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I met Greg Jarboe at my very first SEO conference about 5 years ago and have chatted with him many times over the years. Recently we conducted an interview via email.

You are speaking at Chicago SES next month on a variety of topics from the first timers guide to SES and SEM, to an introduction to SEM, to SEO for video content. What are your favorite topics to talk about?

I'm also speaking about turning PR efforts into SEO results as well as teaching the optimizing for universal search workshop with Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit. So, I plan to get a pair of roller skates in order to make it to all five sessions in time. It's sort of funny how all this landed on my to-do list, but I think that it's a an example of being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. A couple of years back, SEO-PR pioneered press release optimization. It was a niche -- and it got our foot in the door. Then, we branched out -- and started optimizing video for YouTube. At that point, Amanda and I starting teaching workshops entitled "Getting found in all the right places," which covered getting found in Google News, YouTube, and other vertical search engines. Then, on May 16, 2007, Google introduced universal search -- incorporating information from a variety of previously separate sources ? including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites ? into a single set of results. So, all of those niches that we had focused on in the early days had suddenly gone mainstream. This also fundamentally changed how you can best optimize content to gain "natural" or "organic" traffic -- because we no longer live in an era of 10 blue links. So, which one of these topics is my favorite? It's video search engine optimization. In fact, I'm writing a book for Sybex entitled: YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day. It's part of the series that includes Web Analytics: An Hour A Day by Avinash Kaushik. So, I'm pretty focused on video right now.

How has video changed the SEO game? Do you recommend submitting to YouTube and other third party sites, or hosting video content on your own sites?

Hosting video content on your own site was the right thing to do in 2005, when Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Singingfish and other video search engines were the leaders in online video. But, in 2006, YouTube came out of left field -- and totally changed the game. That's why Google paid $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube, a video sharing site. It had beat all the video search engines hands down. According to Hitwise, YouTube accounted for 76% of all U.S. visits to online video websites in October 2008. Google Video had less than 4%. Yahoo! Video changed its focus to Yahoo-hosted video only in February of this year. And Singingfish has ceased to exist as a separate service. So, if you host video content on your own site, you're optimizing it for less than 4% of all U.S. visits. A much smarter strategy is to submit your video to YouTube, which gets about 20 times more visits, and then embed your YouTube videos in your website or blog.

Of the Search Engine Strategy conferences in the US, Chicago has traditionally been one of the smaller conferences. For a person new to SEO how can the smaller size benefit them?

SES Chicago will attract about 2,000 attendees, which SES San Jose got more than 6,000. So, yes, it is a smaller conference. But, it's the only SEM conference in the Midwest, so most of the people you see at SES Chicago aren't ones that you'll already seen at other conferences. In fact, 87% of attendees at last year's SES Chicago were new to SES, just 13% were alumni. And 85% of the SES Chicago attendees approve or recommend purchasing decisions. So, the quality of the audience is very high. I find that means the Q&A sessions are not only lively -- they are lively at all of the SES events -- but people come away feeling that they got "their questions" answered.

When I first got started with SEO, I remember sitting at a table with your partner Jamie and you, as you guys discussed some of your tips. Since then you have become more and more well known in the search marketing space. What were some of your keys to that growth in exposure and awareness?

It takes time for new ideas to catch on. So, part of this is just persistence. But the other part is the willingness of many of our clients to share their case studies with the rest of the industry. When we started in early 2003, press release optimization was an interesting concept. Then, we were able to show that optimized press releases had generated $200 million in qualified leads for Symmetricom?s chip-scale atomic clocks, more than $2.5 million in ticket sales for Southwest Airlines, and almost 1.3 million searches for ?florists? on SuperPages.com. Later, we were also able to explain how combining blog outreach with press release optimization generated a record 450,000 unique visitors to The Christian Science Monitor, more than 85,000 entries into Parents magazine?s cover kid photo contest, and a record 1,100 attendees to the Wharton Economic Summit. So, if there is a tip, I say focus on measuring business outcomes instead of traditional PR outputs, like the number of clippings. Money talks. The other stuff walks.

With universal search and authority based search relevancy algorithms it seems Google keeps placing more and more weight on public relations. Are you surprised at how far this has come over the past few years? How far do you see these fields merging?

Actually, David Dalka posted an item to his blog about a year-and-a-half ago that said, "One can?t help but notice that if Greg Jarboe had gone to Google and designed Universal Search himself he likely couldn?t have designed it (better) to play into his strength areas in news and pr related issues." But, I didn't go to Google and I didn't design Universal Search. Nevertheless, it does play to our strength in public relations. We were among the first to recognize the getting links from blogs with a lot of authority wasn't a technical skill. It required public relations skills.

When should a new site consider using public relations as an SEO strategy? What are the keys to effectively using public relations as an SEO strategy?

Before it is launched. As it is being launched. And after it is launched. As for the keys, here is what the Google Webmaster Help Center says, "It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest."

When should people consider outsourcing PR, and how much of it should be driven by internal resources?

We've trained PR departments as well as PR agencies. So, it isn't that important whether this is outsources or handled internally. It is important to start -- and then to continue updating your skills -- because learning SEO isn't like learning the multiplication tables. The search engines are constantly changing -- and Universal Search is just an example of one of the bigger changes we've since in the past five years. So, learn how to optimize press releases, then learn how to optimize blogs and RSS feeds, then learn how to optimize video for YouTube, then keep learning.

While in Chicago what dish should everyone make sure they eat?

If you don't eat some Chicago-style deep dish pizza, then you haven't been to Chicago. You were just visiting some big city in the Midwest.

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Thanks Greg.

Check out SEO-PR to learn more about Greg and the intersection of public relations and search.

Not really. But kinda.

Google have announced the release of SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. Don't like a result? You can vote it down. Likewise, you can vote links up if you think they deserve a higher rank.

These changes will only appear in your Google account, and won't influence the result sets as seen by others. However, it is hard to imagine that Google won't take note of such signals, especially if they see broad patterns emerging, and then feed this data through into their algorithm development.

