StuartLangridge.com

Last night I dipped into one of my favourite books, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. I love the book and have read it cover to cover three times, but I also just read sections here and there when I feel the need.

As I read the following paragraph it spoke to me about SEO and all of our relationships with Google. The unemotional, thoughtful and logical interpretation of their words and changes are what we should be aiming for.

To quote Robert Greene:

“It is a game. Your opponent sits opposite you. Both of you behave as gentlemen or ladies, observing the rules of the game and taking nothing personally. You play with a strategy and you observe your opponent’s moves with as much calmness as you can muster. In the end, you will appreciate the politeness of those you are playing with more than their good and sweet intentions. Train your eye to follow the results of their moves, the outward circumstances, and do not be distracted by anything else.”

Imagine you are sat at a small square table on one side of a chess board. Matt Cutts and a few dozen of his math prodigies sit behind it.

A few paces back are ten more boards. At each one sits an empty chair facing in the same direction that you are and a competitor, straining their eyes and focusing intently. Staring over their shoulders is a manager and a board of directors whispering to each other. They are writing cheques trying to improve their lot with money.

As you stand up, you can see row after row of these tables stretching into the distance. Some have no opponent facing you. Others have several players sat around the board. A few have several players, managers whispering advice and piles of cash beside them.

This is the game of SEO. It is a multi-player, multi-discipline, multi-front battle for new business. Winners thrive. Losers may not survive.

In recent days I have decided to switch off a few of my sites. This feels like a big decision because I have owned some of them for five or more years. I am attached to them. I invested lots of time, energy and money into them.

However, I am starting to believe that building websites for lead generation or affiliate marketing purposes ought to be a much more fluid process. Research, build something, test and then decide whether to keep them or not. I think that my process should be more iterative and less trusting and hopeful.

In the past, my thought process has been very different. I have had multiple examples in my life of achieving success only after persisting (for what seemed like forever). Therefore, the urge to “stick with” a website was very strong.

In an age of Panda and Penguin updates from Google and a multitude of projects, it feels like starting sites ought to be far less rigid. It also used to be the case that older sites were viewed more favourably, but again, in a world of Panda where any single page can drag a site down, the age of a site feels much less important.

I have many good ideas and the question is whether the time, effort and money will be better spent on an old site with issues to fix or on a new site that is a clean slate. In this regard it feels like an investment management decision, similar to assessing where money will hopefully be most productive now.

This kind of thinking probably ought to be used more within small businesses as well. If a firm relies heavily on the leads generated online, then having just the one website is inviting disaster. It now only takes one whack from Google (either within their search algorithm or their advertising platform) and those leads or sales could dry up immediately. (I discussed this last year here). This is a lesson that internet marketers have been taught again and again by the search engines but most small businesses have either been able to avoid or ignore. That won’t last forever.

Next I need to try and decide what constitutes a “good attempt”. In other words, how long should a site last before I move on? My guess is that the ones with real potential will be obvious and the rest won’t, therefore, ditch the rest. That might be a little too simplistic, but time will tell.

How are you evolving your business and marketing efforts?

Over the last month or so I have really delved deeply into keyword research. It isn’t something I like to do all that much and to a certain extent, once good keywords have been identified, they will remain good keywords for some time to come. So it is not and should not be a daily operation.

But it had been some time since I had really committed to focusing just on numbers and in total I spent three full weeks looking at different factors.

Something that has become very clear to me is the extent to which search engine users alter their interests. To give an easy example, there are a handful of phrases that I have targeted (and often ranked number 1 for) relating to the stock market that received over 10,000 searches in the United States per month. It seems that now, in the midst of a global economic crisis and recession, that number is reduced to around 2,000 searches per phrase.

It makes sense of course, less people should be interested in investing when times are tough. However, these are phrases that I believed were “evergreen”, the core terms that people starting their investment career would investigate.

Since I rank number 1 for many of the keywords, it is possible to draw a direct comparison between times gone by and now. Clearly, the world has changed.

However, the types of website that I used to compete against are largely invisible in Google’s upper rankings now – the giant financial publishers have their act together and rank for these phrases now. In other words, the market size has reduced by c.80% in some cases but it has become much harder to reach those remaining people.

