Originally written 6-26-08, I am just now posting this due to the fact that there’s an update I’ll be posting soon. Look for it coming soon, this is the longer version of the post that ended up on feedfront.

Last year I had a client who was the largest company in their space, yet they consistently ranked on the bottom of page 2 for their main HOME RUN term no matter how hard they tried. Then they brought us on board and we were able to help get them to #5 at their peak, which I was happy about but NOT thrilled, as they are the leader in their space.
The company holding the #1 spot was getting the most garbage geocities-esq links and I mean to the tune of thousands. Most were not on theme and were on low value sites, it just took a quick second to look (I use linkdiagnosis.com to see competitors links and their pageranks) and BOOM you could see the low quality stuff.

Interestingly enough, a year later I had the opportunity to work with the company in the #1 spot (our old client’s competitor) on some architecture work. We were referred into this company for a very small project, and I was curious how this company was able to rank so well over my old client with no content on their homepage, so I took a short term consulting agreement.

What I found was SAD, SAD, SAD.

A top agency was doing nothing but buying links and a TON of them. This is a highly competitive highly spammed area!

I wonder…if the client who we got to #5 at their peak came back, I KNOW exactly how to get them ranked well – buy those same / similar links as the company who has held the #1 spot for almost 2 years, but that is not what we are supposed to do right? So I won’t, too much of a short term gain.

I hate that crappy feeling I get in my gut when I go very cautious on link acquisition to help ensure that our clients don’t get in any trouble, yet the obvious spammer keeps buying and keeps retaining their high rankings.

I want to be as on the right side of what Matt Cutts says is right as he does here in this interview.

But it just sucks to see someone cheat and stay at #1 (now in all honesty both sites were 100% relative to the query, so their bought links doesn’t hurt the user experience) for almost 2 years and to have an inside look at how they got it and maintain it. It is sheer link numbers on low quality sites, there is no linkbaiting, no widget development, no press releases, no useful tools, no firefox plugins, no coupons! Just hundreds if not thousands of bought links on very low value, low quality domains.

Looking at this insider view, many of you may wonder if my tactics would change. Well, first I know that changing my tactics to be even more aggressive on bought links would likely result in slightly higher rankings for our clients. But with that said, I make it an important part of my strategy to develop long term value for every client.

I think the short term gain is like using steroids in professional sports…you know that at any time the shoe will drop but choose to keep cheating, which is fine as long as the client knows the risks – if they do get caught. Instead of spending all my time figuring out how to get the lowest quality links for now I am going to do everything I can to build systems to better identify the highest quality links the ones that are going to take time to get. I guess it makes me sleep easier at night at #5 that will last for the long haul than the #1 that may work for 20 days, 20 months or 20 years but will eventually fail.

We don’t have our highest quality linking process worked out 100% yet, but the blueprint is a beauty and I’ll be sharing a part of it at SES Chicago on my presentation on advanced link building.

Darn, 15 minutes ago I was just referred to a company that competes with a client of ours whose SEO campaign just wrapped up about 3 months ago. They are in maintenance mode, maybe a couple hours a month to keep an eye on things. All of a sudden this new opportunity comes to us, as usual it is referred to us by someone that works at the prospects company, so he’s way vested in picking a good SEO company. For the record, I would never proactively go after an old client’s competitor, but this one was referred in.

This put me in an awkward position, and one that I think most business people wouldn’t worry about, but I do. The minute I found out the industry they were in my jaw dropped, for the first time in our 6 years we were referred into a direct competitor. Something immediately felt bad in my gut, I felt like I was cheating, even though the client and SEER have a very minor relationship on SEO, we are running their SEM. I told the new company that I looked at it as my job to kick their butts, for our existing client. How could I have spent the last 12 months trying to kick a company’s butt to only turn around and try to help them kick my old client’s butt?

Then the business side kicks in and makes me say, wait a second. This might come back to bite us 5-10 years from now if I keep this feeling of dedication to past SEO clients. So I talked about it with one person from our team, and decided I would leave it up to the client.

