Greetings chicklets! Or chicklettes. Chickhims? Whatever floats your boat really.

The blog is back, live and kicking, and getting started with determination on the pebbly path that is 2012. First up, a few thoughts from yours truly, as the most recent member of the blogging team. My topic? Sharing is caring. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may have noticed  the world and his wife posting up their thoughts on Google’s latest upset – Google Search plus Your World – over the last 48 hours. SEOs in general are very very good at jumping on hot new topics and getting an opinion blog post up and written before you even think the words ‘SEO is dead’. Did I hear someone whisper ‘linkbait’?

Having worked in a variety of agencies for some years now (I know I know, I don’t look a day over 21 but really….), I’ve noticed that we are not always so good at communicating with non-seos. Let’s face it, if we think we can get an opinion piece out there before the next Joe Seoggs, get us a bunch of links, and look clever to our peers, we’ll do it in a heartbeat. All too often however, not so educated clients and colleagues are left by the wayside. It may not feel as important, or as useful, but don’t forget the people around you.

Here’s some thoughts on betters ways to be reactive, pro-active and generally just a little more active:

Reactive

-          Ensure that you produce a very simple one to two page document that is accessible to all explaining the update. What has happened, what does it mean, what do they need to do. Done. This can ensure your company and your clients are all well prepared.

-          Be prepared for Round 2, no update happens without a 2^nd fallout and reaction to follow shortly after.

-          Have an opinion! Nobody is right or wrong. Take the risk and say what you think. You are the expert here!

Pro-active

-          Make a template – it’s rare that updates or announcements aren’t going to fit the What Happened, What Does it Mean, What Do I Need to Do’ mould so make life as simple for yourself as possible. Have a simple template ready to update and pdf.

-          Make it clear and official. Simple but effective! Create a brand around your updates.

-          Ensure these updates are regular – it’s not just about raising your profile in the SEO industry. Make sure people at work get to know you and what you do. Whether you work in an SEO only agency, in-house or in a wider agency like me, it is good to get out there!

-          Make sure internal and external partners are on the mailing list, it doesn’t just have to be people you work directly with. A person casually reading your name at the bottom of an update today might be the one who thinks of you when some SEO work pops up in 6 months time.

Just Plain Active

-          Take an interest in other people’s work and they may take an interest in yours. You scratch their back, they might scratch yours. SEOs tend to get stuck in a pigeon-hole, it’s worth taking a look around the rest of the world, especially the digital world, too.

Sorry SEO Chicks, for not providing the blog with an update on the Google Search plus Your World shenanigans, then again maybe it’s better not to be the 5000^th post saying the same thing and try to learn something else from the experience instead?

And on that note, hat tip to Beccy Weeks and Sam Crocker for leading me on this by example. Big respect.

Panda Out.

I’ve been feeling a little SEOfatigued of late. Sick of hearing the same old regurgitated advice and seeing the same old presentation. I’ve found myself withdrawing from Twitter and retreating to smaller communities where the discussion is much more specific and emerges from real, in-the-field observations and results. And you know what? I’m learning more, much faster, and in a shorter amount of time. So, this isn’t a Twitter-diss; but more a natural evolution of my own approach to (constantly) learning SEO. I was pleasantly surprised and pleased when this book landed in my inbox reason being the content is very much of the insider-perspective, using situational examples as opposed to any grand SEO theory.

About the Author, Editor and Book

“SEO ROI: Advanced SEOs’ 7 Curiously Obvious Rules and 30 Singular Tactics That Illustrate Them” is authored by Gabriel Goldenberg an SEO and CRO consultant of considerable experience, with a range of industry speaking experience.

SEO ROI is edited by Richard Kershaw, who again has considerable experience of many areas of online marketing from both blue-chip and affiliate perspectives and is currently running the successful gift experience website Wish.co.uk

Download a free chapter of the book.

Style

Divided into two sections, the first looking at overarching guiding principles, “the Rules”, which include sound advice such as “Teach Yourself” (rule 2); and the second section (30 singular tactics) looks at very specific, situational dilemmas and challenges any SEO or marketer in-the-field may face, with advanced solutions that solve or circumvent the issue with an ROI-positive solution. Each of the 30 tactics is premised on adherence to “the rules”.