When asked about this point, Google sounded a little cagey:

"Dupont was noncommittal about whether the company planned to build in that feedback loop, either directly as a signal to influence search rankings or indirectly as extra data that could help the company judge the relevance of its search results. But he certainly didn't rule the idea out. We don't close any doors. We constantly evaluate signals" that are incorporated into the search results algorithm. Search is adapting to the Internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they'd like to see their search results."

Make of that what you will.

Is this a sign Google are looking for other signals of quality? Do too many people know about the influence of inbound linking these days? Quick, vote down Wikipedia! ;) Curiously, Wikipedia's seo page already has 4 negative votes.

Seriously though, let's try an experiment. We here at SEOBook.com love votes for link building, seo tools, and seo ;) Best review on seo for Seobook.com wins a free month of Aarons world-famous SEO training program.

SearchWiki could also be seen as another distribution channel and potential link source ie: the people who look at the SearchWiki are likely to be webmasters. Something to think about if you're targeting this group.

John Andrews highlights the fallacy of "make good content"

If we follow this ?make good content? path eventually the search engines will fail to deliver meaningful search results, either because of the excessive noise or because they enjoy such a monopoly they find market exploitation irresistably more rewarding. At that point the White Hat SEOs won?t know what to do anymore, and the creators/artists will refuse to work for the nickels offered. The web will become the cesspool Google says it already is.

So much is lost in the attention whoring that is claimed to be professional SEO that less than 1 in 100 "professionals" understand the above and are willing to think it through to its end.

Using critical thinking skills does not make one a terrorist or a black hat individual. We are not the ones promoting infidelity (as Google has done for years).

Just in time for the holidays, Media Whiz's Text Link Ads launched a new links product named InLinks, which puts text links inside the content of sites powered by Wordpress, MovableType, and Drupal. Rather than links sticking out like a sore thumb by putting a rail of paid links in the sidebar or footer (the old text link brokering model) this allows for a more efficient marketplace that is more likely to pass link juice and be a bit harder to detect.

Yahoo! Search's Priyank Garg highlighted that they look at link location when determining the value of links:

As Jim Boykin would say, you want links within content linking to content.

Matt Cutts was quick to say that this link buying program violates Google's TOS (and might be against an FTC guideline), but Shoemoney highlighted how Google is known to look the other was on such decisions when it is profitable to do so.

It appears Google needs to clean up its own act before people will take that FTC comment seriously.

I spoke to some folks at Text Link Ads who said that the InLinks inventory is separate from their traditional old-school link inventory.

Is this new network on Google's radar? Absolutely, but then what did Google expect when they only penalized one link broker while letting all the others rank? In doing so, Google made their fighting paid links program much more difficult to manage.

Might they catch some publishers? Sure, especially if they are greedy, aggressive, and use little to no editorial oversight. But some will do it smartly, and for most advertisers the risk is minimal so long as you use it lightly...many of these sites are well ingrained into the web, with thousands of legitimate inbound and outbound links.

Most search traffic goes to the top few ranking results. I wouldn't use this type of linking program to try to go from #103 to the first page, but if you are ranking #8 or #12, buying a few of these links might be all you need to capture a profitable top Google ranking.

/* */ and get $100 off your order by using the code 100free. Try it out, see if you like it, see if it works for you, and cancel if you don't see the movements you were expecting.

In "The Art Of The SEO Proposal", we've discussed how to get SEO clients. In this post, we'll look at how to keep them.

In most businesses, a high proportion of revenue comes from repeat business. Because it can be a costly process to acquire new clients, it makes sense to spent time nurturing the clients you already have. We'll look at ways to both structure the offering to ensure on-going revenue, and the simple things you can do to maintain and build relationships.

It's mostly comes down to doing the simple things well.

We've talked previously about SEO business models.

It can often be difficult to justify ongoing billing using a typical SEO consultant model. You go in, you fix up crawling issues, you restructure the site, you change copy, and you build links. Some SEOs may bill on-going for reporting, link building and/or competitive analysis. However, a lot of the value is created up-front, which can make it difficult to build on-going, high value relationships with existing clients. In this respect, SEO is not unlike the web design model. Minor on-going adjustments aside, the job has a clear beginning and end point.

For the relationship to build, you must create more and more value for the client on an on-going basis.

Bob Massa, one of my favorite SEO commentators, has this to say:

With little more than a glance at many of the more popular SEO hang outs, I believe it is obvious even to the uninitiated, SEO is pretty much focused on traffic generation. Things like conversions, demographics, analytics and increased website revenue generation from upselling take a distant back seat. Were it not so, topics like social media manipulation for the primary purpose of link acquisition and when PR will be updated would not dominate the interactive real estate to the extent that it does.

In this guru?s opinion, too many opportunities for genuine marketing discussions get reduced to yet one more twittershitter to be dug up and stumbled upon.

Serious discussion about honest to goodness marketing often gets buried by linkbaiting headlines that offer little more than a boost to the ego of the master baiter. Why? Because generating traffic is easy. Making money, online or off, takes education, dedication, focus, and even with those assets in place, it does little more than give one the ability to be right more often than wrong.

If you create value for the client, they will keep you. If you continue to add value, you can continue to bill. That has little to do with ranking positions, links and traffic, and everything to do with growing revenue and/or brand reach.

For example, I saw one nice piece of SEO work recently where the client remarked "I don't know what you are doing but we are getting lots of large custom order requests!". The technique was little more than placing some well-chosen keyword terms on the front page, however these words were also a strong call to action for large orders. They appeared in a prominent position. Both the SEO implementation and the business requirement were seamlessly aligned.

Think about ways to grow the the clients business when you structure your service offering.

A few models include:

This list is by no means exhaustive, but these models have one thing in common. They create an ongoing value proposition.

Once you've got your business model sorted out, and you're in a position to build value for the client over time, you need to nurture the relationship. Business is about people, and people need to be recognized, praised, and made to feel good. How much time do you spend nurturing the relationship you have with your existing clients?

