“Hey little girl. Want to see my optimization strategies?” The figures no longer lurk in dark alleyways, opening their trench coats to display their wares. Nope, they’re either onstage or online, with glib pitches, stunning examples and promises that sound, oh, so attractive.
You want that #1 Google ranking - and you want it bad. Today, achieving a #1 ranking on Google is the holy grail of business success. But, think about it, if large corporations employ teams of full-time experts simply to fiddle with the optimization faddle of search engines, what chance do you have on your budget?
Well, as it turns out, you have quite a lot - but your real advantage is to put those on stage and online promises to a simple test. Doing this can keep you from hiring the wrong person for your own “optimization fix.”
Here are two quick ways to optimize your own knowledge of this topic, without having to get under the hood and deal with all the technical stuff.
1. Has Your Web Site Optimizer Optimized?
We’ve written about this before in an article called “Be Careful Who You Hire to Optimize Your Web Site.” The strategy we taught in that article is still works just fine. And, the company we mentioned back then, Webolutions, still tests out mighty fine in Google’s results.
For those of you who don’t have the time to read the linked article above, the strategy is to test your web design company’s own optimization results by doing a simple search in Google or Yahoo this way (and it works for any city):
- web design denver
- web site design denver
2. Welcome to Compete.com - Traffic Cop
Here’s another way to test the promises of those who would be your web site optimizers. It’s called Compete.com - and it’s a riot to use. You can test up to 3 companies against each other for free.
So, put the 3 web site optimization companies you’re thinking of hiring to the “Compete test.” You’ll see a very clear graph that compares their own web site traffic. You see, they are saying they can help you drive traffic to your site. Do they drive traffic to their own site? That’s a fair question. If not - you might want to think twice about hiring them.
Then, start punching in other sites and blogs to see who’s getting the most web traffic. Put in your own web site. Wouldn’t it be shocking if your own web site’s traffic was better than the person at the front of the room - or the person romancing you online?
One Thing to Remember about Compete.com
I hate to break it to you, but the brutal truth is that almost no web sites or blogs get much traffic - no matter how well your site is optimized - and no matter how hard you try.
Here’s a little Compete.com test you can do at home. Put in your own web site, a competitor’s site and, oh, let’s say, CNN.com. What you’ll see is a robust zillion visitors to CNN, along with two flat lines. Unless you are Seth Godin, Ebay or Dilbert your blog and web site are not going to get a lot of traffic.
That doesn’t mean you can’t have success with your blog or web site - but it does mean that numbers is not the main game you want to play. That’s the game they’re playing on you. Don’t bite.
9 comments ↓
Great article. In addition to being helpful and succinct, I’m glad that you included the line about how “numbers is not the main game you want to play.” More important than “driving more and more traffic!” is setting a meaningful goal (like using Google AdWords to drive and covert 10 percent more leads this quarter) is what truly matters.
Great tip Michael and thanks for pointing me to compete.com. I’m now officially hooked - what a great tool.
Michael,
Thank you for your insight- SEO is a tricky subject! I look forward to using compete.com- thanks for the tip!
Best wishes,
Kathy
Thanks Mike - for those of you who don’t know Mike, he is with Provident Partners - click on his name in his comment above and you can learn more about them. Talk about innovative ways to get your business noticed - that’s what they do.
And thanks, Derrick - for those of you who haven’t visited the Hire Sense blog (again, click on Derrick’s name in his comment) you’ll discover a treasure trove of articles that link to the latest studies, statistics, trends and just plain interesting stories in the world of selling - and hiring the right kind of salespeople.
Thanks, also, Kathy, - we don’t know you, but would like to learn more.
Good post, but most SEO guys aren’t trying to reach web design search queries.
I bareley show up for that term for I haven’t targeted it, but I still average 3,500 uniques a day.
You’ve made a great choice using copyblooger as your theme (it’s a great pout of the box theme), a designer would agree, but an seo knows to update the permalinks a clean the header.
No argument really, just being fair that “optimizers” aren’t designers.
You are right, it’s about numbers. The “compete” test can be gamed just like Alexa - it uses data volunteered by those with their wares installed, and the data can be injected by any savvy coder. Best bet is to see where their clients rank organically for competitive terms.
Oh, by the way, I do lurk on your blog and enjoy it:)
Knox knows his stuff and definitely we don’t pretend to be web optimizers in any way. Knox is maybe saying in a different way the same thing Mike Keliher is saying above. It’s not really a numbers game. It’s a quality game, a conversion game and a trust game. I added those last two, Mike. Still in all, compete.com can test out the claims of the boastful - always a good thing. Buyer beware can’t be emphasized enough on the Internet.
“quality game, a conversion game”
BINGO - finally someone else gets it:)
10 hits with 20% conversion is better than 100 hits at 1%
Just saw my typos above, dang it - I’m use to moderating and with that, the ability to fix things:)
Keep up all the great posts.
Michael, thanks for the kind words.
We probably need to point out that the folks at Mike Keliher’s company have an award winning podcast blog called Marketing Edge. Founded by Albert Maruggi, Provident’s blog could be an advanced class for anyone who wants to learn why they (we) should be podcasting - not just blogging. They even let you search the contents of their podcasts with a Podzinger “Everyzing” search box. Check these guys out - we hate to let you see how good they are, but, hey, that’s the Internet.
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