2015 was a challenging year for me in terms of my love-hate relationship with my career as a Search Marketing Consultant. At least once a month, I was so frustrated with either a client or our industry that I wanted to move on to something more rewarding. That being said, it was also a fantastic year. I received both the Search Consultant of the Year award and a Lifetime Achievement award, which was a tremendous honor. It is also the reason I plan to start writing again and try to give back to the industry that has allowed me to have a great living over the past 20 years.
Over the holiday break, I had time to relax and to think about those things that pissed me off and what I planned to do about fixing them, avoiding them, and, more importantly, making money from them. I also found nearly 100 articles in various stages of completion that I will attempt to finish and post.
In a typical year, I work on 2 or 3 large-scale projects and another 2 to 3 crisis projects where I am called to solve problems that are either large-scale or unique. It gives me insight into a number of areas, from agency relations to best practices, workflow, etc.
#1 Frustration – Lack of Appreciation for Keywords and Keyword Modeling
Over the past five years, I have developed various tools to aggregate and model keywords, and mine them for opportunities. My tool, which I now call DataPrizm, allows you to store and mine keywords in any number of ways. I have had a lot of success using it in my consulting practice but have not had much adoption from companies and especially from agencies.
Ironically, every test and pilot of the tool has yielded some remarkable findings and incremental opportunities.
Unfortunately, this also scared the crap out of a lot of people. I had a couple of prospects who told me using the tool would cost them their job. The vast majority told me that they either did not have time to use it or that it did not fit their workflow. For all the talk about content marketing and data mining, I am amazed at how few people actually look at the gold mine they have. I have written several articles on this and have a few clients that use the tool to maximize opportunities, but a few are even willing to try.
Most people store words in Excel or a small internal database within their SEO tools, such as BrightEdge or Conductor. Few mine the data, and even fewer look at paid and organic together.
Until this year, I had become frustrated and did not push the issues, but in 2016, I will be much more vocal about this wasted opportunity and do more to showcase some of the remarkable findings we have had in the tools.
#2 Frustration – Dynamic and Hip Websites and Content Marketing Mumbo Jumbo
2015 was the year of the Content Marketing hype and the move to infinite scroll and other non-functional web designs. Based on cook frameworks like AngularJS.  They make the developers life easier but without prior thought are deadly to your SEO performance.
One of the frustrating things I frequently encounter from creative agencies is the building of sites that can be cool, hip, and modern, or alternatively, they can be as far from search-friendly as possible, similar to Airbnb. Once I get called in to do the review before launch, I point out simple things like robots.txt blocking the site, no title tags, or a single-page infinite scroll with no workaround for search. When we bring it up to the agency, the first answer is SEO Friendly was not in scope or “Getting the site launched was critical†or other bullshit.
I had one project that was going to be the poster child of SEO-integrated design. The agency met 98% of the SEO criteria. However, the Friday before launch, the compliant site was swapped out for one the creative director thought was more cool and hip, which was a single-page infinite scroll. The brand team accepted it. Within a week, 100% of the rankings and organic traffic disappeared. A month later, we returned to the original design, attempting to regain lost traffic.
I am currently dealing with a case where a top-tier creative agency, in collaboration with a large search agency, has built a new online store for the client using AngularJS. The store launched, and everyone was telling them it would take time for Google to reindex the site. There were no provisions for redirects, resubmission, or monitoring indexing, just a simple statement “ it will take time.” A few months passed, and no traffic from SEO, only 10 pages indexed, and millions in lost revenue. Since the site was built in AngularJS, it was 100% invisible to search engines. Ironically, this framework was developed at Google! Once I explained the problem to them, they did not want to double the overhead by using a rendering service, as it would “double the server load,” and are now rolling back the previous build of the site.
First, I have added to my review of potential clients their willingness to comply with SEO best practices. In addition, I hope to prevent this in 2016 by rolling out a set of comprehensive SEO rebuild and relaunch requirements that I developed for one company. These requirements must be accepted by the development team or agency during the pitch briefing process, in the final contract, during the kickoff meetings, and then again as part of the final site acceptance testing checklist. While we have had a bit of success for this client, there are still a few agencies developing sites for the portfolio that were far from search-friendly.
#3 Frustration – SEO is Critical for Traffic but…
This frustration drives me insane. Following the e-commerce store and AngularJS debacle, companies that rely primarily on search traffic need to have better controls.
