There Should
Be More to your SEO Consultant Than Rankings
By: David Leonhardt
Perhaps one
of the biggest misconceptions in SEO is that ranking at Google and Yahoo
is all that counts in search engine optimization. Potential clients come
to me with a single goal: "Get me a top-ten ranking at Google." Some will
also mention MSN, and a few will rhyme off a list of search engines and
want to rank well at the top 200 of them. It is time to separate fact
from fiction. Yes, your SEO consultant can get you a top-ten placement
at Google.
But...
• If the placement
is for "dirty brown shoes", it probably won't help your shoe store one
bit, even if I get you the first place ranking. Few people are actually
searching for that term.
• Being number
ten might not help much either, depending on the term. People searching
for "Essential Nectar liquid vitamins", will probably click on the first
result they see, or at least on one of the "above-the-fold" results that
do not require scrolling. On the other hand, someone searching for "liquid
vitamins" might check through two pages of results to familiarize herself
with the options available. • If your title tag reads like a cheap list
of search terms, it will not be enticing. For instance, if it reads: "vitamins,
liquid vitamins, multivitamins, multi-vitamins", you might skip over it
in favor of the next result that reads "Liquid vitamins from the Liquid
Vitamin Supplements Store". If your description tag is a mess, people
will more likely skip over your listing, even if it does rank number one,
in favor of one that sounds like what they are looking for.
Google and others
use the description tag usually when the term searched for is found in
it, so make sure to include your key search terms in a description tag
that actually reads well. I recently responded to a forum question, which
went something like this: My site ranks number one for this term at this
engine. The term is searched this many times per day, and the engine has
this percentage market share. Can I expect this many visitors?
That's not an
SEO challenge; that's a math problem: searches x market share = visitors
Beyond Your
SEO Consultant's Control?
I responded
with a few factors that override mathematics in the SEO game, including
the site's title tag and description tag, as well as whether the term
lends itself to scrolling. I also pointed out that it depends on the title
tags and description tags of the competition, too. Another factor that
makes predicting traffic difficult is the abandonment factor – how many
people click on none of the results because they get interrupted or confused,
or abandon the search for a new one because they find themselves off-topic
or searching too broadly. It also depends on how many sponsored links
there are and how they are marked. Often at Yahoo and Lycos, for example,
there are so many ads that the average searcher might never scroll a screen
or two to see the organic (natural) results.
And, of course,
it also depends on the color of the walls in the room the searcher is
clicking from, the weather outside and how well they slept last night.
But there is little you can do about that. What you can do is to work
with your SEO consultant to choose the most effective search terms for
your business and make sure he develops a title tag and description tag
that sell to both humans and the search engines. Then make sure he is
monitoring not just the rankings for your key search terms, but also the
description used by each of the search engines. A good ranking at Google
and Yahoo is just one measure of your SEO consultant's success. A more
complete evaluation is that he is your partner in building long-term,
targeted traffic.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
David Leonhardt
is an freelance Ottawa seo consultant and a Ottawa website marketing consultant.
Pick up a copy of his ebook on SEO tips at http://www.seo-writer.net/books/seo-book.html. |