As an example Rule 2 starts with useful points on how and where to seek knowledge within the industry; from blogs to books to good ole’ fashioned networking in the real world.

I particularly enjoyed the section on testing – classic A/B split-test methods looking at the object, existing theories, independent and dependent variables and how to measure the effects on the dependent variable. Included is a great step by step walk-thru in testing; from Step 1 “create a hypothesis, to Step 5 “Measure and Analyze”. There’s also a great deal of emphasis placed on critical thinking, as a mindset or effective approach for SEO practise, observation and test; and this is espoused throughout, including detailing some fundamental steps to thinking critically. Something that resonated quite clearly for me was Rule 5 “Define the Problem”. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen clients and staff react in something of a panic, making all kinds of plans and solutions prior to refining and defining exactly what a perceived issue may be.

Sensibly, Rule 6, recommends challenging assumptions; something I wholeheartedly agree with. Without those that dare to challenge there’s no progress surely? I was particularly pleased to see a section devoted to Inductive Validity “Inductive validity is another way of measuring the truth of an argument. Instead of setting the threshold as truth in 100% of the cases, inductive validity looks for a claim to be probably true.”

Here’s the thing…
DO NOT SKIP “The Rules” and head straight to the paydirt! Whilst the later sections of the book may be naturally more absorbing and resonating for a practising SEO I can assure you that this structure and the content therein is extremely valid.

Best Bits

I don’t want to give away too much of the excellent content detailed in the 30 tactics, but to highlight a few tactics that were fresh thinking for me: Writing Conditional  CSS for Higher Conversion – details a range of four solutions, including the ethics of each method, Link Prospecting Using Demographic Matching – with guidance on how to; and in particular a tactic Gab has described as “Message Matching”, which is an awesome tactic and unfortunately something I can’t really describe without giving away the crown jewels.

Room for Improvement?

I couldn’t find fault with this. And I’m picky.

Overall

A truly advanced book for experienced practitioners that are in a position to evaluate solutions based on wider business objectives and ethical frameworks.

Don’t just take my word for it – get your free chapter and see for yourself.

One of the hardest questions to answer when anyone asks about online reputation management is how to deal with negative reviews. There are as many solutions as there are reviewers, and while it may be best to ignore some, responding to others with humour, a genuine desire to be better and a bit of imagination can go a lot further.

That’s why it caught my eye when the legendary @Chiropractic (come on, how many Chiropractors do you think there are in the world who know more about internet marketing than most internet marketers) aka Mike Dorausch tweeted about a negative review he had received, and the frankly genius way that he dealt with it.

This is the tweet I saw;

And being the nosey kind of person I am I immediately went to the site and read the review

I was immediately struck by how clean Mikes profile had been up to that point, and wondered, if I had seen it as a consumer, if I would have suspected it of being too clean. It’s a lot more common for people to review negative experiences than positive, so this review profile may indeed have raised some flags with me.
Instead of just talking to myself about it though, I thought I should get a better look at this partiular situation straight from the horses mouth.  So I emailed Mike and did a short interview on his experience of being negatively reviewed.

How do you think customers perceive a totally glowing review profile, and do you think having some less than glowing reviews can have a positive impact on customer perception (making the reviews seem more real?)

I think a totally glowing review profile can be of concern, and I’ve had some say it’s makes them question if all reviews are legitimate. As far as less than glowing reviews, I believe it depends on the type of negative review, in my experience it provides something to talk about and does help things appear real.

Can you explain how you handled the review, and what followed (both with the reviewer and putting the review on your wall)

We had a 2 star review on Yelp, which included some odd observations about our business, which made me curious. I took a screenshot of the review and printed it, taping it to the front desk where every client could read it (they all did). Observing how clients reacted was quite educational. Nobody publicly agreed with the reviewer but I asked each person if it would potentially affect them choosing a business had they not ever been to it. One of our new clients said they had read the review before calling, saying they thought it seemed out of context from what else was written about us online.

What do you think is more important as a small business, handling a review in terms of it’s impact on business, or working to turn it into a positive experience for you as an individual?

Both. I think very few people have any clue how much stress small business owners go through, so if it can be made positive it’s worth something. If the review is accurate, it’s an opportunity to improve on whatever can be done to see it doesn’t happen again. If it’s not accurate, there’s an opportunity to get feedback from clients confirming that. A few even went online to share their experiences, people that have been with us 1, 2 or 3 years, not merely for a single visit.

