This week I’ve heard the same extremely poor advice given to two separate companies regarding what they intend to do with their SEO campaign. It’s bad news, but it seems people are still giving out not only rubbish advice, but dangerous advice that could end up with your site being banned. Yes, it’s that bad.

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Sorry, boring blog today, but I just wanted to prove that we do work for some people and don’t just write blogs. I’ll prove that by writing a blog…

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I *love* the iPhone, it’s the bestest gadget in the world ever bar none but I just don’t get the big hoo-har over the latest addition to the updated software.

Apparently it can now cut and paste text from applications. People have been crying out for this since version 1.

Really? Is it that big a deal?

Maybe it’s just me.

One of the very first things we ask when discussing a new SEO campaign with a customer is “Can we see your site statistics”. This is usually after we have been told how many thousands of hits they receive every day to their site. Very often the answer is “we don’t have any”, sometimes followed by “can’t you tell us?”.

It’s an interesting dilemma, we as the experts are expected to know a lot about the web, search engine optimization and how to make pages rank highly for specific keywords. We’re expected to know this for every industry we deal with. Whether you sell a specialist widget or a commodity, as the experts we are supposed to be able to tell you about your market, your niche and how many people are searching for your stuff.

This is the same with all marketing. If you go and ask your local marketing company to advertise your product in the most cost-effective way to the sort of customers who would want to buy it, the marketing executive is expected to be able to do this. They’re being paid to know and so you would expect to be able to get an answer quickly.

I’ll let you into a secret. If your SEO or marketing company gives you an answer straight away, move on. There is absolutely no way a company can tell you all about your niche without doing at least some research, and this is why we ask for your analytics. We don’t know anything about your business because you’ve only just called us up. Even if we’ve dealt with others in your industry, you are different and so we need to investigate why you’re different. If your argument goes along the line of “We’re the same as this company or that company” then you need to find yourself another business.

Google Analytics should be the most important installation on your web site. You should have it running from day one and it should be collecting data. You can then give that data to your SEO company who can then tell you a little bit about your business. But why is it so special?

Well, the analytics will tell you exactly who has visited your site, what they do there and how long they spent. It will also tell you two important pieces of very interesting information. It will tell you what keywords they used and where they came from.

The keyword analysis is very important and it is here that we have been able to highlight the mistakes many people have been making. For example, I recently visited a company that were proud of their number one ranking for a particular keyword. I asked them how many sales they got from it and they just didn’t know. I asked them how many visitors they got from it and they didn’t know that either. However, they did have analytics installed, they just hadn’t looked at them.

And here’s the rub: it’s OK embarking on a search engine optimisation campaign and it’s OK to throw a lot of money at it, but if you don’t test and measure your campaign then you are wasting your time. In the company above, they had spent money on promoting this particular set of keywords and the hadn’t even bothered to see if they were effective. I looked at their analytics and not surprisingly nobody had ever visited their site using the keywords they had proudly pushed to number one on Google. Not only that, using the keyword analysis tool that Google provide, it would have been easy to have saved themselves a lot of money because it seems only a few people use those keywords anyway.

Google Analytics is absolutely essential if you are going to ensure your SEO campaign is effective. Without it, your efforts are simply being wasted and you should consider spending your marketing budget elsewhere.

Google used to just serve up a bunch of web pages when you searched for ‘rocket shoes’ and suchlike. Because they got clever, then they started showing you the cheapest rocket shoes you could buy from certain retailers.

Then came maps and we no longer needed to phone the AA for directions to Dawlish Warren (avoiding mud tracks, truck stops and C-roads).

Are they content with that? No, they now want to get down to the street level and show you people nicking stuff too.

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Yellow Pages does it, your local business directory does it and a myriad of local directories do it to great effect, so why don’t you do it? Why do you try to dominate page one of Google for a single keyword when realistically, you’re not likely to get there for a good year or so?

One can only assume the answer is something to do with vanity, but by taking this route you are missing out on thousands of business opportunities and the obvious wealth that comes with it. You see, many people are quite happy to look for their next product locally and not go nationwide and the number of people doing this is increasing as the web gets ever more confusing.

Although many will buy small items such as books and CDs quite happily over the Internet and put their trust in the mail to deliver on time, there are those that will not be so happy purchasing large items or, in particular, services over such great distances. What’s the point of hiring a business consultant from Leeds if your company is based in Suffolk? So web users are getting savvy and using ‘local search’ and confining their results to the area in which they live.

This isn’t even a new phenomena, it’s been going on for years and many localised directories have sprung up to take advantage of it. Think of local directory and sites like ‘The Best Of’ and ‘City Local’ spring to mind. These have taken over from Yell in the local directory stakes and their search results very often appear very high on Google.

But something’s changing. If you’re an adwords user then you will have already noticed that Google gives you the ability to ‘draw’ the area where you want your adverts to appear – so Google now knows where people are searching from so they can provide the best results for that area.

Users of search though are getting even more savvy and are now starting to add their location to the query. For example, ‘SEO Services Birmingham’ for West Midlands based companies is now becoming common. It’s probably the same for your industry too.

There’s also another benefit in that the competition is probably much less than for your product name alone. Concentrate on optimising for your product in a particular area and you can save money and get a more prominent position in the rankings.

The biggest barrier to getting anything done is time. Knowledge is the easy bit and many people read books and study courses under the impression that once the knowledge is lodged in that business brain of yours that you will somehow be able to utilize it within a few hours and become a master of the skill.

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I’m always going on about how you should be beefing up your marketing, especially the online stuff, but how do you manage that? I know, you’ve got loads of bits of paper knocking about that you don’t know what to do with – that’s rubbish, you need a CRM system.

But they’re expensive.

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I promise, my earlier post was written before I read about this! I don’t plan these things y’know, I just let them happen and today we’ve seen that Toys ‘R’ Us (I tried to find a backwards ‘R’ but couldn’t), has splashed out a whopping $5Million on the domain ‘Toys.com’.

Still think you shouldn’t be on the Internet?

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