It is yet another reminder of the fluidity of the internet and just how fragile any online business model really can be.

For an SEO guy like me, this is not the end of the world. I spent some of my research time looking for new ideas and topics, having convinced myself that my financial publishing days might be numbered. It ought not to be that hard for me to add new projects to my arsenal since I possess the overarching skill.

However, for small businesses that specialise in just one or two things, let’s say yacht chartering for example, if things become much more competitive and less people are searching for relevant phrases, this could be the end of a business, crushed by overheads.

This is not to say that a firm should not try and reach more potential clients through the search engines, only that the fundamentals of most businesses and their client acquisition methods have changed irreversibly forever.

Have you read Michael Lewis’ book or watched the movie of the same name, Moneyball? Brad Pitt is excellent in the lead role and whether you get any more out of this post than this, check out the trailer.

In case you haven’t watched the film or read the book, it is the story of the Oakland Athletics, a baseball team, that tries to use maths and statistics to improve their results. The A’s have a serious problem in that their budget is much smaller than other wealthier clubs. These wealthier clubs can afford to buy in the best players, as if money were no object, with the aim of buying a great team. As the film starts, the A’s have played well and achieved more than people think they can on their tight budget, but the major honours go to the wealthier teams who win the games that really count at the end of the season.

Since I am not an American and have never watched any baseball, much of the book was in a foreign language to me, but I’m sure lots of us can relate to the idea if we think about football (or soccer). The biggest football clubs in Europe are also the most successful and have the biggest budgets. Manchester United. Manchester City. Chelsea. Real Madrid. Barcelona. Bayern Munich. AC Milan.

Internet marketing is much like this. The more profitable a business model is, the more money can justifiably be spent on marketing a website. The sites with the most potential revenue look for Venture Capital funding so that they can put together a TV campaign and really go for it.

This is one of the reasons for the huge spending in the gaming and casino markets. Let’s be honest, as intellectually compelling as the usual white hat tactics are, they just are not going to work in these markets. If you write amazing articles that add super value to visitors will other sites in your area naturally link to your site? Err, no. Probably not, at least not in gaming.

Therefore, to be more assertive these sites have teams of writers pumping out articles that are used as guest posts on other sites for the backlinks. They have to pay to place these posts since other website owners know just how profitable gaming is and want their own tiny sliver of the cake.

But gaming is different…

Yes, gaming is different. It is “adult”. It is extremely profitable. It is illegal in many places. It is the major league of online marketing.

There are lessons to learn though. Most businesses seem almost allergic to spending money online. On one level I can understand that because it can be confusing. However, the reality is that if there is even one competitor in your market that is spending money to promote their website then everyone else needs to as well. Otherwise, sooner or later, the one firm with a budget will have quite a lead over the others. And that is without the advantage they gain from having more incoming leads with which to sell more products and services and build a stronger business.

The Athletics create a team to try and overcome this disadvantage by using some pretty sophisticated maths to find players that have certain skills and are overlooked and therefore “cheap”.

This is certainly possible online – depending upon the market you operate in. In other words, you might be able to do quite nicely by spending less than the competition but spending the money more wisely. However, note the fact that it still involves spending some money.

As an aside, we all know companies that suffer from this minimalist mindset. They built a website and that was it. Five years ago. They wonder why it only gets 42 visitors per month. What they can see from their analytics report is that the site gets minimal traffic, generates no leads and was a waste of time and money. Meanwhile, some of their competitors are making it work and generating new leads on a daily basis. The difference is not in technology, but mindset.

Become number bound

The reality is that the web is based around maths. The search engines certainly are, as are most advertising platforms. Some of this math is more easy to grasp than other parts, but it is still all about numbers.

If I focus on SEO, then there aren’t really all that many working parts to making a website rank highly and generate leads or make sales. They are:

- keyword research
- content creation
- linking strategies
- conversion

Within those four areas there are lots of nuances and things to learn and do, but ultimately there are just four areas. In other words, there are four areas to really delve into and try to find the advantages that will boost your business, just as the Oakland Athletics did. Luckily, three of the four (excluding link building) can be pretty useful if you plan to buy traffic too.

