OrangeSoda Internet Marketing Blog

This post was written by Dan who is on our search engine optimization SEO team.

For every 10 people writing about SEO one person might actually be doing it. Here’s some practical advice on working with your SEO to get the most out of your SEO campaign.

Set expectations upfront

Do you expect most of the work to be onsite or do you want SEOs to leave your site alone and focus on link building? That’s the kind of stuff that’s important to know up front. Normally it should be a combination of the two which leads me to my next point.

Be sure there is a clear channel for onsite changes

Here’s how it works, we send you over an onsite change and the client makes the changes. Normally we have an expectation of how long something like that should take. The longer it takes the more we have to divert spend that would go towards onsite optimizations to link building.

At the onset of the engagement the SEO working on the account normally sends over a site analysis with some information on the types of things we’d like to change. You may be working with a web devloper and if there are limitations on what kinds of changes can be made we should be made aware of it up front. If the site uses non-standard ways of doing things we should be aware right off the bat.

Recognize that you’re paying for someone else to know SEO

You may have heard about SEO and even attended a conference on it but you probably don’t know nearly as much as you think about SEO. Clients often come with pre-convieved notions about what should be done but often the ideas are outdated and no longer effective. If we don’t seem to think something is important it’s probably because it isn’t. Here’s an example: clients want to know where they should “hide text” to stuff keywords in. This just in from 1995, you shouldn’t! Keyword stuffing might have worked 10 years ago but these days that stuff will get you banned.

That goes for everything. Sometimes a client might get upset that they don’t have a certain link but maybe that resource isn’t good anymore but people are still talking about it like it is. We put a lot of time and effort into being on top of the game and understanding how search engines are currently looking at the internet. What used to work may not work now, even if it’s popular. Trust us on this one.

Understand how to measure success

Generally for SEO our only metric is ranking. Traffic can go up and down for lots of reasons, conversions can go up and down for lots of reasons. If you’re paying for SEO then you can expect your rankings to go up! It may take 6 months to start seeing that but it’s how we measure success.

At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what we do to get results, all that matters is that we got them. Of course we adhere to Google’s SEO guidelines and we keep our work whitehat (adhering to Google’s standards). I highly recommend that link btw.

At some point there has to be trust

By all means we want to satisfy every customer enquiry and explain every piece of information to full satisfaction but in the end there needs to be a level of trust for us to be effective. Like the stock market there will be ups and downs in your rankings in the short term, but overall we want the general trend to go up over time.

Here’s an example of a complaint I heard recently: a client was mad about concerned over some “blackhat” links that they had “uncovered.” With a closer look the “blackhat” links were just from a scraper pulling content off a legitimate site. A) That’s not a problem B) We didn’t do anything wrong.

Here’s the point: we know what we’re doing. No one knows Google’s algorithm but we have a lot of experience getting rankings and long lasting results. We are passionate about our work and hope we want to see your SEO success as much as you do. Following these guidelines will help ensure your SEO campaign goes smoothly.