Frequently Asked Questions
-
Q?
What is this Algorithm Thing?
-
A.
Perhaps we should spend a few minutes discussing this algorithm thing. The algorithm is really complicated with 100's of different variables. But we can group all of these variables into 2 big buckets In-Page Factors and Off-Page Factors. Think of the In-Page factors as all of the stuff that you can do to your website to make it more search engine friendly. You can program it in a language that the search engines can read (not flash). You can make sure that the spiders can crawl from page to page by including navigable links and minimizing password protected areas. And you can have a content rich site with lots of different pages that use keywords to tell the search engines what these pages are about. If you do all of this you will probably rank well for Non Competitive Keywords. But please keep this in mind. Optimizing your site just means that it is possible for your site to rank well in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). It doesn't mean that you necessarily will. In fact, we look at it as table stakes. You have to optimize to even be in the game but it doesn't mean that you're going to win.
-
Q?
You’re telling me that organic is a long term strategy and I probably won’t see results for 6 months to a year?
-
A.
Why should I pay you for a year before I see any return on my investment? Why won't you give me a guarantee? Because that's how long it takes. We are not going to tell you what you want to hear to get your business. There a few people in our industry that may be willing to offer guarantees. In our business those people often have a bad reputation. Usually we end up helping the client after the other SEO is done and even if it didn't cost the client much money at the time, we both know that it did cost them a lot. It cost them the opportunity cost of working with the wrong company for a year and ending up unhappy with the final results. We don't have control over the search engines we can just affect them. We understand it is a leap of faith to begin your SEO Campaign. That's why you invested so much in the selection phase of the process way back when. That's why you checked our other client’s rankings and spoke to our referrals. That's why we put together both a Strategy and Tactical Plans outlining how we were going to implement that Strategy. That's why we have regular meetings and progress reports so that you can be assured that we are moving towards our agreed upon objectives. But yes, in the end it does come down to trust.
-
Q?
Why is it that company XYZ who isn’t even a player in my industry is ranking higher than I am?
-
A.
The short answer is because the other guy has been at this for longer than you and has been paying an SEO company to help improve their ranking. The longer answer, do they have different title tags for different pages? Are they using Meta tags and H1 tags? Without putting any time into a real competitive assessment would be that they've probably optimized their site. Okay let's do a quick comparison of back-links. So they have 157,367 links and you have a couple thousand. Again, they have been at this longer than you and have been paying someone to do this work.
-
Q?
If I’m willing to pay, why can’t I have it by Monday?
-
A.
Let’s discuss Google's rules. Google, Yahoo, MSN are competition with each other. Their single most important Key Success Factor is Relevance of Search Results. If you search on Google and consistently don't find what you're looking for then you will switch search engines. If everybody does that, they'll go out of business. If they budge on their policy of not allowing advertisers to manipulate the organic search results by paying their way to the top, they will go out of business. And your $10K, $100K, whatever you're willing to pay isn't worth risking the BILLIONS that they're currently making. So no. You can't have it by Monday.
-
Q?
If Google doesn’t make money from Organic Search then how do they make their money?
-
A.
They make their money from Paid Search. Think of it as Bait and Switch. People use Google because they trust that they are going to find what they're looking for. The search engines know that roughly 20% of people will click on the paid search results above and to the right of the organic results. Some people don't know that those results are Paid Ads.