Investing more than money

By definition, investigating these four areas to try and find better or smarter ways to do things isn’t easy. I have been doing my own version of this for some months now and after a lot of lonely late nights, spreadsheets and reading obscure PhD thesis pdfs, I think I have made some good progress.

The result is that I can see very clearly now that my own online niche of choice, investment and the stock market, is actually far more competitive than I had previously realised. The difference between my sites and the big boys in the space is less of a “gulf” and more like an ocean. The future for my sites is to try and slip into the few remaining cracks I can find in the market.

The question though, dear reader, is will you be increasing your budget and trying to put together a little extra promotional effort for your own site? I am sorry to say it, but I firmly believe that if you know what you are doing it is still possible to “buy” your way to the top, just like in baseball and football.

For some companies that will mean hiring writers and guest blogging until the cows come home – using brute force. For others it will (hopefully) mean more time and creativity on keyword research and top quality content creation to find some interesting gaps in the market. And for the rest, they will do nothing and wonder why these other companies are so successful, complaining that the web “isn’t fair”.

In the final analysis it is all about mindset – you get to choose which group you are in.

For quite some time now I have been fiddling with my value proposition as it relates to providing SEO services to companies. The cold, hard truth is that whenever I speak to other SEOers about what I offer, they laugh at me because I am “too cheap”. I know that but have had some trouble accepting it for unknown mental reasons. The irony is that I am pretty good at SEO, so there is no reason why I should under price my services.

If I were to rate myself, I’d go with A- to B+. (I am thinking of Rand Fishkin as being A++). I’m not the best, but pretty good and a very long way from being the worst. So why so cheap?

I think that one issue is that many businesses do not really understand why SEO should be expensive. There seem to be so many dodgy firms spamming business owners (mainly from India it seems) that it probably feels quite reasonable that SEO should only cost $199 one time. And then it is done, forever…

This, of course, is in contrast to the good SEO providers who typically are not spamming the world. Why not? Because if you get even reasonably good at SEO, you just don’t need to advertise. If used well, SEO skill is like opening a passive ATM machine.

There are a number of reasons why SEO should be an expensive service:

1. Skill base. If you are good at SEO you are probably either a decent quality marketer and can write sales copy and put together campaigns, or a coder. Neither is a skill that should be lowly paid. Some folks can do both (I can’t, I’m a marketer) and they are worth their weight in gold.

2. Business benefit. If a website ranks at number one for the main few keywords that are appropriate, that can be – and often is – a huge business advantage. Typically, between 35% and 50% of all searchers click on the number one positioned listing. Number ten gets about 1%. If your keyword happens to be a big money payer – and you are very good at this – like an insurance or gambling phrase, then that number one slot can be worth hundreds of thousands per month. Perhaps even millions. You don’t ever hear of the top poker sites bragging about how much they earn do you? They don’t want the attention or extra competition.

For a little perspective, I worked with a real estate firm based locally to me for 11 months ending last summer. When we first met (and at almost every subsequent meeting) I told them that their content was not good enough, but they had no desire to alter it. I did what I do and made their site rank top 3 (up from pages 7/8) for the 3rd, 4th and 5th best phrases in their market.

Then they were hit by both Panda and Penguin. They had to be (their content was crap, mostly under 100 words per page) and so I was making up for it with linking (not ideal, but what are you gonna do?). They begged and pleaded for “quick fixes” but refused to work on their content (even though I had volunteered to rewrite much of it for them). 8 months later and they still have not touched those 87 word pages, but they have made 3 people redundant because they were no longer getting the sales leads they needed. Very sad. Thus it seems that while my advice was not worth following, the work I did was helping pay for 3 or more members of staff!

3. Alternative options. Any SEOer worth his (or her) weight, will know that they can earn a pretty decent sum on their own projects without needing an employer or contract. In the last eight months or so, my own online efforts have had a stunning running of misfortune (Panda anyone?), but still my sites bring in more than my monthly rent, even after the problems I have had. And I am turning those problems around day by day. Therefore, working on your site has to be worth more to me than working on my sites or other people’s sites.

Yes. You have to COMPETE to win the time of an SEOer. There are already too few hours in the week.

