I’ve bought a domain to do some hugely naughty and very black hat SEO on. I’ll report back in blog posts but I’m interested to know how much of this stuff (still) works.
I don’t see how you can be a good inbound marketeer without actually knowing this stuff and finding out the boundaries.
Probably worth mentioning that I don’t use any of this stuff in “real life” and certainly not on any client sites. I just think to be “fully qualified” you need to know some of this stuff – and then choose not to use it.
Predictions? That the biggest difference between “good” and “bad” is scale. I suspect some of the techniques I’m about to use aren’t “bad” at the core but are very naughty/cheeky/whatever-word-you-want when done on the scale this form of marketing advocates.
Time to get my hands dirty.
PS This was posted first on Google+. I’m trying to use it a little more to see if I can find space for it. You’ll find me by clicking this link.
Sometimes, we get a site to look after which has had a less than talented SEO chap look after it and the site has a backlink profile which leaves a little to be desired.
In this case, we had a lot of nofollowed .edu links – it’s easy enough to find old student blogs in the US which have commenting open and in theory gives you a .edu backlink (Lots of US based university and colleges have student blog networks that get forgotten about and leave commenting open).
The link ends up being nofollowed and the blog post gets battered by black hat SEO’s posting links to Britney Spear’s twadge, Viagra or “cheap meds”. In short, it’ll take Google all of about 1 second to work out that the link is worthless. Usually these links are placed by powerful pieces of software which sniff them out. With great power comes great responsibility.
Listen to Spiderman kids, he was right on that one.
It’s not about the link being nofollowed – some of those don’t hurt a backlink profile – but links from a site which is clearly being abused isn’t doing you any good. Have a few of these and it’s probably not doing any harm. Have a few (hundred) thousand and it’s time to clean up.
Here’s what I did
Are you ready? This is rocket scientist stuff this…
Found the root University page
Found the right contact details – not always easy but aim to find the webmaster or at least the web faculty contact email
Write a polite email asking them to remove the link to our site but suggesting that the digital asset is being abused by spammers and doesn’t reflect well on such a well respected seat of learning
Wait
Er… and that’s it.
What happened?
I received an email a week later thanking me for pointing it out to them, thanking me for being so courteous and pointing out that they’d 404′d all of the blogs. Bosh. Links removed.
I did this for a few dodgy links and whilst some have been 403′d rather than 404′d, 90% of the dodgy links that the site had collected have been washed away. All I had to do was ask!
We’ve just got to wait now for our backlink trackers (we use SEOMoz and Majestic) to update their data and we’ll see these fall out of our data reports. Now we can start to get some backlinks from authoritative domains and really help market the site (I’ve a post coming up about how we go about this).
It’s an age old question and one which I hear regularly – why should I pay X for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) services? What’s the benefit to me? What’s the return on my investment?
It’s a question I’ve heard a lot from people who are comfortable with PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising – PPC is easily trackable, the costs can be easily maintained and managed and a simple “If I spend X on PPC, I get Y back in sales” calculation can be done as all the figures are available.
When undertaking SEO projects, none of the same figures are available. None. Or are they?
As the industry develops, click through rates studies are beginning to appear for the search engine result pages which are more and more accurate. Whilst these may not be true for every keyword or niche market, they do provide a solid enough platform to start trying to calculate what SEO is worth. Again, it’s worth stating again that these are guide figures. Write good meta titles and descriptions and you might find your CTR is better than these guides suggest. You might have the perfect site with perfect meta information and see a lower CTR than these figures suggest. There is fantastic post on this on SEOMoz – you can read it here.
Do you know what a visitor is worth to your site? Do you know what a conversion on your site is worth? If so, we can start to do some thinking…
Where is all this going?
Let’s try this for MadeUp Inc with a conversion rate of 5% and with an average order value of £56.78. We can start to put some of this together.
Let’s say MadeUp Inc wanted to target the keyword “woo hoo” which had 1000 local searches a month (you can find the number of searches a month data in a number of places but we tend to use SEOMoz. Having said that, the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is free and does the same thing). Let’s say MadeUp Inc rank in 8th place currently for this keyword.
8th place has a suggested CTR of 1.7% – meaning from a 1000 possible visitors, we get 17 visitors a month. Our conversion rate is 5%, meaning 0.9 visitors of our 17 incoming visits convert on this keyword. That’s worth £51.10 to us per month (£613.22 per year).
We’ve just valued our keyword. We might have some analytics data that supports the assumptions, but we might have some data which suggest CTR is higher or lower than the one suggested. Either way, we’ve now given ourselves a base on which we can amend the calculations. Analytics suggesting that CTR is 10% higher? Simply amend the CTR rate used in the calculation by 10%. Not seeing the expected CTR rate? Adjust downwards accordingly. It’s important to use the data that you already have.