In order to spend more time nurturing the relationship, you're probably going to need to free up existing time! Write down your tasks and make a note of how much time you spend on each task you do. Are there any low level tasks you could delegate or out-source? Virtual assistants can take a lot of the drudge tasks off your hands, which frees you up to focus on your clients.

Here are some other tools and services worth checking out:

We've got no affiliation to these services. Honest guv' :)

Are you spending your time profitably? Are you adding value to the relationship? Is it better to go to another search marketing conference, or would your time be better spent going to a confernce that relates to your clients business? How much time are you spending time researching their business area?

Your existing customer base can also be your de-facto sales force. They can provide you with recommendations and references. If they are impressed with you, they'll talk about you to others. This both increases your revenue and cuts your sales expenses. It is much easier to close word-of-mouth recommendations than any other type of sales close. What are you doing to increase the chances of this happening?

One great way to increase the chances of word-of-mouth recommendations is to under promise and over deliver. In your proposals, pull back a little from what you'll actually end up delivering. Everyone loves a vendor who is seen to go the extra mile.

Once you get the job, and find you may not be able to deliver, let clients now well in advance. Chances are, you'll get time enough to make up for it, and most clients are mature enough to realise that mistakes can happen.

It's often as simple as an email, sending a card, or making a phone call. Don't make every communication a pitch. If the client only hears from you when you're trying to sell them something, it's not much of a relationship. Try to think of ways you can contact your client without being intrusive.

Monitor the press for mentions of your client. If you find good reviews or mentions, flick your client an e-mail. Most clients will be impressed that you're taking an interest in them.

This is a tricky one to pull off without sounding like a braggard, but the client does need to understand how much value you're providing them. Build notification into your process. Tell them what you're going to do. Do it. Tell them you've done it.

Everyone likes great clients. But most clients aren't great. You'll get people who don't want to pay much, who won't pay you at all, who don't value the relationship, who miss deadlines, and who are never satisfied. Here's a great article on identifying the types of clients you don't want, and what to do about them.

Not only are these clients a pain, but they reduce the time you can spend with great clients. Make a list of your clients and rank them in order of who will provide the greatest chance of regular, high value work. Consider cutting the rest. Are they really worth your time?

Some ad networks are late with payments and slashing rates. There have been many reports of internet ad networks dying recently, and most of them deserve to because they add no value...they are all hat no cattle.

Like the death of ad networks, many publishing based business models are in decline.

The yellow page companies that were worth billions are facing bankruptcy.

An encyclopedia that costs $3,000 is covering the field of SEO, but with the speed of information online there is going to be a cap on how accurate and deep a generalist volume can be. The same is true for most web publishing business models.

Most content is a commodity, and it is hard to build a loyal PROFITABLE audience if you are in a generic vertical like news. The New York Times is running on fumes.

Some of the most successful blogs now resemble the media they claimed to replace:

Nick Denton has sold off 1/3 of his blogging empire and claims that we are in for an ugly online advertising contraction.

Domain name owners, which hold an easy to operate passive revenue stream, have seen ad based earnings drop and have been forced to sell off large chunks of their portfolios, as mentioned by Fabulous.com:

And those who have a lot of consumer driven media inventory are not faring much better:

The web allows you to connect with people and build communities based around a shared interest. Where is the value in going with a no named ad network to sell inventory when you can change your business model from being a publisher into being a publisher & retailer? Each day the network grows more efficient. During the downturn the best voices will keep building relationships, mindshares, and marketshare - even if it is not that profitable. Once the market returns they will grow faster than those who cut spending.

Youtube allows you to advertise Youtube videos on a CPC basis. Rob Snell created a business card that advertised his conference panel.

The best advertising is not what you say about yourself, but what others say about you. That is why Graywolf launched Viral Conversations, a new blog oriented ad network around reviewing physical products and real world services, marketed by giving away great content on how to keep up with the latest buzz.

Video interviews work well (particularly when you are not as chubby as I am...I soooo need to diet, and am getting on the eliptical machine as soon as I hit publish on this post ;)

And if you can be the host of a great presentation by a guy like Seth Godin that is even better.

Give people more data, do original research, quantify that research, write about topics that are not being covered, be quirky, be the first to report on in the news topics from the lens of your industry, bring back the past, or predict the future.

Copyright is losing momentum. Profits are is increasingly associated with social connection.

Rather than accumulating debt to spend on marketing try to create something that is free that you can give away. Sell food? Offer free recipes and a free online cookbook. Sell software? Give away a lite version. Looking to build a platform? Offer a strong API. Sell consulting or information? Offer with papers and/or a blog. As you gain exposure you can give away less and spend more time and effort making your customer relationship deeper and more meaningful.

As an online entrepreneur you can't be afraid of change.

The WSJ reported that Jerry Yang is stepping down from the Yahoo! CEO role as soon as the board can find a replacement. May the bleeding soon stop. To appreciate the agony Jerry Yang lived through watch this Web 2.0 interview of him by John Battelle

To appreciate the agony that Jerry put shareholders through, look at Yahoo!'s stock chart

How long until Microsoft buys Yahoo!?

In response to my post yesterday "The Art Of The SEO Proposal", we had a few comments from readers wanting to see examples of proposals. Thanks for the feedback, guys. It really helps us to cover areas you find most valuable.

I looked back through some old proposals looking for examples, and here's the one that earned me the most money:

Hi (name removed),

It was great to meet up and hear about your plans for (name removed).

As discussed, this email is to confirm the scope of the project.

I will undertake search marketing for (name removed) with the aim of generating new sales leads. The KPI will be based around increasing the volume of verifiable leads per month, and demonstrating these leads came from search engine visitors.

Contract to follow.

Kind regards,

Peter

Feel free to use it ;)

The problem with templates, and why I don't recommend relying on them, is that they aren't specific. There are no magic words that will ensure clients sign on the line. If you're pitching for thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars worth of work, then you need to do upfront research regarding the clients specific business problems, and that must flow through into your proposal.

The exception is if you're taking a "throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks" approach, in which case you just need to swap out a few details. Personally, when I receive such proposals, I bin them, and then make a mental note not to have anything to do with that company again. If they can't be bothered, then why should I?

