2012-02-14 @ admin
If you and your company are spending hundreds to thousands of dollars a month on Search Engine Optimization services, you might want to rethink it.
With the demise of the yellow pages in favor on online search, many companies shifted their marketing budgets from yellow pages to spending roughly the same amount of money to have SEO companies get them to the top of the search engines.
But in the last few months the SEO world has been silently rocked. I say silently, because the truth is, most average business-people are totally unaware of what’s been going on in the world of Google. I’m not saying SEO companies are unaware, but they’re not likely to tell you.
Here’s the thing … I don’t think they were doing this entirely on purpose, but Google has been inflating search counts for years. So if you’re paying an SEO company to get you to page one for some number of keywords, thinking you’re getting exposure to some number of people searching on those keywords, and you’re paying that SEO company based on the number of exposures you think you’re getting, you’re probably paying more for this service than you would ever pay for normal media.
For example, one of my very important keywords is the phrase “marketing speaker.” In the past, Google told me there were roughly 5,400 global searches on that keyword alone, every month. Well, those kinds of numbers got me excited and encouraged me to put considerable effort into raising my rankings.
The problem was with the way Google counted their search results. They weren’t just counting the people who typed in the keyword “marketing speaker,” they were counting any search where the words “marketing” and “speaker” came up. Like “How to market audio speakers” for example.
In a sincere effort to serve searchers better — and to defeat companies that were trying to game the system — Google has once again changed its algorithms, or the way they evaluate searches. In short, it has placed considerable additional emphasis on “relevance.” And it has cracked down on itself in the way it counts searches.
Now, when I check the number of people monthly who search on the keyword “marketing speaker,” I get an accurate count of only those people who type in the exact phrase “marketing speaker.”
And here’s the rub … that number is only 590, globally, per month.
Yeah, that’s right. Just a smidge over 10 percent of the exposure I had previously thought I was getting.
And my understanding is, that kind of numbers drop is fairly common across most searches.
Now, let me ask you something. If you were paying $2,000 a month for a yellow page presence, would you be happy about
making that investment I if you knew that ad I would be in front of just I 10 percent of the people I you thought it would be i exposed to?
What about a I radio campaign? Would I you happily pay $2,000 1 for a flight of ads if you knew it would only reach about 10 percent of the audience the station told
you it was going to reach?
We already know what’s happening to newspaper ad space and ad rates as readership plummets.
And in each of these traditional media, you at least know your ad will be run at a certain place or time. You have control over the size and how much or how little is said in the ad.
Not so with search. You may bought seo company services and pay SEO companies a monthly fee for them to “work on” getting you to page one for the keywords you want. They can’t promise it will be there tomorrow. On the contrary, they promise it won’t. They can’t tell you exactly when it will get there, although they do promise you’ll climb the ladder. (Trouble with climbing the ladder is, it’s exactly like climbing a ladder. Being somewhere in the middle is of absolutely no value whatsoever. The only time you can cash in is once you reach the top.)
And finally, when you do get there, you’re on the page with exactly the same look, feel and even word-count of at least 10 other players on that page, and perhaps as many as 20.
All this, and now I’m the messenger who tells you, even when you reach the top, you’re not reaching anywhere near the number of people you thought you were. Don’t shoot me.
So — what to do?
Here are your alternatives:
While I made it to page five on Google by modifying my site, I have now gotten to the top of page two by consistently contributing online content — particularly video content — to my online community. Out of pocket to accomplish all of this … ZERO.