The 5HITS

SMX Sydney 2010 was held Thursday and Friday this week at the Hilton. SMX has grown in stature in recent years as the event for the search industry. Bruce Clay was an exhibitor and during my time at the booth met a number of interesting people and companies, all looking for more traffic from search online.

For more on SMX Sydney 2010 you can get the complete coverage from the Bruce Clay blog, the whole event was live blogged by our very own Bruce Clay blogger Marc Ellison. Read all the detail on the Bruce Clay SEO Blog, here.

As I work in an SEO agency we are constantly recruiting SEO staff. The challenges we have include:

• Recruiters do NOT understand our business, no matter how much they say they do
• People overstate their own capabilities

I always joke and say when I see a resume, the person looks so good I feel I should report to them. When you interview, you get about half of what the resume said, thanks to the resume writers and online resume tools. Then what you end up hiring is about half of what was represented in the interview. So 25% of the initial resume. The other side of this I accept is that with all the resumes this way, we take the best looking ones, which may be a somewhat flawed approach, but it is hard selecting from multiple applications.

Don’t get me wrong we have great staff, who are loyal and who field calls from recruiters at least once per week. Keeping up with rising salaries is also a challenge. Nobody calls me though, cannot understand why. Put it this way, we hire people with little or some experience, train them heavily, pay them increasing market related rates, and give them a performance based bonus, and all this time adding serious value to them, through skills, experience and education. Should they not be paying us for the opportunity? I ask myself everyday? Just kidding.

On average what we consider to be a senior SEO person for hiring is not what gets presented as a senior SEO person. In fact most of the so called 1-2 years experience people we hire are good as analysts and where he have hired managers this has ended in tears.

The impact on our industry is as follows:

• Agencies hiring in, to fill a competency, often do not know the ins and outs of SEO and are reliant on this person to deliver
• Companies hiring SEO’s are buying their past experience which is often small websites and expecting them to pull top rankings out of the hat for large dynamic websites
• There are few very experienced SEO people out there who have worked on and succeeded with large dynamic websites. I can probably name around 15, but hey maybe my SEO circle is small.

Read more…

The global financial crisis means the economy will flow down. While things look bad there are opportunities out there, just not where you maybe looking. If you sell things that people really don’t need, then this may not be for you.

• While hair dressers might be doing it tough, sellers of hair treatments and dye are doing very well as more people do their hair at home to save money
• While weekend getaway hotels might be doing it tough, flower deliveries are up as people choose cheaper options to treat their loved ones
• While air travel is down, regional hotels are getting the business as people stay closer to home
• People are moving away from media advertising to search marketing due to the ROI and from paid toward more SEO based approaches. Social marketing is big, why do you think?

In every industry there is a flow down economy. Are you tapping into yours?

How is your GFC?

I meet a number of business owners, corporate managers and CEO’s and the first question usually how is business? In other words, we seem to be doing OK, are you guys doing OK? With all the bad news around, we are not sure if things are good or bad. On average I would sum up responses and the feeling toward the economy as such:

• So far we seem to be tracking OK, given the bad economic news
• We are not rushing out to hire and have not replaced certain people
• Revenues are in a range of 10%  up to 10% down on prior year

Keep in mind these companies are generally still profitable and thus engaging my services or about to. I accept sometimes people are frugal with the truth. So if you are reading this and doing it tough I accept there are real issues out there in certain industries. If you look at the Classifind job index, that also tells part of the story.

Consider your business model?

1. Marketing & sales

• Have you reconsidered who your customer is, your customer profile?
• Have you considered whether your customer needs have changed? They may still be buying but for different reasons.
• Have you considered new customer markets on a needs basis, and how to reach these people?
• Are you still paying to market to the wrong target customers?
• Where is the current spend and are you tapping into it?

2. Customer service

• Where is your customer service dollar being spent, still on the upper end? Are you servicing customers who are no longer buying? Read more…

Reading George F Colony’s Blogcalled the Counterintuitive CEO on how what CEOs will face next with respect to the recession and how it will act a s a gateway connecting 2 different era’s got me thinking on the top things CEOs should be considering to get them through this gateway or portal with business intact.