The "proposal" above, which was just an email, was arrived at after a working lunch. The client came to me by a word of mouth reference. This particular client was the internet marketing manager for a large, international bank.

Over lunch, I asked questions about the clients business, the problems they faced, and what they hoped to achieve. I made it clear to the client before lunch that if I didn't see an opportunity to get them more business using search marketing, then I would tell them so. No hard feelings, and at least we'd have a nice lunch.

It turned out that was the right thing to say for this particular client, as he had a dim view of search marketers - he'd engaged people in the past, and it hadn't worked out - and he was visibly relived when I started to talking about solving business problems, rather than rankings, links and tags.

In this instance, the proposal fit the client. He was already sold by the time I put something in writing, he just wanted to sign-off and get on with it.

However, template guidelines can be useful, especially if you're struggling to know what to say. Proposals are a plan for solving a problem, and they outline the terms of engagement. You need to state what the problem is, explain how you're going to solve it, and explain why you're the best person to solve that problem.

One of our readers, Hugo Guzman, from zetainteractive.com provided a great example of structure he uses, which I'll reproduce here:

1) Clear bullet points on scope of work (details, details, details)

2) Emphasis on three main facets of SEO (site-side, link building, analytics). In many cases, it's our ability to demonstrate link building or analytics proficiency that wins the business.

3) Emphasis on the tie between SEO and social media

5) Emphasis on the tie between SEO and content development

6) Emphasis on our team's ability to work directly with client stakeholders (IT/Dev, marketing, PR, and even legal for some clients)

7) Emphasis on our team's ability to take overall business goals into account (not just being SEO-centric)

8) Emphasis on ROI (explaining how you will justify their monthly spend...again it's all about the details)

9) Emphasis on the idea that SEO is ongoing and not a one-time engagement

10) Emphasis on the importance of "baking" SEO into redesigns, site migrations and even the addition of a single page of content

11) Case studies and client testimonials

12) Emphasis on our efforts to be thought leaders in the space (aka "shameless plug for my blogging efforts over the years")

That's a good a structure as any, and notice how Hugo emphasizes the need for "details, details, details". There are no short-cut to specifics, and you need to understand the clients business in order to provide them. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Most clients will appreciate your level of interest.

Here are a few other template ideas to get you started:

In terms of structure, SEO proposals typically include the following:

There are, of course, a million ways ways to skin a cat. If people have any further suggestions and proposal examples they would like to share, please add them to the comments.

Google recently added a big ugly AdSense block to Google Finance. It looks poorly integrated and noisy.

I am surprised they didn't look to take a page out of Yahoo!'s book on this front. Yahoo!'s ads offer more in the lines of branding, and they also sell custom research reports (likely on a CPA model).

Anyone who thinks Google has fully tapped out its revenue potential needs to be reminded that Google and YouTube are leading downstream destinations from Google.

Did you know that when a company ranks #1 on a Google Map with 10 results and #1 in the organic search results that the organic result only gets 60% more traffic? But there are 10 links in the onebox...which means that as a whole they probably get more traffic than the top organically ranked site does, especially on smaller browsers.

One interesting fact is that the majority of the users who got to the site via the natural link had resolution above 1024×768 and the majority of users who visited via the Onebox result had resoultion of 1024×768 or under. This makes sense because the lower the resolution of the screen the more real estate the Onebox listing gets ?above the fold.?

Many of these onebox and universal search destinations (Finance, maps/local, product search, real estate, movies, travel, video, lyrics, books, and perhaps even images) can be monetized at much higher rates than whatever AdSense is yielding, and Google sees all the AdWords data, so they can tackle any new vertical they want (employment? education? healthcare? finance? ) and compete based on under-monetizing themselves in the short term, aggressive launch-time public relations, and giving themselves free traffic from the search results.

Google will take a leadership position in new markets like voice and video chat and voice search.

As long as Google does not destroy their brand, punt on user privacy, raise anti-trust concerns, or lose a major copyright battle they have lots of upside left. Google defines the new digital economy.

Following on from last weeks post, How To Be An SEO Service Provider, we'll now take a look at the art of the SEO proposal.

Pitching and proposal writing is a time consuming business, so ideally you want to put your efforts where they will get the most reward. Here are a few tips on how to land the best clients, and how to avoid wasting your time.

The first rule when pitching or writing a proposal is to put yourself in your clients shoes.

What would be your concerns? What would be holding you back from handing over thousands of dollars for SEO services? You'll need to anticipate those concerns, and be able to counter them in order to win the job.

In my experience, here are the most common concerns you'll come up against:

To overcome these objections, it is a good idea to have case studies and references prepared. Use before and after scenarios which demonstrate how your skills solved a problem and added value. Here's a great one by Jill Whalen.

The killer hook is at the end:

"High rankings are great, but what do they mean to a business? We talked to Doctor Bowler from Georgetown Surgical recently, and asked him, was he getting new business from the Internet? He was getting two to four new patients a week with his old website, and he's currently getting 50 to 70 new patients a week. That's a dramatic difference: he was nearly going bankrupt and was close to shutting up shop, and now he has to hire a new surgeon".

Now, who wouldn't buy that!

Demonstrate the value of your services over and above what your service costs to provide. For example, try to show revenue increases, as Jill did. You could also show traffic increases, and value these clicks against the PPC prices for these same keyword terms.

A variety of tools, including Google Traffic Estimator, can help you estimate the value of search traffic.

References are also valuable, because clients often seek out independent verification of what you're saying. Treat every client you have as a potential future salesperson.

If you're new to the game, and don't yet have any case studies or references, then consider doing a few freebie jobs. Theses jobs are essentially a marketing spend i.e. you "spend" time, but in return you'll be able to create case studies and get the references you need.

Don't give away your services to just anyone. The bigger the names, the better. You'll be associated with success. High profile charity organizations might be a good place to start.

Neil Patel got his start by giving free SEO tips to top tech bloggers. Bloggers have a big reach and lots of link equity that can be leveraged, so helping them can work just like helping a charity.