SEE the beauty of calling our existing client to tell them (which I already did) was:
1- They a REALLY fair people who would not tell us NOT to take it unless they REALLY did want us to
2- We are still working with them on SEM and they are very pleased with our team’s work
3- They have referred us 2 new opportunities and have been a reference on numerous calls for new prospects
4- I would imagine that it displays SEER’s ethics by running this by them FIRST for their feedback before we make a decision

I left the call saying, if you tell us not to take this we wont!

I guess what drives me crazy here is that the business side says, how can you turn down a big job for a new client to just do 2-3 hours a month for maintenance for an existing client? The karma side says, even if the SEO project is small, they’ve been great to us, and deep down I want to see every one of our clients kick their competitors asses, and helping someone whom I wanted to put out of business 15 months ago, just doesn’t feel right.

What are your thoughts? I am about to just call the old client and say, we were with you 15 months ago and we’re with you now, and turn away this new opportunity. Our pipeline is good and deep down it doesn’t feel right. On the flipside, am I not them being fair to our company by not solidifying new business even if it competes with a client we are basically done SEO work for and are still running their SEM?

I know from time to time we talk about ethical SEO as being tactics but I think it also gets into how you treat your clients and how upfront and honest with them you are about campaigns, and yes, even new business with a competitor.

Ok this post will sound angry because I am angry!

We have a client who is VERY web savvy & runs an awesome business. They are not a mom and pop, these people are very smart Internet marketers.

They recently got a proposal from a company who was offering VIDEO SEO. Luckily because we have built trust with our client, they often run these new proposals by us for a review before they spend money. (trust is the key to building a low stress agency)

In looking at the proposal I am ashamed that people like this exist in our space.
Lets get to the nitty gritty

1 – Within the second line of the proposal they tout their “proprietary video SEO platform”. Bleh! Then they say that this tool consistently outperforms traditional SEO companies. (Seriously you are calling out traditional SEO in your proposal)? I’d love to see them quantify this statement, but they don’t. We’ll get to that later.

Moral of the story Don’t fall for “proprietary”, few company’s proprietary tools mean anything for you.

Content Creation - how much?

It appears that this company will create the videos, OK cool, I like this! Companies often don’t have time to produce the videos themselves, this is valuable.
After video production they will upload the videos to the major search engines, and develop titles and descriptions for every video (although they never tell you how many videos they are going to create). For the cost, I just can’t imagine that they are going to create a TON of high quality videos for less than 5k.

Uploading the videos is a task and one that they should be paid for, however we all have heard of tubemogul right? If you go there you can upload videos to most of the major platforms, how much more value does their “proprietary upload tool” add? This is a legit question that should be asked and answered.

The monthly fee

They are charging between 3-4k per month for optimization of the video. This entails monitoring where the videos rank on video search engines and regular search engines.
They don’t list out which search engines…so while it might be great to report on rankings in AOL Video, or MySpace Video, Veoh, Viddler, etc the only one that is going to really matter is really YouTube right?

The monthly “work”

They plan on adjusting titles and descriptions monthly, ok, that’s good but after 4-5 months, how many more title and description tweaks can one person make?
They plan on “maintaining optimization rules and parameters to adjust for real time changes in market state.”
HUH?

Can someone tell me what this means and how it relates to me paying 3,000-4,000/month?

Reporting

Like any good SEO firm they should provide reporting. They do.
They report on keyword rank, monthly.
Keyword rank, is fine but this client needs account signups – how about you track down to something beyond rankings, this client will not do well if they get rankings that don’t lead to real value.

How about you track down to:
account signups
video engagement
embeds
comments
subscribers to a channel
YouTube lets you analyze when people typically lose interest in a video, how about analyzing that to help make better videos and understand how people interact?!

The fact that they rank #5 in YouTube for some keyword means NOTHING unless that ranking does something for their business.

Ok, so then I looked at the proposed keywords, ohh here we go again, target the long tail only to create easy successes!
1 word phrases – 0
2 word phrases – 4
3 word phrases – 22
4 word phrases – 34
5 word phrases – 17
6 word phrases – 12
7 word phrases – 3

Now without divulging too much info – this clients two biggest terms get searched for 400k and about 200k times per month respectively, that is just for 2 two-word phrases – they already have page 1 natural rankings for both (by the time I wrote this the slipped back to page 2, time to get back to work).

