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@ infomonkey - And what is the ROI a client who pays for SEO services devoted fully to rankings in the organic results is likely to achieve as a result?
1. SEO is very much unlike horse racing: you don't know how large is the relevance score gap between your page at, say, # 11 and the page at your temporary target ranking of # 10. In horse racing the gap is visible and the jockey can estimate the effort needed and his chances.
2. It is untrue that you cannot guarantee # 1 rankings for every search query, despite what Google write. After all someone must be # 1 in every list of items arranged by the descending order of the measurement of some quality they share, in this case their relevance scores for a given search query, and the SEO worker's task is to make one site have the highest relevance score.
It is only when a team of judges, such as those of the recent Arthur Rubinstein Piano Competition, decides that no candidate achieved the highest musical standards set at former competitions and none therefore should be awarded the first prize, that there is an empty pigeonhole in the list.
Amazingly, few veteran SEO workers seem to understand this simple principle.
"How do you prepare for Google's next algorithm shift?" can replace the whole list, since an in-house SEO can rely on nobody else.
And my two questions for testing a candidate's SEO logic, in-house or otherwise:
1. You are implementing a new SEO technique. Someone else is still using an old technique, only 50% as effective as yours, to optimize for the same search query. Who will be # 1 in Google first?
2. Your page advances from # 11 to # 9, while the page formerly at # 9 is now # 10 and the page formerly at # 10 is now # 11. Despite that, your situation is now worse than before. Provide two possible explanations for this statement.
It is the client's responsibility to finance SEO experiments looking for positive ROI, and among
alternative solutions for the best ROI. You cannot know in advance. Moreover, positive ROI may turn negative when his competitors push him down the rankings.
The most stupid thing SEOs say most often: ... The process (of getting Top 10 rankings for competitive keywords) could take up to a year to achieve saturation due to competition...
The process could take up to a year? Really? And what if the website now at # 10 gains relevance score at a pace that is higher than the pace at which your site, already at # 11, is gaining relevance score? You'll obviously never catch up.
http://www.seodesignsolutions.com ranks indeed # 2 for SEO in AltaVista but not in the Top one hundred results of google.com or any other local google, except google.in where it ranks # 17. Hardly something to brag about, considering the poor popularity of AltaVista nowadays.
The second most stupid thing SEOs say most often is that the number of pages relevant for a given search query is relative to the level of competitiveness to be encountered while optimizing for that search query.
Suppose you're already # 11 for a number of search queries, and your temporary goal is to be # 10 for as many of them as possible within a month and a definite budget.
Obviously the level of competitiveness of each search query is determined by the relevance score gap between your page at # 11 and the page at the target ranking of 10. It has nothing practical to do with the number of relevant pages for each of those search queries, and even less with which one has 75K - 250K "results in Google in quotes"
It's amazing how SEO workers survive and even thrive with no idea of the fundamental notions of this profession:
What barrier is there at # 10 to be broken? There's a web page just like yours unto which SEO work is done too, in order to make it # 9 or at least to maintain the gap between it and yours.
The consolidated relevance score calculated by Google's algorithm for every Web page and for
every search query is not one component out of many (many what?) but the sum of all.
In the ideal dreamworld most SEO workers believe they live in nobody else optimizes his web pages but you. There are barriers to be broken by hard work but it is unimaginable that the guy above you in the SERP takes the barrier with him while he runs up the relevance score hill. As you do in fact to the guy just below you. The question who runs faster is determined of course by the effectiveness of the SEO techniques employed and the amount of work invested, which is determined in turn by the size of the SEO budget.
Think dynamically: saying that within a year or so you'll be number 1, or whatever ranking you target, amounts to believing that you are able to keep all your competitors idle, or to sabotage their efforts effectively, or to ensure that your client provides you with such a large SEO budget that you will gain relevance score at a pace that will always be higher than anyone else's and yet one year will be sufficient to close the gap between you and those who started years before you.
In many cases this exactly happens and you're # 1 within the promised time interval. Meaning that your competitors were lazy, ineffective or constricted by an SEO budget allocated to the firm that presented the lowest price quote. So what? You couldn't know it in advance. And therefore these are happy circumstances and not the foundations of a theory of how things work in SEO.
An estimated time frame (or cost or both) for reaching a target ranking is 100% imaginary. Even if you already are # 11 you can have no idea whether the relevance score gap between the page at # 10 and yours is one point or ten thousand points, and whether the page at # 10 is gaining one point a month or ten thousand.
You know nothing about the relevance scores of your pages either. Simply because the search engines do not want to let you know. So you are left with looking at the rankings, which only show the descending order of the relevance scores of all those pages. This is SEO theory in a nutshell.
