We know some SEO companies who offer article submission services. They submit articles for you to build links and brand awareness – all well and good so far. Now you’d think that hiring a service like this, a copywriting service, they would research and write the article – oh no! They get you to write your copy, then they ‘optimise’ it and submit it for you. Let’s look at a breakdown of the time involved:

Research and Writing – 3-6 hours.
Optimisation – 1/2 hour tops
Submission – 1 hour

So you spend a day putting your content together, they add a keyword link and an optimised title and submit it to their favoured syndication services, which quite possibly are free. You’ve done the hard part but get charged the full fee – in this case over £500.

SEOs like this amount to consultants, but they haven’t been hired to do a consultants job – they’ve been hired to do the legwork. Make sure of this distinction before you hand over your cash.

A marketer based abroad may not have the same grasp of your business as someone from the UK. Cultural differences, language differences or simply not being familiar with your product could turn your job into a numbers game. Make sure whoever is working on your account knows your business and your aims.

If your work has been outsourced abroad, you’re never going to get a direct line to anyone actually working on the account. You’ll have to go through an account manager – this is normal for a lot of companies, but be aware that the wait time on any of your questions could be longer than if your developer were sat in the next office.

If you’ve paid for copywriting, make sure someone with an excellent grasp of the english language carries it out. We’ve seen websites where the owner has had to re-write the copy themselves because what came back from their web company was so poor.

Finally, if your web company outsources work, rest assured they’re making a tidy profit. What costs you £500 is probably sold on for £100 to a country where wages are far lower. Don’t pay over the odds for your service.

Companies that offer submission to ‘Over 100 Search Engines!’ however are pulling your leg. Yes, we’re sure they really do submit your site to over 100 search engines, but how many of those search engines will get you traffic? How many are even based in the UK? Mass submission is simply not worth the effort and since it’s done by automation, not worth the (invariably large) fee.

These are also software-generated.

See below.

A closer look at an SEO report revealed it to be remarkably similar to something a bit of software produces. Identical, in fact. You type in your web address and your keywords and it produces a multi-page ‘report’ on how ‘effective’ your website is. It looks at things like the Meta Tags, headers and code. Let’s have a think about this:

You can look at a website and see if the Meta Tags, headers and code are alright.

What exactly is this report telling you? That you need to improve the Meta Tags, headers and code. Well yes, we saw that by looking.

Your site isn’t effective for 70 keywords. To be honest, your 5-page company website is never going to be effective for 70 keywords. Please choose 10 and try again.

If you’ve commissioned this report that tells you what your SEO company have worked out just by using their eyes, you’ll then have to commission the SEO company to make the changes. You’ve paid upfront to be told you need more work – you have been hooked in.

Finally, how much did you pay for this report? We’ve seen companies charging the best part of £1000.

SEO reports are all well and good – after all, you need to know what’s wrong with your website. But please please please don’t pay hundreds of pounds for an automated bit of text with your web address pasted in. An SEO report should take into account your business aims, your target market and all sorts of other on-site factors you can only see by looking. Hire an SEO who asks you questions, finds out about your company and actually writes the report themselves.

But bidding software means that once a campaign is set up and running, no-one has to look at it again. As long as the targets are being hit why would they? The client is happy and the management fees keep coming in, for ‘work’ that’s completely automated.

Unfortunately this ‘hands-off’ approach to your Ad campaign means a shoddy job can remain a shoddy job for months without anyone realising. Take a campaign we saw recently – the client was spending £11 per sale and wondered if we could do better. A quick look inside revealed that about 4 keywords were converting, out of a total 100-odd keywords. We simply paused the offenders and brought the cost per sale down to under £5.

Of course, the client had been paying someone else a ‘management’ fee this whole time. Someone who had obviously never looked inside the account.

Needless to say they were fired.

An SEO, Yesterday

In 1967, the Beatles fell under the spiritual influence of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. A gnomic font of Eastern wisdom, trailing a long white beard and dressed in simple robes he fit the role of ‘guru’ perfectly. Only when he started trying to bone members of the Beatles’ entourage in a decidedly less-than-holy way and suggesting that the Beatles renounce their worldly possessions (“cash”, to you or I) and more or less hand them over to him to spread his message did they smell a rat. Ringo got out quicker: his wife didn’t like the food.

SEO has it’s fair share of guru figures – people who can command high fees on the back of their reputation and whose every utterance is clung onto by a host of would-be acolytes. A lot of these reputations ain’t worth shit.

The main feature of a guru is the convergence of two things: an ostensibly compelling message and a great way of communicating that message (a third might be ‘great beard!’) At some point in our lives, we’ve all been convinced by a guru figure to accept some apparent truism or other. Normally this consists of wrapping up some complicated moral/financial/political system into a shiny, eminently quotable nugget. Think of “no-one ever got sacked for buying IBM”… “all you need is love”… “all political careers end in failure.” You could name a dozen more (three hundred and fifty-odd more if you have a motivational calendar).

Aphorism is a key weapon in the quest for guruhood. Lots of people might have the same message, but the person with the best quote wins. So it is with SEO.