Probably the most valuable thing you can do, in terms of landing a sale, is to make a real effort to understand the clients business. Find out who their competition is, research their market sector, and ask questions. Most business people will appreciate you going the extra mile to truly understand them, and the issues they face.

The flip-side of the argument is "is this pitch worth your time"?

The unfortunate reality is that some clients are not clients at all. They might be competitors trying to find out your pricing structures and strategic approach. They might be tire-kickers trying to scope the market. They could be bottom feeders who want the earth, yet are only willing to pay a few hundred dollars.

You need to quickly identify these people, for the sake of both your business, and your sanity. Make sure you're only giving away detailed strategy and pricing information if you're close to the sale. To exclude bottom feeders, mention a minimum starting price early on.

In my post "How To Be An SEO Service Provider", I question if it's a good idea to use the SEO client model at all:

Here is why I think some of you might be selling yourself short if you sell your hard won skills to clients.

If you can return real value to clients i.e. not just ranking and traffic, but real tangible, value - then why aren't you keeping all that value for yourself? Why not compete with them instead? How about partnering with people so you get to keep an on-going share of their business? If you can position sites in lucrative keyword areas, that is a very valuable skill. Can clients even afford to pay what you're really worth? If you're really good at SEO, do you really need clients? "

Unlike PPC, SEO is a strategy that requires significant client buy-in in order to work well. The reality is that the bigger the client, the less likely you are going to get your way until you've proven your worth. It's a catch 22 situation.

Test the clients expectations early and be upfront about what it's going to take. For example, who has control over the website? i.e. are you talking to the right person? How much are you going to be able to alter the website? Why do they deserve to be number one? What are they prepared to do to get there?

The happy medium is to land a client you can work with for mutual benefit.

When I was doing SEO for clients, I wrote up an ideal client profile. If the prospective client fell outside this profile, I wouldn't take the proposal any further.

For me, the ideal SEO client:

There are exceptions, of course, but clients who fit this profile were a lot easier to deal with, and a lot more profitable than the alternative.

One area I found that really makes a difference is how much the client knows about SEO. If a client has the wrong idea about SEO, then you're going to be spending a lot of your time educating both them and their design teams. This can be a long, costly unproductive process.

One way to get around this is to start with PPC.

PPC is low impact. You can use PPC to demonstrate to the client that the traffic is there, and that s/he is missing out on it. If the PPC spend is high, you can then demonstrate how you can create cost efficiencies by getting that traffic at a lower cost, using SEO. It's a good way to educate clients by showing, rather than telling.

A lot of SEOs don't do this, and I suspect it's the prime reason the industry has earned a bad reputation.

For example, a lot of SEO is sold on the basis that the client will get an increase in rankings.

So what?

An increase in ranking is meaningless unless it translates to a desired action. Some clients will be fooled by such metrics for a while, but they are unlikely to remain so.

Eventually, they will look at their marketing spend, then look at their traffic numbers. If those referrals from search engines aren't heading up, then you're unlikely to get on-going work. If you're not getting on-going work, then you'll spend a lot of your time on the expensive sales process as you churn and burn your way through clients. Not that this isn't a valid business model, but it can be a difficult way to go about things.

Likewise, traffic can be a poor metric.

It works for a while, but unless the client is solely preoccupied with traffic numbers i.e. sites that sell advertising based on page view numbers tend to focus a lot on pure traffic volume, then you're unlikely to get long term business. The traffic needs to turn into a relationship, a sale, or an inquiry. Marketing spend, in all businesses, needs to be justified in terms of the bottom line. Everything, eventually, comes back to revenue.

If you can help the client increase revenue, then you'll make yourself indispensable. Show how SEO fits into their business objectives, which is why making an effort to understand their business is so important. At that point, you can start to reorient their web strategy around SEO.

Not only does this give you more sway, but it increases the chances of future work. For example, you could turn a brochure-web strategy into a publication strategy, which then opens up more content writing opportunities. The client is not going to be able to change a thing until they talk to you first.

If you're in it for the long term, then that's where you want to be.

In recent years personalization, localization, universal search, search suggestion, and specialized algorithms like query deserves freshness have altered the landscape of search. But even outside of these add-ons, Google's core relevancy algorithms are (at least to some degree) query dependent.

When there are many matching search results for a given search query, Google places a lot of weight on core domain age & authority and on external signals of quality like link quality, link diversity, link anchor text and perhaps other signals of quality like usage data and a LocalRank boost. For competitive queries where there are many matches on page optimization is not given as much weight.

For search relevancy algorithms where there are fewer matches and fewer external signals of quality available, Google must put more weight on the content of individual pages. Where there is no community to rely upon Google must trust publishers. And while each longtail ranking might have little value the nickels and quarters add up. Their limited search volume and value leads many competitors to skip over them as they do not appear in most keyword research tools.

In a recent blog post the Google AdWords team asked "Did you know that 20% of the queries Google receives each day are ones we haven?t seen in at least 90 days, if at all?"

The same post highlighted that "broad match currently accounts for over 1/3 of all clicks and conversions for advertisers, worldwide" and that Google "recently improved the search query report to provide more granular detail on which queries are triggering ads for your broad match keywords."

This graphic makes no attempt to be 100% correct for any given query, but was made to show an illustrative difference between competitive keywords and non-competitive keywords.

If you are starting a new site and have built little to no offsite signals of quality you can expect to rank for longtail phrases first. As your site builds authority you can compete for some of the head keywords.

As an SEO professional it is easy to over-estimate the value of top search engine rankings. After all, we sell traffic and rankings. In some cases (thin affiliate sites, for instance) good SEO is the difference between a website worth $34 dollars and $34 million dollars, but for many service based businesses top rankings have little to no value.

One of my clients who sold expensive physical products with high shipping costs saw that there was a lot of search volume for their keywords using words like discount and cheap as modifiers. We ranked that site for those keywords, but we regretted doing so.

That client's business almost got destroyed through the combination of...

