and we have had a very honest and smooth working relationship, they challenge us, we challenge them but all for the sake of growing their bottom line. So with that story behind us, lets get started on how to not take on jobs DOOMED for failure from the beginning – and if you do fail how to handle it.

Avoid jobs with unrealistic revenue expectations

Search marketing, social media marketing, conversion optimization, whatever it is that you do, you MUST avoid clients with unrealistic expectations, none of your businesses create miracles. You must also admit to yourself that you don’t walk on water, and there’s always a chance for failure.

It is part of your job to do the math with your prospective clients to at least give you and them an idea on what a goal you should both be shooting for.
In every initial new business conversation, ask the person on the other end of the line for their average sale value and a rough idea on margins. Starting the conversation there allows you to easily do some mental math while determining if the expectations are realistic.
Focus on how your client makes money – look at the searching universe if things don’t match up don’t take on the project, because even if you kill it in SEO they’re probably going to have a negative ROI and a negative sentiment about your company.

Want to avoid a major screw up later down the road?? Don’t fear letting a prospective client know that the numbers don’t add up, and as such they should seek another company.

Sometimes clients will say “don’t worry about our profitability, we’ll handle that, you bring the traffic we will worry about how to convert it.” We’ve had clients say that, and that is 100% fine with us – if they end up upside down on ROI later in the project we know we tried to help them avoid that reality in the first place.

Agree on success metrics before contracts are signed

We had a client for whom we increased their traffic 3x (yes they were already getting thousands of visitors) yet in spite of that they weren’t entirely sure we weren’t doing all we could to grow their business. I KNEW we were.

This was my fault, I should have done a better job up front of making sure we both were in agreement on what exactly success was. For me success was returning a positive ROI, for them, it was a positive ROI but more important was how many links did we build last week/month.

We ultimately had to let them go because the way they looked at success was obviously different than how we did. I am not saying they were wrong, but just not the right fit for us.

Assuming your upfront due diligence is done and you agree on what success is, and for some reason you just can’t get a great ROI at 6 or 9 months in, the first step is to admit to the client that you see that they have an upside down on ROI. Get the elephant in the room on the table immediately. At the very least you’ll earn their trust that even in the face of bad news you have the cojones to admit it. See below for some ideas on how to address failure with clients. By getting this issue on the table you give even the nicest clients the ability to now talk openly about the obvious failure. This doesn’t make them feel bad for bringing the obvious points up. When your results aren’t good you should never have to wait for the client to say something first, NEVER.

Don’t show your best hand

Why do you think might not be the best idea to lead in with your best case studies?
Prospective clients who ask for a case study may see an example for a site out there you were able to increase traffic by 10x and conversions by 8x and added $500k in gross sales.

Some people when they see those kinds of results think its typical and not an exception, so when you finish the project with a traffic increase of 80% and conversion increase by 55% with $180k in additional gross sales, that might feel like a disappointment to them.
If this happens, it is your fault.

You got the biz by showing your client your best case scenario of all time, setting their expectation that these results are not always typical is one way you can address this. Personally I’d prefer to show a prospective client the best, middle, worst case scenarios giving them a more balanced view of how SEO can work for them and outline why (if possible) those results happened.

Remove “magic server pixie dust” thinking in SEO

Remember this commercial from IBM? It’s time for clients to wise up to the fact that crappy links typically ain’t gonna get you that leg up on your competitors, we should be the people pushing that message. This means in the sales process you should be educating your client that you are going to need them, A LOT to be successful in building high quality links.
You are going to need budgets, access to project managers, give-a-ways, etc.

No project sucks more than the one where the client just thought they’d pay you, you’d sprinkle some dust and then they’d wake up with money coming out the whazoo.
Ok, so now that you’ve done all the work to set the clients expectations, congratulations. The real sad question is what happens when you do all the hard work spending night and day optimizing, link building, and the results never come?

Typically there are a few reasons why ROI can be in the pits – here’s the three most typical scenarios and how we deal with them at SEER.

If the ROI sucks because the client is slow

Solution – cut their monthly payments up to half (unless you bill hourly) – most clients know when they are the cause for the slowdown in results. But if their slow down is preventing you from doing a large part of what you need to do to help them be successful, it’s a good idea to cut their monthly payments, especially since you have less work to do and parts of your project are in a holding pattern. It may not be half, but you should show some kind of sign that says I am not comfortable billing you for work I am probably not doing.

If you don’t take this approach, you’ll likely keep billing them and they may keep paying, UNTIL someone asks “what we are getting for this”, which is not a good conversation to have once you’ve been put in defensive mode. Taking an “F you pay me” approach to a slow client is a guaranteed way to get the boot.