“Big name” SEOs often come attached to some Grand Unified Theory or other – a defining phrase which they kind of lay claim to. It might be “linkbaiting” or “black hat seo” or “grey hat seo” or “strategic link building” or “it’s all about content” or “chase the long tail.” There are lots of variations, but once an SEO has developed an association with a phrase then there is a relatively well-worn path for them to tread. They don’t even have to really document what they are doing. Just cast out a few hints and let imagination do the rest.

Firstly, an inevitably, their blog becomes more central to their being. Although they’ve probably been blogging for months or years (often to help their clients, but shhhh – we won’t talk about that) they suddenly receive a namecheck from another guru. Instantly, their blog becomes A Hot Topic because it is seen that this person has An Angle. Suddenly, they are the name to drop into conversation. If you’re having a slow blogging day, you can check out what they are saying and write something along the lines of “Guru X had a great thought today…” as if you are really plugged in. Good writers, or course, thrive on this. Assuming that Guru X is a good writer, he can now conjure up more or less any thought and people will be ready to prostrate themselves before his wisdom.

At some point, this reputation leads to speaking duties or a high-profile move to a big SEO company or a “I’m setting up my own consultancy” moment, all of which causes a big flurry of excitable, gossip-page style speculation about what this all means for the industry. The blogging and the speaking become almost constant. Guru X is now an Industry Authority. If you want the best SEO, you’d better approach his firm.

Of course, chances are that Guru X isn’t actually doing the work any more. He’s too busy attending expos, getting photographed with other Gurus and blogging about how they shared a beer at SXSW and enjoyed a ’round table’. Meanwhile, the real work is getting carried out by acolytes – low level grunts picking up titbits from the master’s table while he’s gallavanting around the world or blogging in between dropping grapes into his mouth. Does it work? Who can say? By now, our Guru has to protect his client list. He can hint heavily that he is working on exciting new projects and that’s about it. Companies above a certain size are accustomed to throwing millions at advertising channels with uncertain results – and SEO just fits into that picture so what does anyone care? It’s an endless circles of self-justifying activity: I can command $180,000 fees therefore I must be good. We can afford high fees, therefore we must be buying the best.

But at some point, these figures enter a rarefied world where if their advice doesn’t pay off they can actually accuse the client of failing: “you’re not spending enough… your positioning isn’t right and SEO can only offer you so much… your company is too generic… your branding isn’t strong enough…. you haven’t got a niche…”

By now, our much-vaunted SEO Guru has basically become a Business Consultant in SEO clothing. And let’s face it, anyone with half a brain can say “your product is too expensive”. The only difference is that some companies will pay a Guru any sum of money to hear that – and they are probably exactly the same companies who would ignore the same advice from an internal team member.

So why does all this matter? Primarly because a lot of successful SEO is actually market-specific fluke. In one field, the competition might be incredibly weak. Google might decide, apropos of nothing, that your site deserves to rank highly for non-algorithmic reasons. Your competitors might all be engaging in a spam war and suddenly plummet en-masse when their cheating is uncovered. BUT! Once an SEO has achieved success in one field, he falsely attributes that solely to his skill in a kind of low level confirmation bias.

If he has any nouse, he’ll soon turn that into the first step towards guruhood. But only if he can think of  catchy nickname.

In case your eyes were glazing over through all that – please note the following word: FREE. You don’t pay a penny for Google Analytics.

What the software means for SEO is instant analysis. If you find that lots of people are finding your website with a particular keyword but never translating into actual buyers, it gives you a clear point of action to identify why and try to rectify the problem. You might want to look at your pricing or add even more bright red “buy now!!” buttons. You can also see what is actually working. If you’ve spent £50 gazillion with your SEO agency to get to number 1 for “massive shoes” and they’ve delivered the results, you can also see whether that was worth the investment in terms of cold, hard figures.

Of course installing this software must be quite a chore, right? Actually no. Without getting too technical, here’s why.

Most websites are built on a templating system. This means you normally have one “template” file that defines the look of the site – typically called index.php, index.asp or something similar. If you look at a website, you’ll generally find that as you navigate around the site the top and bottom of the page and often any menus on the left or right stay the same. This makes sense because it makes it easy to find your way around, and focusses your attention on the actual content of the page, which is the bit in the middle. All of this is normally achieved by keeping all the static design elements in a template file and just dropping the content into the middle.

Now. In order to install Google Analytics onto a site, you have to copy and paste a few lines of code onto every page of a website. If your website has 10,000 pages you might expect this to take whole days. Actually, if your site is templated – and it almost certainly is – the code can be copied into the template and will automatically appear on every single page in the same way that your logo always sits in the top left corner.

How long would that take to do? To be generous, 3 minutes. Tops. If you wanted the whole ecommerce tracking, that might take longer – but no more than an hour or two.

Despite that, we know of at least 2 companies in our area who charge up to £750 for this ‘service.’ £750!!! For 2 minutes’ work!!!! You can certainly see the appeal to the company collecting the readies, but good heaven’s above! How would you feel if you had been charged £750 for, say, someone to change a spark plug? Chances are you’d be livid and never use them again. Fear of technology leads many companies to be led by the nose and winding up getting bilked by some shady company who literally couldn’t give a toss about value for money.

As long as that kind of practice abounds, SEO will continue to have a poor reputation – especially amongst technically-literate audiences.