When you service clients shopping on price you often end up with a negative profit margin. Unfortunately, unlike during the late 90's, you can't make up for losses through high growth by selling your company's stock to suckers. :)

It is a bit of a paradox, but is something that should be discussed and explained more often than it is. About 3 years ago this site stopped ranking in Google for "seo book" because Google filtered out many sites that were aggressive with anchor text. Given that this site is linked to by SEO savvy people, the odds of it getting lots of focused anchor text aligned with the brand keywords are quite high.

In spite of this site selling a how SEO ebook, sales during the month when the site was not even ranking for its own brand name were (at that time) 85% of the all time peak in sales. Imagine seeing a site selling SEO information not even ranking for its own name, and then buying SEO information from that site...that is exactly what hundreds of people did, thanks to word of mouth marketing.

If Google banned this site we would still get lots of sales because so many people talk about us and recommend us.

Branded keywords convert to sales at a much higher rate than non-branded keywords.

Many of the most valuable and frequently searched keywords are branded searches. When someone searches for a brand they show they are (typically) trusting of that brand, and highly interested in related offers.

This site has over 1,000,000 inbound links and ranks for keywords like SEO. And yet if you look at our top referring keywords, most of them are brand related.

Yes Google sends us that traffic, but that demand was created through branding and word of mouth marketing. Even if Google did not exist, most of those searchers would still find their way to this website. And those are the type of people who have a high conversion rate and are loyal customers.

On a few occasions this site has been recommended on top marketing blogs like Copyblogger and Seth Godin's blog. On such occasions this site usually earns far more from that mention than it does from THOUSANDS of searchers visiting the site.

I spoke with guys like Seth Godin, Brian Clark, and Jakob Nielsen at a multi-billion dollar hedge fund's conference about a month ago. The reason they wanted to pay me to speak (and put us up in the Ritz-Carlton hotel) is because some of the companies they invested in asked them to have me come speak. During lunch at the conference I sat next to the external legal team from the hedge fund. I said to the lawyer next to me "I bet all of your business comes from word of mouth" he replied "yes. In fact our marketing budget is $0."

Compare the value of a recommendation of a company you are invested in or partnered with to what Google recommends. Google has no problem recommending search engine submission scams and in some cases even malware. They recommend...

Google can spend a lot cleaning up their marketplace, but there will always be offers that are below radar, just within the law, just outside of the law, and ones that are only legal because the law has not yet caught up with the market.

People often want to buy scams (lose 60 pounds in a month, guaranteed!!!), and Google gives them what they want.

Be careful who you work for! I spoke with numerous friends who run service based SEO businesses, and they all agreed that less than 1% of the people who contact them are actually worth working for.

When a client asks for an RFP they typically are not worth working with, because they are not yet sold on you and your services and are uncertain what they want. The type of person who finds your marketing company via a search engine ranking is still a shopper, not a committed buyer. They will likely buy cheap, get scammed, and then go from there.

If 99% of leads are crap, how do you access the 1% that have value? Easy...

Some SEOs speak at 20 or 30 conferences a year...existing primarily in the role of traveling salesman. They generate leads, while underwaged and underskilled people "service" the clients. Rarely do the people who know what they are doing work on the accounts, but the steady speaking engagements bring in new clients.

Search rankings help build awareness, invite low risk interactions (comments, reviews, etc.) that help show social proof of value, and can be a low cost lead source. But you still have to develop a relationship and build trust to sell.

It is not that search is a poor lead channel...it is just that we trust humans more than machines, and that will probably remain true long after you and I die.

When we asked for questions from our readers on topics they'd like to see covered, we received a few requests on how to set up an SEO agency and position the service.

Here's my take on it:

Don't do it!

OK, I'm being facetious :) But before you run out and sell your SEO skills, let's take a look at the issues, ways to get around them, and how to position your service so you get the greatest reward for your efforts.

I'll also explain why selling your SEO services might be selling yourself short.

The news is good. According to SEMPO, pay scales for SEOs are looking healthy:

"Of those respondents with up to one year's experience, 60% reported annual salaries in the $30,000 to $50,000 range. Compensation tracks strongly with experience. At the next level, two to three years experience, almost 34% reported salaries in the $50,000 to $80,000 range. At the more seasoned end of the spectrum, of those professionals with nine or more years experience, just under 40% are earning between $90,000 and $140,000 annually."

However, let's take a closer look at those numbers:

" More than 33% of the survey respondents said they managed both pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and organic search marketing efforts. Another 35% said they worked primarily in PPC; some 20% worked primarily in organic search"

Most activity in the search marketing space is not SEO. It is PPC.

The reason for this is because SEO is a long term strategy, yet a lot of marketing spend is dictated by short budget cycles. In order to land work, you must be able to demonstrate value reasonably quickly. PPC provides a way to do this. Once businesses are sold on search as a channel, then they'll consider planning for the longer term search strategies, such as SEO.

The exception is when the client is already sold on the value of SEO. This type of client, who doesn't have an existing provider, or hasn't already moved the function in house, might be hard to find.

There is no harm learning both. PPC can teach you a lot a lot about SEO - mainly in terms of keyword research - and it increases your options.

There is a big difference between knowing how to do SEO and selling a service to clients.

For starters, there is the level of competition. Try searching for seo providers. As you can see, the world isn't short of SEO providers! And a lot of them are competing on price.

In an industry with such a low barrier to entry, how will you stand out from the rest? You'll need to give prospective clients a good reason why your service is better than the others on offer. How do you intend to match or better the credentials of established operators? How can you differentiate your service?

Secondly, how do you propose to sell your services?

The sales cycle is a significant cost, both in terms of time and resources. You can put a lot of effort into writing proposals, attending conferences, pitching presentations, and networking. None of this is guaranteed to pay off. And if you do land the work, how much time will you have to both do the SEO work and put in the sales effort required to land the next client? Can you scale up and take on qualified people quickly if that happens?

Thirdly, do you have sufficient cash reserves to live on while you're waiting for your first client to pay up? Cash flow can kill a small business, even those businesses which have a a lot of prospective work in the pipeline. The bills wait for no man.