With the video SEO company, not 1 of their 80+ targeted keywords according to Google Keyword Tool was searched for more than 2,000 times last month.

Now if this client was a B2B client who made $1,500 or $15,000 per sale then long tail would make more sense, but they are nowhere NEAR that, so they need a combo of tail + volume.

So in conclusion – here’s the big takeaways I’ve been preaching FOREVER about how to NOT get ripped off.

1 – Their proposal starts off with proprietary – just don’t fall for this
2 – The company doesn’t rank well for video seo, or video search engine optimization (yet they say they in their proposal that they “are the world’s leader in video search optimization” it was the FIRST line in their proposal). If you are going to make that claim you should be able to back it up with a ranking on the first 3 pages at least
3 - I typed in their company name and video SEO into a Google search – no video of theirs showed up in universal search (which they say is the big value they bring)
4 – I type in their company name into YouTube and didn’t find a channel, and found only one video they authored under their name it had 21 views, no ratings. Fishy.
5 – The keywords picked out were horrible, low hanging fruit keywords which they knew they could get rankings for with little work.
6 – They are not offering to proactively analyze anything other than rankings.

Luckily we saved this client from making a 40,000 mistake! not to say that video SEO is not valuable, but the way this company pitched the service, it wasn’t.

Automate, save time, fill it with more business. While many businesses are looking for the easiest ways to save time, there are some activities we are all guilty of that can suck time out of our days. Here’s 5 time wasters I have encountered during my short SEO life and a few remedies:

1. Continually checking rankings: This applies to the SEO company and the client. Rankings can change multiple times per day. How a keyword ranks in the afternoon might be different from the morning, or if the search is personalized. Rankings can change because Google says so. I am only immediately concerned about rankings when ALL keywords have fallen off the map. Unless that happens, most times they fall back into the balances.

From a client’s standpoint, some might be concerned (or totally freak out) if a keyword falls from #8-#10. Conveying in the beginning of an SEO campaign that movements will occur and taking immediate action is not the right solution will save an SEO company hours of calls and emails. The main point is to focus on conversions. Employees are not paid with rankings, so lets all concentrate on what keeps us in business.

2. Especially Needy Clients: I have a cat named Sandwich. She is a polite cat, but constantly needs attention. Whether I’m sleeping, watching ESPN, checking email, or trying to shut the door to go out running, Sandwich is there and wants to be pet. While trust is a factor, a client that calls 5 times a day over rankings or just to see what progress is being made is not worth their weight in gold. Save your time and filter out working with clients like Sandwich.

3. Google Reader: This is a great way to quickly review numerous updates in one place. I started out adding a dozen SEO blogs, then I added my clients blogs, then blogs related to my clients, then added a few feeds from search.twitter, then added a Craigslist RSS feed for real estate in my neighborhood, then decided to add the feed for sport results from my alma mater, then have news coming in about Aerosmith tour dates and possible Zeppelin reunion tour news, and then…..

Things can quickly get out of hand in Google Reader. Maybe it’s time to clean house and get rid of a lot of personal news and old client feeds that are still flowing in.

4. Doing something is always better than nothing. Whether working out, fighting global warming (is your SEO agency prepared for global warming?), or linking, doing something is ALWAYS better than nothing.

The best ideas, linkbait, heck, office cubicle design are just plans until some action is taken. Getting five directory links is 100% more effective than coming up with a great linkbait that will never fly with your client. Creating a plan to go after links is a 100% waste of time if it is never implemented. Save your time and spend time on tasks that will provide something in the end.

5. Meetings: Like #4, having a meeting is completely unproductive unless an agenda is followed, questions are answered, and future steps are outlined. Meetings usually involve a minimum of 3-4 people, if not upwards of a dozen. How much is each persons time worth that is attending the meeting. Should they be there? Can three people make the meeting and recap it for the rest of the office? Time and resources are limited. Schedule meetings with the right amount of people and go in knowing what will be discussed.

Have any other obvious time drains?