If the ROI sucks because you are unable to get rankings

This happens, SEO’s hate to admit it, but good ones aren’t and we’re no exception, yes at times SEER has not gotten the results I hoped for in the timeframe I hoped and sometimes it was not the clients fault. We may have just needed more time than expected at the onset of the project.

I strongly believe in the Vince Lombardi quote that goes something like this:

“We didn’t lose, we just ran out of time”

That’s my mantra. Personally I feel like I rarely lose because I’ll never give up, that does require patience on the part of your client. Again if you’ve done a great job of setting expectations up front and being honest, you’ll have explained to them that results come at different stages, so they should be expecting that late results is always a risk you take with SEO.

Any SEO that says they bat 1.000 and have never had a job that at times looked like a failure is probably not challenging themselves with difficult projects or they are just not being honest.

This has happened to me maybe 10 times in my SEO career. In every instance I proactively called the client, and said just this:

“When we sat down at the table and shook hands, you knew that I couldn’t guarantee rankings or results, yet you trusted us in the goal of helping you grow your traffic and leads through search. While we have some small victories to point to we are not at the level that both you and I expected. As a result we are going to halt your payments for 2-4 months (depending on how far away we are) while we are still working 100% full steam ahead on your project. Assuming we get the rankings (and I believe we will) we can make up the payments on the end when you can see a tangible impact.”

Clients are shocked when I make these calls, but it is just the right thing to do. That is how I’d want to be treated, and you would too.

If the ROI sucks due to less search volume / tighter margins

This is one of those things you as an SEO can’t do a whole lot about, but to maybe stretch out your payments for a month or two as a sign of client solidarity, letting your client know that you know they are getting the squeeze and that you are in this with them as a long term partner.

Good clients don’t abuse this, so make it your job to find the GOOD clients. GOOD clients also know that there is nothing you, as an SEO can do if less people search for their target keywords or if they have to cut prices, thus throwing off your ROI projections.

If the project sucks because there’s communication problems

So this is again your fault, unless you can point back to documented instances of you setting a clients expectation over and over again. Every time I’ve seen a major communications “F Up” at SEER I took responsibility for it, and our team does too. As such we are constantly working on process improvement, with the idea being that every time a client has an expectation we didn’t fulfill that its either our fault for not communicating or its MY FAULT for bringing in a client who I didn’t work on setting expectations with properly. Once we own the problem we own the solution – and that’s what we do, look back at the communication failure and figure out how can our processes be improved. If the process can not be improved then we know that we need to chat with the client about why they were wrong, if the process can be improved we let the client know that they have exposed an area of weakness in how we manage projects / communicate and let them know when they can expect to see an improvement.

SEO is an unpredictable business, we all know that, and I think that even clients (the good ones at least) are starting to realize that too. Good clients are not breaking backs in 2 months asking where’s my top ranking anymore.

Maybe I took the long way to just saying, just follow the rule you learned in the sandbox at age 5, treat others the way you want to be treated, and when tough business decisions arise – you’ll always make the right decision.

Admittedly most of this post revolves around ROI & Communication but there are several things I didn’t have time to go into like retention, having a great team, firing bad clients, etc that also help lead to SEO success.

I hope these tips help you avoid SEO failure from the get go, and for more on how to avoid colossal F Up’s – come see our session at SXSW.

I was curious as to why, and when doing some keyword research, I decided to try something really broad and test different keywords to see how this changed the graph in Insights.  We knew Insights broad matched, but hadn’t quite realized just how much this affected the graph and trend lines.

Taking a look at a broad term like “insurance,” you can really see how the broad match can cause a discrepancy.   I compared “insurance” to “car insurance” and “health insurance.”  Now, since most people are specific when searching for insurance, I expected to see specific keywords having a higher search volume.  “Car insurance” has a much higher exact match search volume.

However, looking at the three terms in Google Insights, you see that “insurance” has a significantly higher line on the graph.   That is because Insights broad matches, and a broad term like “insurance” is matched to so many other keywords, including both “car insurance” and “health insurance.”  You can’t assume that “insurance” is more popular than “car insurance.”  Car insurance is search for more, but insurance appears more popular because it’s broad matched.

You can choose to enter the keywords in quotes to phrase match, but since you can’t get an exact trend, you can’t really compare the exact search volume from the Adwords Keyword tool to the trend lines in Google Insights.

Going back to the snowboarding keywords.  While “snowboarding equipment” has a higher search volume, “snowboarding gear” is more popular because gear is probably broad matched to more terms than equipment is.

Of course, it’s always best to use multiple tools and use them as a guide.  One thing to take away from a trend like this is the importance of researching for variations of keywords.  Insights shows you 10 top searches and 10 rising searches, but if you download a csv of the data you can see a longer list of the top searches for both terms.   It can help you research other keywords that are contributing to the popularity of a certain term.   And maybe even help you see how relevant the terms are that are being matched to your keyword and why one term is more popular than another.