You get my drift. There are many other considerations before deciding to run your own business, but the takeaway point in terms of SEO is this: determine what you like doing best.

If you like doing just SEO work, consider joining an established agency. They will take care of all the other details. If you want to build your own business empire, doing so mostly involves management, sales and administration. And, if you still have some time left over, some SEO.

How will you be remunerated for your efforts?

Most commonly, SEOs bill by the hour, or by the job. They set performance metrics, such as rankings and/or traffic numbers, and the job is completed when those metrics are achieved. The SEO might be able to get ongoing work in the form of reporting, or by extending the scope of the SEO project. The upside is that such a deal is simple. The downside is this needs to be sold over and over again. When you run out of hours to bill, you've hit the ceiling on your earnings potential, unless you raise your rates, or take on new people.

If you are confident of your skills, and can provide real value to a company - and that means boosting their sales and being able to prove it was you who made that happen - then consider partnership deals.

For example, one high profile SEO I know operates exclusively this way. He doesn't sell his services by the hour, he looks for businesses he can partner with, he boosts their earnings by implementing a robust, long term SEO campaign, then takes a share of their profit. This provides a healthy on-going revenue stream, without having to sell the service over and over again.

This type of deal requires a great deal of trust and transparency, but it is worth doing if you are sure you can deliver value, and can find a solid, reliable partner.

Some SEOs work on a Pay On Performance basis. This is a risky strategy, unless you are certain you can deliver the desired results. All the risk lies with you, and, really, you'd need to charge in such a way that accommodates this risk. Unfortunately, the type of clients who ask for pay-on-performance SEO deals are unlikely to be generous payers.

While search engines deliver value, businesses will pay to be seen on them.

SEO sits awkwardly amongst other marketing channels. The search engines will always try to make PPC attractive, because that's how the search engines make their money.

At the same time, they'll try to negate the value proposition of SEO, because SEO competes with PPC. SEOs are only useful to search engines in that they help spread the word about search engines, and they help sites get crawled. But don't think the search engines are going to do you, or your business model, any favors.

This situation doesn't make the SEOs job impossible, but I'm sure many people would agree that offering SEO as a service is a lot harder than it once was. A few years ago, all you had to do was add a few keywords terms to the copy and titles, point a few links at a site, wait one month, run a ranking report, and voila! You're an SEO provider.

Not any more.

SEO has become a much more holistic strategy. It requires a greater level of buy in from clients, designers, programmers, and all the other people who's toes you might tread on.

But there is plenty of life in the game yet. A lot of SEOs do great business, as can be seen from the huge popularity of the conference circuit. A lot of marketing spend is moving from other channels into search. By selling your services to others, you not only have an occupation, you gain insight into how other businesses work, which is a valuable education in itself.

I'll be going into greater detail on the workings of SEO consultancy in the coming months.

Here is why I think some of you might be selling yourself short if you sell your hard won skills to clients.

If you can return real value to clients i.e. not just ranking and traffic, but real tangible, value - then why aren't you keeping all that value for yourself? Why not compete with them instead? How about partnering with people so you get to keep an on-going share of their business? If you can position sites in lucrative keyword areas, that is a very valuable skill. Can clients even afford to pay what you're really worth?

If you're really good at SEO, do you really need clients? ;)

Social media is the next big thing! No, it's the big thing! It is here, now, and it is big! Let's face it, if you're not aboard the cluetrain to social media marketing city, you're sitting on that station alone!

A pity, then, that social media traffic is so often worthless.

Worthless?

Let's look at the market signals. Why is it that you pay dollars per click on Google Adwords for financial keywords, yet the same keywords on social networks are priced at five cents?

This suggests to me one of two things. Either the social networks are seriously underestimating the value of their own traffic, or most of the people on social networks aren't interested in commercial messages. If they were, then the bid values would closely match those of Google Adwords.

I think the latter is the most likely scenario. Social media traffic isn't priced higher, because it isn't translating into revenue for the advertisers. This isn't happening because the intent of the users when engaged with social media is not conducive to selling stuff.

Of course, social media traffic isn't all bad. We'll look at some ways you can benefit from it. But firstly, let's compare and contrast some aspects of social media marketing and search marketing, in order to help clarify the value proposition.

Traffic only becomes an asset when it translates into something else. When it becomes a bookmark, a sign-up, a link, or helps establish a genuine relationship. It must also result in an increase in revenue. If it doesn't, then traffic remains an expense.

What is the value of 10,000 Diggers hitting your site to look at, say, a picture of a monkey riding a bicycle? Zero. The trouble is that a lot of marketers are watching the web scorecard - that spike in the visitor stats that shows the number of visits - and using that as a marketing metric. "Hey, I'm popular!".

Sure, with 10,000 teenagers amused by a picture of a monkey riding a bicycle. But how is that helping boost revenue?

There isn't a lot of meaning to such a relationship. It is low value.

"This is a truth of the Internet: When traffic comes to your site without focused intent, it bounces. 75% of all unfocused visitors leave within three seconds.Any site, anywhere, anytime. 75% bounce rate within three seconds. By unfocused, I mean people who visit via Digg or Stumbleupon or even a typical Google search....."I'm just looking," is no fun for most retailers. Yet they continue to pay high rent for high-traffic locations, and invest time and money in window displays. Very few retailers lament all the traffic that walks by the front door without ever walking in. A long time ago, they realized that the shoppers with focused intent are far more valuable. Smart retailers work hard to get focused people to walk in the door and to keep the riff raff walking on down the sidewalk.".

It is difficult to control the message. Released into the wild of social networks, the message can just as easily result in negative effects as positive ones.

Check out this sad experience of being dugg, from Kim at Cre8Pc:

"Since I logged off last night around midnight, 12 hours later, over 23,000 people have been to this blog. The reason is that someone dugg about the post I wrote, where I shared a resource I found useful. That post was "dugg" and the incoming traffic this blog is receiving is to that specific blog post I wrote....Diggers complained about everything from the site design of the site I wrote about, to how stupid I was to write about it at all.....Which part of this Digg activity am I supposed to be happy about, now that something I wrote has officially been slaughtered there?"