My two questions for testing a candidate's SEO logic:
1. You are implementing a new SEO technique. Someone else is still using an old technique, only 50% as effective as yours, to optimize for the same search query. Who will be # 1 in Google first?
2. Your page advances from # 11 to # 9, while the page formerly at # 9 is now # 10 and the page formerly at # 10 is now # 11. Despite that, your situation is now worse than before.
Provide two possible explanations for this statement.
There is absolutely no relation between the answers Frank Antonellis expects to hear from an
"SEO Expert" which is in his opinion worth hiring and the quite rare ability of a real SEO expert.
A real SEO expert will tell Frank that his questions are silly and so, I guess, he won't get hired. Look for instance at # 5: Can you describe or produce a recent successful SEO campaign? Anyone can produce a long list of successes in noncompetitive arenas and you cannot know whether that arena was indeed highly competitive just by the search query. A real SEO expert would rather show interesting failures, for instance a case of very high competitiveness in which he used special expertise and ingenuity but the budget allocated by the client proved to be insufficient for achieving and/or maintaining the top ranking.
@ markymark: Showing off with examples of high rankings belongs indeed to the primitive stage of SEO, when almost nobody optimized their websites and those who did automatically raised in rankings.
The problem today is that for almost every search query there often are hundreds or thousands of websites trying to get into Google's Top 10 rankings, and those precious 10 pigeonholes are not even vacant! So the question is whether the rate at which you're going to make your client's website gain relevance score in the next few months is not smaller than the rate at which the websites now ranked in the Top 10 will gain relevance score during the same interval. Because if they do you'll never catch up and you are doomed to fail.
Consequently, since for each search query hundreds of SEO "experts" service hundreds of websites, but only ten of them can prove success, the common experience of SEO "experts" is failure.
@ alwoodman: since you are recruiting another inhouse SEO (so you'll have at least two?), how about the definitive interview question: "How are you going to prepare us for Google's next algorithm shift?"
Only some fail? For almost every search query that has commercial value only the SEO firms that have brought up the Top 10 listings qualify as successful, while hundreds or thousands of SEO firms have obviously failed.
There are many suckers hoping to get rich quickly from an online business and they deserve what they get. But what about the guy who asked for a price quote for getting a Top 10 ranking on Google and how honest were you while providing him such a quote? How on earth can you know that this sum will be sufficient for accomplishing his task?
SEO firms that participate in the game of providing imaginary price quotes for achieving rankings are not so much different from those who sell "guaranteed @ 1 rankings or money back". And since most SEO firms do provide imaginary price quotes most of them are crooks as well.
@ wanderer - if pages with apparently poorer qualities outperform in Google's SERPs pages with superior qualities it is simply because you know so little about the hidden factor that contribute to the consolidated relevance score by which pages are listed in the SERPs in descending order.
In principle, nothing has changed. Nevertheless, something is being changed every day.
# 10 - it is true that there are many charlatans in this profession, but I can bring a site to # 1 in Google for every keyword. If you don't know how you have no right to call those who can Bad SEO Firms.
@ semscholar: Let me repeat it - I can bring a website to # 1 in Google's organic results for every keyword.
Directly from Google: No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
Directly from Me: No one can say what I can't guarantee, Google included.
The fact that Google say that none can guarantee a # 1 ranking in Google does not make their statement true, unless they start showing randomly empty # 1 listings in some of their SERPs.
@ pocketSEO: You wrote "If someone can get #1 for tough keywords, they shouldn't be taking any clients." I don't know about you but for tough keywords I need the client's very large, and sometimes largest, SEO budget.
The reason for the common difficulty to understand how one can honestly guarantee a # 1 ranking is the common practice of providing SEO price quotes. You often guess in advance that your price quote won't be sufficient for the workhours and other resources required to achieve the # 1 ranking, but you compete with other SEO firms. And the client is too often so stupid that he believes he can expect you to excel and be # 1, against anyone else, and at the same time pick up the cheapest price quote that you have provided.
My first impression was that this article has been written from the perspective of advanced SEO. But my final judgment is that it has been written from the perspective of advanced intermediate SEO. For instance: If you look at a search results page and say, “We have a problem” you’re at the intermediate level. If you look at a search results page and say, “Well, stuff happens”, you’re doing advanced SEO.
Advanced SEO, to use Wiep's terminology, cannot have anything more advanced above it, by definition. Otherwise we must invent ugly terms like super-advanced SEO, for instance, which only help us to demote the formerly thought to be advanced SEO to a lower status. Which means that our process of categorization has not been really completed. The same logical process can be accomplished without inventing new terms, just by being more careful with what we choose to include in the advanced SEO category and what we choose to include in the lower, intermediate SEO category.