And finally, how exactly do you manage to stay so happy that people complain about it?

I love being a chiropractor and I believe that being passionate about what one does comes through to people. The reality is that there’s always someone who’s going to be turned off by another’s happiness, and they’ll often make an effort to bring you down. If we stop moving forward they win.

From talking to Mike about this particular situation, and thinking over how I have seen complaints most successfully dealt with in the past, I think I can boil the answer to the question ‘how should I deal with a negative review’ down to one far more simple answer than I ever could before;

Respond to negative reviews with a genuine desire to see things put right and improve on what went wrong, and if you can’t then perhaps no reasponse is the best response.

My silence on SEO Chicks over the last few months, and indeed lack of community involvement all round, has been something of a worry to me. While there was good reason for it (Like Moving counties twice, I’m now in Costa Rica, lucky devil that I am), it has given me some time to think about the role that the SEO community plays in influencing my marketing strategies for clients.

What I’ve found now that the dust has settled though, is that this temporary removal from the online marketing community, has helped me see things in a different light, helping me to develop better strategies, and understand my client’s customers better.

I have come to realise that the majority of the world does not see the internet the way I do, in fact there are even people out there, working in marketing, in their 20-30′s who have never heard of LOL Catz or The Oatmeal, true story.

So I wanted to give you my top 3 ways to try and gain some of the perspective of those poor unfortunates who aren’t jacked into the net 24/7 and aren’t being exposed to the witticisms of college humour & cracked every day, without you having to  go through the expense and stress of moving your life to another country.

Talk to people, and I don’t mean on Twitter

Yes that’s right folks, those IRL friends who laugh at you when you tell them about twitter, or call someone you have only met online a good friend. Those are the people you’re marketing to most of the time, and they have some great perspectives on how they would like to be marketed to.  All you need to do is tone down the lingo, explain some of your reasoning, and not laugh when they tell you how an animated gif of a cat is going to persuade them to buy that new car. Yes some of their ides will be dated or impossible to implement, but listen anyway, they might just  know something you don’t.

Turn off the internet

Oh yes my friend, I went there. You don’t necessarily have to go completely offline, but try downloading thunderbird and getting your emails offline for a day, close down the browser, and schedule some offline work to do. How about reading a book, one one of the many disciplines that overlaps the online marketing industry, traditional marketing or branding for instance. Or just take a team day at the park. You will be amazed at how quickly that little internet exhausted bit of your brain starts to recover and throw great ideas at you.

Pretend you’re here in Costa Rica with me

Now imagine yourself trying to find a pool cleaner, or a dentist, or pretty much anything really. You go to Google, and you find, nothing. Perhaps a blog post from an American Ex-pat complaining how they can’t find a pool cleaner! The internet has not yet become the tool for finding everything and anything here. If you’re anything like me your second thought will be ‘yellow pages’  , but no, you’ll be out of luck there too. People find things here through personal relationships. the pool cleaner is the brother in law of the cleaner, our car salesperson is the grandfather of the same friend who referred me to my dentist and so on and so forth. Everything here is word of mouth referral, and you can see the strength and effectiveness of those personal relationships everywhere, and no one is shy about making the recommendation. So go out and build your network, tell people about great services because they’re great, not because you’re marketing them, and you will find yourself in a stronger position for it.

So there you have it, 3 ways to be a better online marketer, by not being online!

As a child, it used to piss me off no end when my parents would answer my frequent requests for quantification, with the above question.

“How long till we get there?” “When does it stop?” “What time does it get dark?” “How deep is water?” “How much do apples cost?” “How long do Goldfish live?” All such questions would be met with the question “How long is a piece of string?” It’s a colloquial saying which I think is fairly common in the UK, though for sake of clarity means, “It depends.”

Whilst of course it wouldn’t take much for a parent to guess the sort of parameters the childish mind is working within; fill in the necessary missing data points (origin, destination, average case etc.) and give a straight answer, however kids can fire off a phenomenal amount of unquantified questions per second. I find after ten or so in a row, I’ve lost all patience and then it’s time for a game of “Who can lick their own ear?” (Two minutes of silence, guaranteed. Bliss.)