It is with this in mind that I describe a couple of recent situations I have encountered. In one, I was asked to meet the owner of a design/marketing/branding agency. It turned out that they wanted me to write SEO articles for them (if you aren’t aware, this is one of the least skilled areas of SEO). We didn’t discuss price, but I’d guess they were hoping for 5-7 euros per hour. It was a little ironic for me because the meeting also contained their “Head of SEO” and he didn’t strike me as very knowledgeable – but in 15 minutes who can really say? Despite this, there was a very good chance that I am better at SEO than he is. Why? Because I wasn’t looking for work and had been invited in, while he has a J-O-B.

The second was with a company that I also did not end up working with. They asked me to quote, I did (and as usual was too cheap!) and made the best no risk, results only offer that I could so that it would be a no-brainer to say yes to. They then tried very hard to negotiate me down in price! I declined.

It was the mindset that intrigued me. If you hope that someone will be able to dramatically improve the flow of leads into your business, why would you want them to work for cheap? Don’t sales people receive incentives for making more sales? How do you incentivise performance by paying as little as possible? Do these people not know how the world really works these days??? (If you are unsure of the answer to that question, it works online and people that make the online world work for you are kinda important).

Two comparables

While thinking about this I have found two very interesting links. This article from January 2012 by SEOMoz suggested that over 50% of the SEO providers they surveyed charged between US$76 and $200 per hour.

This survey from the UK details wages earned by SEO folks in different types of roles (note that is salaries earned and not the amounts charged to clients). In the middle of their range is “Manager” and that is likely to be the person doing some or all of the actual work. They weighed in at between GBP32,500 and 35,000 – not a fortune, but not nothing either.

Simple relativity

Ultimately, I think that the value of SEO services should differ from business to business. For the real estate firm I mentioned above, I was charging well under 1,000 euros per month, but they were clearly making multiple sales per month from leads generated online. At several thousand euros per sale, they were getting good value for money. This means that as SEOers we need to be careful in selecting clients and sectors to work with.

But what if you were in a big industry with lots of international traffic? What if your main keyword was “diet pills” and ranking at number 1 was worth US$1 million per month in sales. How much would it seem reasonable to pay your SEO providers then? $25k, $40k, $50k per month?

This is leading me to think a slightly odd thought about SEO. The person you need to crack the number 1 spot for the keywords you are interested in is probably already good enough that you cannot afford to pay him or her. In other words, the SEO you need is probably out of your league.

I hope that offers some perspective on how much your business ought to spend on search engine optimization.

I first began to get involved in internet marketing around the time of John Reese’s famous Traffic Secrets launch – the notorious million dollar day. I had read a little of the hype and then it happened. I had probably only been involved in trying to understand any of the IM world for a couple of weeks at that time.

Since then, there have been lots of big launches, taking the IM world by storm. Over time I have bought almost all of them, but not having the money to hand, I typically waited several months and then start searching for it each day on ebay. You would be amazed how many courses end up on ebay for 10-20% of the original purchase price only a few months later. Some are unopened.

However, something that took me a while to figure out, but is a real insight into the IM guru world is that while the course authors have had success with their model and others can too, if you are already involved with a business of some sort, it is not always obvious how to apply the new model to what you are already doing. For most of those years I had been building content sites the SBI way. That is great and I have had some success at it, but it was never obvious how to make some of the ideas from the launches work in addition to this existing model. Along the way I have learned a ton about marketing, so it wasn’t a wasted effort, I just couldn’t figure out how to apply it…

Really Valuable Training

In amongst all of that, there have been a few courses from which the concepts could be used to transform almost any business. For an offline only business, especially if selling high-end products or services, PEQ by Jay Abraham and Chet Holmes is brilliant. I think that the concepts behind the Theory of Constraints by Eli Goldratt are excellent too. They involve looking for bottlenecks in a process and then working on them to enable a process to operate at a greater capacity. For an existing business that is process or systems driven, this ought to be very powerful.