However, for this example, let’s assume that the CTR study is supported by any data we have on the site and that our calculation above is somewhere near.
If we were to undertake some SEO work for the keyword “woo hoo”, we can now work out what the potential ROI is. Being adventurous, we aim for slot number 1.
1st place has an expected CTR of 18.2% – meaning from a 1000 possible visitors, we’d get 182 visitors. Our conversion rate is 5%, meaning 9.1 visitors of our 182 visits convert on this keyword. That’s worth £516.70 to us per month (£6200.40 per year).
Using these numbers, climbing those 7 spots from 8th to 1st is worth an extra £5587.20 a year.
It’s fair to say that I’ve picked the most dramatic example I could (we’ve gone to the top of the rankings!) but still, we’re providing a guide ROI against any budget being allocated to this process.
Is it reliable?
No – the CTR could be wildly different to the studies suggested expectation. The expected visitor data could be out too which could mean we don’t get the amount of traffic being expected. Of course, the opposite is true too – we could get more.
Should it be quoted as legally binding?
Absolutely not. You’d be a fool to do such a thing.
Does this provide some boundaries though of what could be expected – upper and lower limits, that sort of thing?
As long as it’s explained properly (and I mean”properly”), then yes, I think it does.
Summary
I’d always recommend any SEO work should be tested with some PPC first – it’s cheaper than any SEO project and provides a quick insight as to if the keyword you want is worth having. After that, get in to your data. Do you get traffic for that keyword already? How much? Does it convert? At what rate? What is a conversion worth? At this point, we can use some of the data that is available to us – yes, it’s guide data and yes, it shouldn’t be treat as gospel but it can help when deciding if targeting a keyword is worth yours or the clients worthwhile.
I bought some big stuff from Amazon recently and it turns out they use CityLink couriers. This is a major pain in the arse for me as:
CityLink don’t provide a timed delivery slot, SMS alert or sod all – leaving you guessing as to when it’s going to turn up other than between 7.30am and 5pm.
This sort of “timed slot” is a waste of time for anyone who works. I can’t be there and nor can I arrange for someone to be there. Can you imagine the call? “Hi Dad, I need you to stop in at my house all day please – come on, you’re retired, you’ve nothing else to do”….
They automatically try again the day after – which is a decent enough idea except that this second delivery follows points 1 and 2 above.
If you then miss attempt 2, they whisk it to their secret hideout in Scunthorpe and you have to go get it. This is something like a 60 mile round trip with a toll bridge in the middle. I know I can give them a ring or use their website and arrange the second attempt delivery but regardless of when delivery 2 occurs, it follows point 1 and 2 above so is still useless.
Previously, I’ve not bought from someone who advertised they delivered with CityLink. It’s too much like hard work to get it. I was unaware Amazon used them for big stuff which is how I found myself in the situation. Anyway, it led me to tweet this:
Is there a worse courier than City Link? Absolutely shite.
I might have been a bit heavy handed (it’s been said before!) but my @replies lit up with many people agreeing and with a few declaring Yodel to be another courier to avoid (although I’ve never dealt with them personally).
I never knew CityLink where on Twitter – turns out they are and they were monitoring for usage of their brand name. Their profile declares this:
City Link is the UK’s leading Premium Express Delivery Company providing high quality, flexible and innovative courier services across the UK, Ireland and World
Hmm.
This morning, I came into to find this waiting for me:
@jghull Sorry to hear you feel this way. Is there anything we can do to help?
Aside from the use of “LOL”, which I think is pretty poor for an official channel of the business, I gave them some credit for engaging with me. It didn’t change the situation I was in, but at least I felt like I’d been heard. I was about to declare it a social media win of sorts until I checked out the CityLink Twitter stream. It’s a list of @replies to pissed off customers, mainly tweeting an apology and an email address where the issue can be “looked into”.
You nearly got this right CityLink, but a Twitter feed of apologies does not help you look like the “the UK’s leading Premium Express Delivery Company providing high quality, flexible and innovative courier services across the UK, Ireland and World”. It makes you like someone who receives a lot of complaints and that’s not a good look is it?
I’m willing to bet this is done in-house. I think if this was an agency running the social media content (such as my wonderful agency – ahem!), the @replies to customers would still be there but countered with some real content. On top of that, the account only follows 14 users , are followed by 111 users and have only tweeted 49 times since their first tweet in November 2008. On top of that, one of the Twitter lists they appear on is called “Bad Companies”. Ouch. (All correct at the time of writing)
Close but no cigar Mr. CityLink Couriers – and to think you so nearly got it right.