Never getting a straight answer is annoying. As adults we can’t help but feel we’re being fobbed off, or worse; deceived in some way. So I can sympathise with many of the online marketing professionals that I meet, that complain that SEO professionals never seem to be able to give a straight answer; however when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, I would argue that most good practitioners will decline to offer an immediate answer to questions like…

“How many links do I need?”

“How long till I get to page one?”

“What changes need to be made?”

“Why is my content not indexed?”

“How come [competitor] is number one?”

Given the sheer number of factors and dependencies, research and analysis is required to even begin to answer questions such as these. Even then, it would be foolhardy to give a guaranteed answer. However, I’m getting a bit sick of hearing myself say “It depends…” in response to every initial question in a first meeting (or words to that effect.) To the uninitiated it must seem at times as if SEO professionals have adopted the same tactics as the bad mechanic. This response is the SEO equivalent of raises bonnet, sharp intake of breath, tuts and shakes head.

Of course this isn’t really the case, and there are numerous, extremely valid reasons why any good SEO professional is unable to offer immediate answers to questions about quantification.

Multi-dimensional Attributes

Search engine algorithms are complex and comprise hundreds of componants, such componants being weighted and such weights varying frequently. Number of links is immaterial, without frame – in terms of quality, variety, position, type, relvancy, and a load of other weighted considerations assessed.

Factors Outside of One’s Control

We may be able to legislate for our own activities, however a great deal of dependencies are outside of our control – such as competitor activity, significant algorithmic updates, macro socio-economic factors.

Sector Relativity

Even when it comes to perceived wisdom, what is required and valid for one client, may be completely unsuitable for another client. As an example it is generally inadvisable to pursue site-wide footer links, such links being generally low quality, out of context and often unnatural; however in the IT hosting sector, the leading host companies (in business and SERPs) all have a huge majority of sitewide footer links in their backlin profiles. In this sector it is perfectly natural and valid for host company clients to have a “hosted by” footer link, to either the host URL or TOS page. Many high-trafficked and e-commerce brands link to their host as good quality hosting companies have extensive terms of service, codes of practise and sophistocated disaster recovery set-ups.

Resources

Although much of the technical and analytical resource required for SEO is provided by the SEO professional, when it comes to content marketing and sophistocated linkbuilding campaigns, much of this is dependent on the available resources and collatoral provided by the client.

Working with PR and marketing teams to leverage content and brand messaging is a much more efficient and effective strategy at times.

If you are buying or assessing SEO services, please do consider the above points and indeed there are many more reasons not detailed here as to why prospective agencies will not be able to provide on-the-spot answers and guaranteed parameters. In fact, if a prospective service provider does offer immediate quantified guarantees on aspects of your SEO objectives I’d be inclined to question their knowledge and proposed strategy in detail.

As always – DYOR!

Hi there, it’s me…Julie, the one who used to be prolific here but is no longer due to maddening amounts of chaos in my life that now includes a killer bloodhound, a flock of 6 hens, and a fledgling attic squirrel population. However, considering it’s this site that brought a lot of the aforementioned chaos (ie blogging opportunities and proper business) I should take it a bit more seriously, especially as I’m vacationing with the Viking and her family in August and France is the perfect spot for her to beat my ass, because we’ll all be consuming loads of Camembert and local wine. Oh, and omelettes, because that’s listed as the main vegetarian option in Normandy. Yay.

Anyway, looking back over the years, we’ve had some amazing posts here, and I love finding older articles when I do a search for something industry-related mostly because I love seeing how the industry changes, how what we think about a certain metric or technique goes out of fashion or stands up. With that in mind, here’s a list of the 20 most popular SEO Chicks posts over the past 4 years, for your viewing pleasure.