On my last trip home to the UK, I collected ‘The Box’. I had managed to buy it on ebay about one year ago from a chap in Canada and it had sat in my parents house ever since. For some time, the box was famous in the IM world. It is Formula 5 by Paul Lemberg and was released in 2008/9. It was one of those limited size launches (pump up the scarcity!) by the Stompernet guys with about 78 pages of sales copy (I am exaggerating, but not by much…). Actually, there were just 500 copies sold and I’d bet that only a handful made it to Europe. If they did, they made it to the UK, not beyond. I’m not certain, but I think it sold or US$1997. I bought mine for more like US$250 – though the import duty from Canada was almost as much as the purchase price

I have had the chance to start really looking at it over the past six weeks or so and it is brilliant. It is so well structured and thought out – which is often not the case in the world of IM launches. I really think that the action based steps in the course could be applied to almost all businesses. Having a decent background in marketing now, I can see lots of the best ideas from others weaved into the content, but the structure is such that you should do job a, then b, then c, etc.

The Concept

The basic plan is that if a business owner focuses on just 5 areas and manages to squeeze out improvements of just 15% in each area, they will essentially double the size of the business. If you ask someone to double their business, it seems like a very hard thing to do, but if you ask someone to convert their leads by an increased 15%, that seems much more possible.

If a business owner can do that, increase a specific part of the business by 15% and move on, soon enough they will have cycled through the 5 areas and achieved very substantial growth. Then, if they repeat the exercise with another 5 steps, they can grow very substantially in the second cycle. As Paul Lemberg said in his sales presentations, “The system is brilliant so that you don’t have to be”. Got it.

If I’m brutally honest, I am glad that there are only 500 copies of this in the world. I keep searching every now and again on ebay and I haven’t seen another for sale. I’d bet that most of those 500 are gathering dust on shelves somewhere. That is such a waste. In times of business hardship, this is a real insight into how to grow and grow fast. I’m going to have to find a few clients that I can strike deals with and use it on. This is powerful stuff.

For years I have been hearing and reading that entrepreneurs the world over think that being a part of a mastermind group is vital to their success. For those not in the know, a mastermind group is a number of people – typically under 10 – that speak to each other often to exchange ideas, motivate, critique and assist each other. These meetings might be face to face, but in the modern connected world it might be via skype, a yahoo group, gotomeeting or any number of other services.

A few months ago I accidentally put a mastermind group together. Just the three of us at first, but there is a fourth member now. The original call was to ask some questions about a specific technical SEO issue to someone knowledgable. That went well and we arranged a second call. Now we speak every second week for about an hour.

The four of us are each involved in SEO. My experience is mostly in building good sized content sites and blogging. The second person is an Austrian guy with lots of ecommerce experience. The third is from Singapore and has done all sorts of strange black hat things (mainly in the health supplements space). The fourth and newest member is a big-brained German guy who is building his own long-tail / LSI tool that for now I don’t even understand the description of!

So far I have learned a lot. The fact that we are all essentially doing the same thing (making websites rank highly in Google) but from different perspectives means that there is a lot to learn from each other. So much so that I am starting to understand why other entrepreneurs recommend masterminding so highly. I find it very hard to imagine that it won’t help me with client websites and that it won’t provide more new ideas for me to test and hopefully profit from.

If you haven’t tried discussing your industry as a group yet, you really should.

In recent weeks I have been having almost identical conversations with two separate female friends. Both have positions of responsibility in the company they work for and both are watching in despair as the company owner destroys the firm from within with what looks like shocking management and decision making.

Firm number one is a gaming firm. From the descriptions I have heard, the owner seems to travel only by helicopter, drink only champagne and lives life to the full. The firm is pretty large from what I can gather, but his personal spending and poor decision making (to help enable the spending) has put the company into a dire financial situation. Several years of excess are coming to head at the moment. There are lots of jobs and families that rely on this man and his company for employment.

Firm number two is a publisher. From the descriptions I have heard, the owner has a flash lifestyle to support (but not as flash as owner number one), including private schools for the children, multiple cars and a very nice home. However, his publishing empire has a number of loss making publications (all of them) and no plan to sort things out. Invoices go unpaid. Creditors have forced the closure of company bank accounts. Company income has to be routed through the personal bank accounts of members of staff. All in all, a real mess.