Kim wasn't trying to get on Digg as part of a marketing strategy, but it shows how unpredictable the "benefits" of social media exposure can be.

Perhaps this might explain why Digg has been left at the altar a few times? It suggests to me that it might be difficult to extract real commercial value from such environments. Part of the problem is structural. Digg is "free" and "open" and "anonymous", which leads to a tragedy of the commons.

At the risk of blowing our own horn, part of the reason our SEO community is valuable is because people have to pay for it. People have provided a signal of interest lacking on most broad social networks. There are no questions from a member named MakeEasyMoneyOnlineTodayRightNow asking how to get his adsense earnings up to $1 a day. The price of admission helps protect the community from the tragedy of the commons.

"It's a brand spend!". Marketers say that a lot.

What they often mean is "we can find no no measurable return".

Return on brand spend is very difficult to measure, and even more difficult to isolate in a channel such as online social media marketing. Did visitors remember our brand? Did it affect their future buying decisions? Was the brand association positive or negative?

Who knows?

If you're thinking of engaging a social media marketer, and they use brand building as a metric, ask them to explain how they will demonstrate an increased, favorable level of brand awareness. If they mention traffic numbers, ask them how that squares with my first point "Traffic Is Not An Asset, It Is A Cost".

To my mind, any commercial endeavor must ultimately come back to revenue.

What are people doing on social networks?

On the likes of Facebook, they are engaged in social activities. They are catching up with their friends. They are playing games. Marketing messages in this context are about as welcome as an Amway salesperson at a bachelor party.

Consider the context of the message. Search marketing works well because the searcher has already signaled their intent, and that intent may well be commercial. It's like walking into a shop, and asking to buy a watch. The relationship and interaction is direct and obvious. The context of social media is more like a cocktail party. People are there to socialize, not enter into commercial interactions. They may do so, but the relationship is fuzzy and indirect.

To overcome this obstacle, look for social networks, or network groups, where the users demonstrate clear, commercial intent. Alternatively, have a clear idea of how you're going to progress "fuzzy indirect" visitors to desired action.

Social media marketing is time consuming.

Building your social networks. Responding to "friends". Is there are measurable return for the time spent? What is the opportunity cost of that time?

For example, compare the time you need to get a commercial message on the front page of Digg, with getting a commercial message on the front page of Google. With Adwords, I can do it in seconds.

With Digg, I'd be unlikely to get a marketing message to the top, unless I'd previously developed relationships with all the right people and/or gamed the system, which, in itself, takes a lot of time. Even then, the marketing message, unless heavily disguised, will likely be despised by a community rabidly opposed to any message with an obvious commercial imperative.

Is this time well spent on either channel? Once again, a cost/benefit analysis, where the benefits are clear and measurable, will provide the answer.

I guess no-one ever went broke underestimating human stupidity, but one really has to question the marketing value of these types of approaches:

"The Coca-Cola Company will feature its Sprite brand on a new Facebook Page and will invite users to add an application to their account called "Sprite Sips." People will be able to create, configure and interact with an animated Sprite Sips character. For consumers in the United States, the experience can be enhanced by entering a PIN code found under the cap of every 20 oz. bottle of Sprite to unlock special features and accessories. The Sprite Sips character provides a means for interacting with friends on Facebook"

Facebook, which distinguished itself by being the anti-MySpace, is now determined to out-MySpace MySpace. It's a nifty system: First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, and then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads. And what do the users get in return? An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with.

Are people going to then talk about Sprite in a way that would increase the sales of Sprite? Really?

I can barely imagine this would work for a teen audience. Such an approach has no chance with an adult audience. Keep in mind that most people who are heavily active on generalist social network sites are likely to fit in the 15-25 year old range, although there is evidence to suggest this age range might be changing. Look at it this way - how many stories about hip-replacements ever make it top the top of Reddit?

There are a lot of messages that just aren't going to work on social media. Wrong time, wrong place.

"Media buyers ? the agency people who book campaigns ? report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They're mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for each other to show much interest in advertising. Facebook's members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% ? just 400 clicks in every 1m views ? according to one report seen by Valleywag."

It is easy to scale up a television campaign. Buy more airtime. It is easy to scale up an Adwords campaign. Increase the number of keyword terms and/or bids. How do you scale up a social media campaign? You can't re-create viral. Viral is hit and miss. All word of mouth is hit and miss. How many people can you cost-effectively follow on Twitter?

Social media tends to pay dividends in the long-term. Social media, generally speaking, is hard to influence, but by understanding your field well and creating relationships in your niche, you can learn to create the types of content that influencers will pick up on. Like the mavens in The Tipping Point, they will spread your message for you.

Forging such meaningful relationships won't happen overnight.

Ok, I admit it. This post has been a bit of a rant :)

It's not all bad news.

Whilst not a replacement for a marketing strategy, social media can be a viable component of a wider marketing strategy. It can be used to generate buzz. It can be used to attract links. One well placed article can achieve both these ends. If that buzz, and those links, can then be translated into a valuable relationship, and perhaps better Google rankings for commercial keywords, then the social media approach may well pay dividends.

In order to do this, social media must be back-ended with content geared towards establishing a valuable relationship, rather than one-off visits.

Marketing exists for one purpose: to sell stuff. If it doesn't do that, then it isn't marketing.

The key to evaluating social media marketing, like with with all media spends, lies in tracking and cost/benefit analysis. If traffic provides you with a measurable return on investment, then the marketing spend is justified. The only traffic worth anything is that which ultimately results in revenue producing interaction.

The problem I find with social media traffic is that so little of it ever does.

Your mileage may vary.

We are always trying to come up with good content ideas to write about, but we would love to get your feedback on what you would like to read. Here is a Google Moderator page where you can submit SEO, marketing, link building, pay per click, domaining, search, webmaster, or blogging questions and/or topics that you would like us to write about. In addition you can vote on which topics you want us to cover. We can't write about everything, but we will try to write about many of the topics that are covered here.