Do You Want To Rank For Large Fish?
Oh My Christ They Got Facebook
The Local File Google Local Business Hijacking Issues
Top 10 Favourite WordPress Plugins By A Pregnant Chick
Twitter Is Not A Social Media Strategy
How To Get More Followers On Twitter If You’re A Girl And Aren’t All That Interesting
SEOs Should Moonlight
How Keyword Matching Is Just A Little Like Online Dating
Shock Horror Blackhat SEO Discussed At SMX Advanced
Why Relevant Links Are Irrelevant
SEO Sheep Are Baaaaaaad
Google I Don’t Get It! Com vs Co.UK
Even A Blind Hog Finds An Acorn Now And Then
The Best Job In The World
How To Interpret What Your Clients Want
Could A Chimp Do SEO? Heck Yes!
What’s Changed In The Matrix? Ehm I Mean Algos
Yoda’s Ultimate Tool List Part 1: Competitive Research
Our Princess Leia: An Interview With Dazzlin’ Donna
Let’s Talk About Spaceships

Dear SEO Deniers,

It seems that there is not a week goes past when one of you doesn’t feel the need to post about what a crock of shit SEO is. I have to admire your tenacity in maintaining this point of view despite the growth and continued success of SEO.

I’ve noticed, over many of these posts, that the majority of you are in fact web developers. It’s quite apparent that you feel SEO’s are stepping on your toes. The charges levelled at us are most often that there is nothing we do that shouldn’t be included in the development of a site. Some of the more aware deniers have conceded that website marketing is necessary (I’m glad that this at least can be acknowledged), but that this isn’t optimisation, it’s marketing and should be sold as such.

So I wanted to tell you that I have never met an SEO who wouldn’t love to be able to get on with the job of marketing without having to deal with the tasks that should be completed during development. However before you start complaining that SEO is a none job, I wanted to encourage you to take a good long look at your own industry, because perhaps you need to clean up your own back yard, before you start complaining about ours.

It is almost impossible for any search engine marketer to get on with the job of marketing a site, until they have corrected all of the issues caused by bad development. It is common to see sites that are created in such a way that no amount of marketing is going to do any good. Sites developed only in flash, robots.txt files that completely prevent a site being crawled, and site architectures designed in such a way that you could be forgiven for thinking that accessing the right information was in fact some sort of IQ test.

If you would like for SEO to no longer be something you feel the need to complain about, I strongly recommend that you work on educating your fellow developers on how to create sites that are ready to be marketed, instead of complaining at us for fixing your mistakes and enabling your clients to make some money from the sites you develop.

Yours, in hope that I never see a badly developed site again.
Sarah

I recently got into a debate with someone about the benefits of social media. This person (who I won’t name because I think they were being an idiot) maintained that the biggest benefit to social media was getting links for SEO, and I have to admit my heart just sank. There is no denying that social media is great for building links, but it’s a side effect of a marketing technique that is far broader reaching and can have a much bigger impact for businesses that do it well.

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the attitude of an individual, but something that is quite widespread in SEO, and it’s not only social media that is met with this attitude of irrelevance, quite often traditional marketing methods are met with similar derision. One of the reasons for this is, I think, is the ability to track ROI so accurately for SEO, we are held accountable in a way that our offline marketing counterparts aren’t, but social media means that we are going to have to learn to accept that the SEO way isn’t the only way, and for that we have to look backwards.

Until the internet, widespread pull marketing didn’t really exist (the yellow pages is perhaps as close as it came), TV, DM, Print, they’re all push marketing methods, working to gain brand awareness, and maintain a steady stream of marketing & advertising so that when someone was ready to buy, your business was at the front of their mind.  When you stop and think about it, social media is far more aligned with this than it is with SEO, but SEO’s are the ones in the position, and with the expertise to take advantage of it.

So what can we take from the decades of learning that traditional marketing offers us

Reporting Results

When traditional marketers track the results of a TV campaign, they don’t look at which ad slot generated the most sales, they can’t, what they look at instead is what uplift the campaign as a whole had on total sales. They may be able to get some additional data from a unique phone number or URL on the ad, but that will only give them a limited view of the overall impact of the campaign. In social media we can track a lot more data than this, looking at weather sales had a social media touchpoint, seeing which mentions had the biggest impact on visitors and more, but fundamentally a consumer may never click through on social media, but the persistent presence of a brand can increase click throughs through other channels, look at overall traffic uplift as well as direct referrals for more meaningful results.

Great Concepts Deliver Great Results

I doubt any advertising agency has ever walked into a pitch with the following “we’re going to talk to people through TV advertising, then we’re going to ask viewers how they feel about you”, yet we quite often hear “engage users through social media and monitor sentiment”. It’s the same idea, and equally useless. When you think about the TV campaigns you remember, they’re usually interesting, funny or shocking concepts, they’re always unique and can have a huge impact on sales for the businesses lucky enough to develop those campaigns.

