The 5HITS

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…

Internet, Online marketing Digital Strategy, In-house SEO, Marketing, Marketing managers, Search Engine Marketing, SEO, SEO Training

Google has finally come out and confirmed the “Vince change” which favours big brands.

Outrage, arms thrown in air, search engine optimisation (SEO) has changed for ever…

So what does this mean? Firstly Google admits making a number of changes continually, so this is 1 of 3-400 annually which occur annually, and it is a change, not an update. So put your arms down and read further.

Matt Cutts at Google has tried to explain it, we think it goes further. According to Google, the dial has been turned up from brands and thus related generic keywords, searchineland gives great examples around “air tickets” and airlines.

What Google has said, via the Matt Cutts video:

Trusted sites, potentially brands will rank, as they are trusted. Trusted essentially means:

• PageRank
• Legacy (Age)
• Quality and unique content
• Technical soundness of the site
• No spam
• Good linking structure and outbound links to other quality sites
• Good inbound links from other quality/ expert site

COMMENT: If you give users high quality search results, they will keep on using your search engine. So whats new?

Given the average length of a query is 3-5 words and 25% of all searches each year are new, this only impacts a small number of search terms. Matt Cutts has confirmed this as well.

ISSUE:The change may only affect a small number of search terms, but… most brands are related to products, and if they are a big brand these products are generally popular. Take air tickets for example, which has significant search volumes behind the term. I believe that if you looked at the affected seach volumes as a % of total search volumes this may tell a different story. Effectively, this means that most of the generic terms related to large brands are searched on a lot, they are generally highly competitive terms. Saying the long tail is not affected is fine, but who targets long tail search terms, other than SEO’s who guarantee # 1 rankings.

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Search Marketing SEO

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…

Paid Search, Search Marketing Marketing managers, SEO