1. There is always opportunity. It just looks different, maybe now it is less abundant, but it is there. Opportunity + Planning = success. Testing ideas online is cheap.
2. There is no such thing as an unprofitable business. Just unprofitable business models.
3. Stay clean, squeaky clean. The digital trail never dies. Manage your life and your associated online reputation carefully.
4. Invest in your digital properties and digital footprint. Proactively managing your online customer and future customer base is key. Make sure your selection processes for vendors and software are sound.
5. Educate yourself on all things digital. Take a course. Invest some time. Understand search engine marketing (SEM) and especially search engine optimisation (SEO) and how it applies to your business. Read more…

We know the number of web pages is growing exponentially, more and more content is out there.

We know that around 75% of small businesses do not even have a web presence, try searching for a butcher in your local suburb. This will grow over the next 3 years.

We know that large companies can afford good web design and search engine optimisation (SEO) firms to help them build their rankings in search engines.

We know that Google is largely dependent on search related revenue and continued growth, and it is thus critically important for them to keep users engaged with search results.

We know that human beings are creatures of habit and that most will not act more than around 30% of the accepted norm.

Finally, we know search is a set of software based rules, search engines cannot see the patterns or form opinions, it is rule based.

So what? I hear you think?

Well, if most established sites and companies can afford large websites and the best SEO advice money can buy, the chances of a smaller company ranking for a highly searched on term does not look so good from the start, and we know search users will use similar key terms to find things. In fact Google helps with the suggest feature. So other than for obscure, long tail items, pretty much,  you are going to see the same culprits ranking for certain keywords, being branded, well known large organisations. Right? In fact search users get comfort they have used the right search terms when they see brands they recognise in the results who provide the product or service they are after.

So if 20% of all keywords provide 80% of the traffic and there is big dollars behind these search terms, how will Google keep users engaged in search results which have the potential to become increasingly similar for similar terms, other than to encourage them to click past the first page of results.

Read more…

It had to happen, somebody had to link SEO and the global financial meltdown together so thought it should rather be me than someone more qualified to comment. Does it help that I was, actually still am an accountant?

So the United States and certain other countries will be bailing out some of the larger financial institutions by either buying up distressed assets or by lending more money into the banking system as some of the banks are too scared to lend to each other and the system is bunging up I think the highly leveraged finance deals and credit default swaps (CDS) still have to come out somewhere, just not sure where. You can read more great articles on CDS’s by those who do this for a living at Bankaholic on what is going on and where it is happening.

So while the US, UK and everywhere else appears to be melting, from my dealings with business in Australia both large and small, I feel there is a sense of we should be cutting costs, managing budgets, things are bad but nothing drastic from a business perspective has changed in certain sectors so its a tad confusing. I have also noticed a higher interest in SEO and discussions around how to reduce paid advertising.

If I were a Marketing Manager

I would want sure fire ways to bring customers seeking my product or service to my website to convert them or introduce them to my brand at the lowest possible cost.

1. I would spend some time ensuring my paid search campaigns were highly focused, conversion based and delivering at a set cost per customer acquisition or transaction. Why mess with a formula that works and that could potentially deliver even a higher ROI as more folks potentially cut their marketing budgets Read more…

Trusted sites are dead, or are they?

Past behaviour: Find a source that provides good service, good content and is credible. Return there whenever you need more information. You trust that it is the best.

New Behaviour: Loyalty is dead. When I need something I search. I cannot recall the sites visited. When I find what Im looking for I stop, use and move on.

Hypothesis: Your homepage is no longer the doorway to your website, the search engines are. They will deem the most appropriate page in your site to the search engine query and then deliver that page to the user, the user can drop in anywhere. Users don’t necessarily want a user experience they want specific information or knowledge, thus the query. A user process or experience also usually starts from the homepage and works ina  logical manner, most users don’t, due to search.

Impact on design: Traditional design focuses on the homepage as the entry point, traditionally a clean splash type page and the usage or words, considered cool

The world has changed: When designing or building your new website consider the following, to

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