If you’re going to develop a social media campaign, remember that you need a reason for people to engage, and you need to innovate, there are as many ideas possible for social media as there are for TV ads, we just need to get better at finding them (or work closely with an advertising agency, having done this a lot recently I can honestly say that creative advertising agencies are brimming with ideas they would love you to execute)

Plan for the long term

Most Marketing teams will have a plan, not for this month or next, but for the next 12 if not 18 months. They will plan campaigns and marketing outreach around key times in their business cycle, maximising their opportunities and accordingly their ROI. Social media should be equally well planned out, what are the opportunities in your market place, will that exciting idea you’ve had work better 6 months down the line. Online marketers are used to being able to do everything quickly, and see results equally quickly, but biding your time can have far greater results for your campaigns.

There are a number of things that have led me to this post. I first started thinking about it following Judith’s post on SEO Moonlighting, then I had an experience with my pilates instructor and her website, that has my blood boiling still a week later, and finally Judith turned the SEO accreditation strategy session into a blog post which cemented my ideas and suddenly this post came together. I had planned for this to be the third in the SEO chicks 101 series, but this had to be written (in the way that blog posts often do) so I’m afraid you will have to wait until Thursday if you want to learn more about Keyword strategies.

For now let me tell you about my pilates instructor.

For quite some time now I have been moonlighting. Interestingly when I first read Judith’s post on the subject I disagreed, on the basis that many of us have lives outside of SEO and that there are only a limited number of hours in the day. Then after a lot of thought I realised that I managed to combine my moonlighting with other interests by doing SEO for very small business, on a barter basis. In the last couple of years I have worked with Yarn vendors, rat hammock makers, my optician, and now, my pilates instructor. I get free or discounted products and services, they get very cheap, quality SEO. It’s a win win situation. Most of these people would never be able to afford a good SEO, but because I barter they spend £100-£200 and I get products worth £200-£300. Not only that but I get to work on sites where the owner never argues, or tells me that their branding team won’t let me do something essential.

So when Abbie told me that she was leaving the health centre that she had been doing classes at and branching out on her own, I let her know that if she wanted help marketing her site, to give me a call. I also gave her a few hints, like making sure that she was able to edit the site and that there was a CMS in place to let her make the changes she needed to.

Lo and behold last week she called to let me know her new pilates site was liv, I had a look and wrote out some recommendations for the site. We then arranged for me to go round to show her how she could implement them. This was when it all went horribly wrong. The list of things that her web developer had screwed her on was huge, but some of the biggies were;

Not to mention the sexual harassment from someone who just couldn’t accept that he wasn’t getting a date!

Now, in some ways these aren’t the worst things a developer can do, but for someone who has never worked on line before, they are deal breakers. Abbie had been planning to get business cards printed out the following day, and had she not spoken to me would have built her business around a brand she did not own.

I’m working with Abbie to resolve many of these issues, and look at what we can do with the site on an ongoing basis to help make it manageable for her. She doesn’t need monthly ongoing SEO, she needs educating on the little things that she can do to make her site visible, against relatively few competitors.

So what does this have to do with regulation? When Judith was first venting about this on twitter, I pointed out that it wasn’t the medium sized companies who should know better that I got pissed off about, it was the really small, one man bands, without the resources to find out this information. Abbie proved to be the perfect example of this. So I urge everyone, if in any area of your life outside of work, you deal with small businesses or niche vendors, go out of your way to spend an hour or two to educate them, barter for your time if you want, or jut do it for free. Work with your local small business groups to provide some training, even if they’re not your target businesses. Not because it will bring you business in the future (though it might) but because the only way to beat the charlatans in this industry is to educate the people who are most likely to fall victim to them.

P.S. I haven’t named the web developer in question in this post because that wasn’t the point of the post. Abbie and I are giving him time to correct some of his errors before we look at way to take further action.

Woohoooooooo!

My first post for SEO Chicks and I am bricking it seriously excited and honestly a bit surprised. Not only am I not (by my own standards) a true SEO expert; but I never win anything.

Actually that’s not entirely true. I did once, aged 7, win an ICI health and safety competition for best poster. Mine alerted the general public to the very real and grossly under-estimated risks of overloading an electrical socket with too many appliances. It carried the immortal caption “Leads to danger”.  (Check out that polyseme! You are NEVER too young for semantics.)  In retrospect it was clear that that Little-Miss-Sunshine-with-a-mullet was never going to be a vet.