And therefore, if we categorize SEO by what we actually do and what we think about what we observe, things will always flow like water from high to low, because the practice of SEO and the reflection which accompanies the work of the better SEO practitioners is always in advance. If only thanks to the growing number and sophistication of the obstacles invented by the search engines to protect their search results from our manipulation - their advance.
However, if we reserve the advanced category for the meta perspective, for thinking about the limits and not the contents of SEO, we will not yet completely stop this conceptual flow from high to low, but it will always be clear what remains in the top level - thinking about the limits of SEO and the creative process of inventing solutions, if possible. The results of the creative process, the actual solutions, will flow into the upper part of intermediate SEO to be used at once by their inventor and after a short or longer process of digestion by some others. (The crowds, as usual, don't think that there is a limit to what they know and certainly dislike philosophizing about the limits of they can possibly know. Even though, in this particular case, there are only a few and well-known culprits responsible for the limits of SEO knowledge.)
Wiep wrote that saying “Well, stuff happens” instead of “We have a problem” while looking at a search results page on which our web page has dropped down or even dropped out of it, means thinking from an advanced SEO position in the first case and from a lower, intermediate SEO position in the second case. Well, for once stuff happens all the time. And think of just two out of many possible scenarios:
1. We are # 9 for a given search query, we employ a new optimization technique we have good reasons to trust its promises for success, many weeks pass but nothing happens. Possible explanation: anyone above us and those closely below us employ the same technique, so the relevance scores rise but the gaps between them remain too stable for allowing rankings change.
2. We are # 11 for that search query and we employ a new optimization technique we have good reasons to trust its promises for success, and soon enough we jump to # 9 while the former # 9 drops to # 10 and the former # 10 drops to # 11. At this point we still don't know whether the advance in rankings is real - whether it is accompanied by a real advance in the relevance score - or whether it is false and the relevance score has actually dropped down too dangerously close to that of the page at # 12. Because I, and the SEOs of the pages formerly at # 9 and 10 have all of us employed the same harmful technique, but those two were much more industrious than lazy me!
The terminology used in the second scenario is helpful for describing the unknown facts behind the appearances in a particular case. It cannot be immediately turned into SEO practice in the positive sense of doing this and not that, but it should be used as a permanent warning sign not to believe that the appearances are all there is and not to trust what the appearances show. It belongs therefore to the meta SEO, to the advanced SEO.
Sorry for arguing with Wiep - the real author of the article is of course Michael Martinez.
SEO in highly competitive arenas is for the big boys. SEM Australia and Australian SEO are
obviously not very competitive.
@JamesDuthie - the competitiveness of an arena has nothing to do with the size of the firms who own the websites that show up in the top rankings for the search phrase that identifies that arena. It only has to do with the relevance score of the website that now occupies your targeted ranking - usually # 10 - versus the relevance scores of the websites that occupy the same ranking in other arenas.
The terms SEM Australia and Australian SEO are not popular. One way to get an impression (though not reliable data) is to compare them with other search phrases in Google Trends. These two phrases are reported as having insufficient search traffic - which is probably why other SEO firms don't bother to optimize their websites for them, and the few who do didn't invest enough work to get high relevance scores.
You can pose as an expert by talking like one and by writing like one. But can you pose thinking like an expert without really thinking like one? Ever heard of those phony physicians working in hospitals for years? Do they really think like physicians or do they merely imitate the output of a medically-trained thought process? - "OK. Lets give him 50 mg of Querdowaxyl and measure the blood pressure again".
I just got a lesson in talking (and perhaps also thinking) like an expert from my two-years old grandson, while driving him home the other day. He spends the time commenting from the backseat on all sorts of things, and this time it was "Grandmom works in a hospital. Grandfather Emanuel, what do you work?" It took me some time and I found no way to describe SEO accurately to a two-years old guy. So his grandmother tried to save my face, "he works on the Internet".
"Aha...," he said, "...on the Internet."
Story: Top 10 SEO Myths V2
"No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” Really? I can. And not in the weak sense of the "money back if you're not # 1" guarantee but in the strong sense of "I guarantee that you will be # 1 for this particular search query most of the time". There are two ways to achieve this feat:
1. Pick up search queries that are extremely uncompetitive - the dishonest way.
2. Ensure sufficient budget so that the current # 1s do not gain relevance score at a rate that is higher than the rate at which you try to catch up and overcome them - the honest way. Which is obviously what those SEO firms servicing websites that are # 1 for years do.
Story: Top 10 SEO Myths
In this case the current # 1's relevance score most probably rises at a rate that is higher than the rate your can increase your client site's relevance score trying to catch up with him and overcome him. Conclusion: the budget of most clients cannot guarantee # 1 rankings. Mostly because they're asking for price quotes and choose the cheapest or because there often is absolutely no relation between the 'customized' price quote and the difficulty of the task.
Story: State of the nation - What is SEO?