As a member of staff, it must be awful watching such an implosion, knowing that things could have been different if the mercurial and (let’s be honest here) selfish founder could reign in his desires for the good of the firm. As an entrepreneur, it becomes your responsibility to provide employment, wages and some security for the staff that you employ. This is why laws are written to ensure good corporate governance. One would presume that at some point in the distant future, once their edifices have collapsed, criminal charges and perhaps even prison awaits both of these owners.

To quote Denzel Washington in the move Inside Man, “That thing you’ll be sucking on [in prison], its not a pina colada!“.

Alas, we humans – and especially entrepreneurs – always want more. We are wired to overreach. Without addressing these very personal issues, anything can go wrong and probably will. Too few of us think about our mindset and how they interact with our desires and how that impacts our business.

The reality, of course, is there are probably tens of thousands of businesses in just as poor shape around the world right now. The owner had an idea, built something profitable, employed people and then totally screwed it up. They were profitable and long term ventures that will soon be a part of the personal story of rags to riches to rags of the owner. How sad.

Luck.

There I said it. It exists in business and online business. I firmly believe it.

Last week, Tomaz “The Slovenian Superstar” came to visit me in Malta for a few days. While here, we discussed a lot of things about life, success and business. There were a number of areas in which we agreed that luck was a major contributor to results and more specifically to differing results.

For example, we both followed – as best we could – the same plan to build our early websites. He understood some elements better than I did and I understood some elements better than he. C’est la vie.

However, we chose niches that seemed to make sense for us as individuals but had wildly different impacts on the results we saw. Then as we launched second and third sites, this luck and differing results continued.

Separately, we discussed the results of tests I have been running on a website. As I experiment more and more, I am coming to realise that things like bounce rate and the amount of time a visitor stays on a site can be heavily manipulated. That means that – in part at least – when people have mocked my terrible bounce rates and laughed at my numbers when compared to theirs, the results that they have are quite likely due to one lucky decision that they made a long time ago. These conversations have tended to make me question my writing style, which is odd since I get paid to write speeches and opinion pieces.

For example, the tests we were discussing have helped me to increase my time on site by almost 90% and reduce my bounce rate by around 18%, on one site, in the last year. The content did not change at all. It seems that the quality of the writing had nothing to do with my high bounce rates!

As I said, we were both following the same plan, but our ability to interpret and execute it was not the same. The niches we picked made a huge difference. His ability to conduct excellent keyword research, compared to my then ability to do average keyword research (thanks for teaching me!) made another big difference. Yet, these things are only really obvious after the fact when lots of lessons have been learned and results can be seen.

If we could remove these elements of luck, business and life would be so much easier. Until then, all we can conclude is that if your site is not getting the traction you hoped for, it might not be your fault – but you might be able to correct it!

If you are involved in the world of internet marketing you will know that a lot has changed this year so far. For those of us making a living selling our own products or as an affiliate, we have known for a long time about need to diversify by using multiple websites and offers. With the advent last year and earlier this year of Panda and Penguin, generating leads or sales for a business from an online property has become much more risky.

Therefore, I think the time has now come for normal small businesses to start building multiple websites. This is news that they will hate and it is news that will not make them think nice thoughts about Google, but there we are.

In recent weeks I have had several conversations with consulting clients about the content on their websites. There isn’t much of it and it needs to be increased and improved. They, for their parts, do not want to do this. Anyone involved with SEO will be able to confirm that making a page with 150 words on it rank these days is pretty much impossible. Clients on the other hand, just want the telephone to ring and do not seem to be able to draw a connecting line from writing more to earning more.

In their defence, an argument based around “I am a(n) (insert profession here) and not a publisher!” seems quite reasonable. Whether it is reasonable for Google to keep frowning on the SEO profession while making it very difficult for everyone – skilled or not – to rank a webpage would seem to be open to question. After all, family businesses and small companies are unlikely to have the right technical knowledge inside and so will need help.

Under such circumstances, where a website can drop from page 1 to page 9 overnight, but the wages of staff and bills need to be paid, it now seems as though most small businesses need to have a handful of websites (hosted with different companies, on different domains and platforms) so that if one site drops there are still others that might be able to keep the phone ringing.

Who knows, this might be the next big boom online. It is now received wisdom that every business needs a website. Perhaps in a few years it will be equally sound advice to have 3 or 4 or 5 of them.