So… I’m not an SEO expert or a vet, (sorry to those hoping for “Top 5 Tortoise Vasectomy Tips”), so WTF am I doing on SEO Chicks? I guess if I’m any one thing I’d have to say I’m a business woman. (A business woman who understands search rather well. ) Hopefully my four years of experience in paid search at Yahoo! might be a source of interesting blog fodder too. On speaking to @lisadmyers about what I could bring to a generally SEO audience, one thing we did agree on (apart from ‘Mummys need wine too’) is that many SEOs and SEO Chicks’ readers are by nature, pretty entrepreneurial – often running sideline web projects, working freelance or running their own business. So yay! (Cos this is my shit.)

So without further ado, I thought I’d start with a bit of an empowerment piece – which looks at one of the hardest lessons to learn, when it comes to making a living from providing a service to somebody else. I’m not going to argue the toss here, just trust me that the hardest lesson I’ve learnt in twelve plus years of business development is that sometimes it pays to turn business down. Here’s when…

Time spent is greater than or equal to amount billed.

A challenging client is (99% of the time) a really good thing. A client that knows a bit about what you do and should be doing; a client that demands excellence and pushes you out of your comfort zone is better than a pro master-class. That said, it is absolutely essential that you have a forensic understanding of the value of your time (or staff time) versus the amount you will be billing your client. If you are paying your link builder a per annum salary of £x, divide that into units of days, and make sure that the amount you are billing your client exceeds the amount of time spent by your staff. If you are working on something yourself you may need to work a little hypothetical or forecast model into that. If it’s your start-up you may be paying yourself little to nothing. In which case this is an exercise in weighing up your future earning potential against time spent. If you’re spending two full days a week on a client that you’re billing a half day or day fee, not only are you working to a loss, but you’re tying up two whole days that you could be using to source leads, make phone calls and otherwise identify a more profitable client relationship. Cut your losses and be mercenary.

Great Expectations

When I say “great” I really mean completely unreasonable.  It is our job to educate our clients as to the nature of SEO, SEM, SMM, whatever it is that they are buying from you; however unless they are actually buying training, one can only go so far. If after some reasoned consultation and a few home truths they still brief you that www.contentshysemicons.com must be number 1 on Google for “laptops” then I suggest you walk away. Save yourself the inevitable grief, time drain and demand for discount.

Bad Karma

I truly believe that it’s not possible to like everyone. If you work for a large organisation (as until this year, I always have) then this isn’t a problem.  When a client complains that they hate your guts, they think you don’t *get* them and feel you’re not on their side, then that’s fine. Your boss can move them to another face and it’s all good. When you’re freelance, or running your own small to medium enterprise this truly sucks. My advice is trust your gut and act before that contract is signed. If you are not on the same wavelength as your client, feel more confusion than connection, shudder everytime the phone rings and cannot muster a gnat’s chuff of enthusiasm for their product, you will not be able to do an excellent job. You may be able to do an adequate or decent job – but who ever got more business from a review like this “yeah Nichola was okay. She managed to feign a modicum of excitement over our new social network for ex-cons, and the results were passable!”?

Can’t brief won’t brief

Are you a ‘full service’ agency? If so, then this final point isn’t so much for you to worry about. If however, you provide one or two services solely then my message is to draw some pretty hard lines. Let me be clear first. I am not saying that every single business should know how to write a design brief, or an SEO brief. Not at all! (Hell, I wouldn’t have a clue how to write a catering services brief, or a corporate hospitality brief.) My point is that if your client cannot construct a reasonable brief you must either factor in the amount of time you will be spending in honing a workable brief, and imparting knowledge on a consultation basis that many companies would charge dollars for; or be prepared to pass that business upstream to a strategic business partner that is of an operational scale to cope with that level of hand holding. In return, you should seek to reciprocate said relationship and get them to can pass on smaller clients that are below their billing threshold to you.

Now repeat after me “thank you for your interest in [insert company here] but on consideration we must decline your request to quote, due to a significant volume of interest in our services; meaning we are currently working to capacity and feel we cannot provide the level of consultation your project deserves”.

Easy eh?…