I had one client who received 88% of all traffic from organic search, and yet the Web Development team and Creative Agency did everything humanly possible to prevent organic search traffic. The SEO Manager tried to get another resource and was told there was no budget. They returned from vacation to be introduced to 15 new members of the social media team. Social Media contributes less than 1% of the traffic and zero direct revenue. I was asked to help build a business case to justify the cost of a single headcount for the SEO team.
I have another project I turned down from a global company wanting help setting up redirects from some of their campaign sites to Facebook. They were going to make a significant effort there and wanted the current web traffic to also be directed to Facebook. I tried to explain that it was the web content that was generating the traffic, and if that were to move to Facebook, it would all disappear. They were convinced by their agency that the paid media they would get from Facebook would outweigh that loss.
#4 Frustration – Paid Search Waste
I will repeat it, Paid Search is the single greatest advertising tactic available to brands today. There is nothing that matches the laser precision it offers to target consumers at the very moment of interest. However, the way many of these programs are managed is criminal.
I often get access to paid campaigns when I import the data into my DataPrizm Keyword Management tool. As I have written before, the paid search teams are the #1 reason companies do not adopt my tool.
In the past year, I have not seen a single paid search campaign that was remotely managed to its potential. These range from budgets of $5,000 to over $100 million and a gamete of agencies, and they are all wasteful, and no one cares.
In mid-November, I was asked to review a couple of holiday or year-end paid search projects for one of the brands with a strong repository of historical information. I was asked to provide my recommendations on how they were structured and confirm that the new agency effectively leveraged all the information shared. Nearly all were set to broad match, one or two pieces of creative, and one with 10,000 words had only 5 ad groups. When challenged, the agency said they would optimize over time. I am all for the test-and-learn approach, but when you have 4 years of historical data and best practices from the 6 previous agencies, there are some things you don’t need to test.
Some of the most concerning findings are campaigns that are not regularly updated. I had one F100 company that was spending upwards of $50 million with a large agency. I reviewed the campaign history, and they had not made a single change in 5 months. They attempted to convince the client that their bid management tool made all the necessary changes and, based on their financial model and algorithmic calculations, did not require human intervention. They had changed a single creative or added any negatives. They were fired that week. Unfortunately, the new agency is not much better.
The opportunity for 2016 is to refine my audit program and expand my agency scorecards but find a way to get clients actually to use them! Additionally, to further expand the use of negative and underperforming word detection in DataPrizm, which helps flag these words more quickly.
#5 Frustration – Clients Demanding to Rank for Something Not Relevant
I am following up on my recent post about the silliness surrounding content marketing, especially for clients who want to leverage lifestyle marketing for traffic. One brand wanted to rank #1 for Coachella. They only have two articles on the topic that are a year old. As one of the event sponsors, they assumed that that would get them top rankings.
Just as companies want to rank for terms they shouldn’t, I have others who only want to perform for branded phrases. In September, I turned down a six-figure consulting project for a large luxury brand company. The brief sounded like a dream project to mine keyword opportunities, help them find niche content targets, and mine search data for incremental gains. A former client suggested to me that I had completed a similar project last year. Soon after sending my initial questions to the client, the agency lead informed me that all future questions would be directed to them, and I would not have direct access to the client.
They went on to tell me that, although there was a scope of work, I was only participating due to the client’s mandate. Most of the brief was smoke and mirrors. The plan was to have them perform only for the brand and product category words. It was such a wasted opportunity.
#6 Frustration – Because A Celebrity SEO Said.
I could go on for days about this one. I attend many conferences and hear numerous search experts speak. There are a number that I call “Celebrity SEOs,” as they have a massive base of followers who follow every word they utter. Their job is to write and drive awareness of themselves or their agency. People follow them blindly, no matter what they say, even if it is wrong or misinterpreted. I have to spend more time than I want to debunk some of their nonsense to clients.
One of the big ones was a person in their keynote who told the audience that the H1 tag was dead. They referenced various “ranking factors studies” that showed it was no longer working. We had a web team in India that removed the H1 from the pages. First, if it is not being scored, there is no reason to penalize it, so why remove it until a future build? The developers assumed since it is not working it should not be in the page. Within a few weeks, rankings tanked, and they had lost nearly $15 million in revenue. Below, I describe how we found the problem, but we immediately rolled back the change, got the rankings back, and recovered the lost revenue. Just because it was said at a conference or maybe works on small sites does not mean you should implement without discussing with your own team or testing it on a sample.
Another keynote recently told the audience that keywords were dead. You need to focus on content marketing and create content people want. Ironically, in every case where he used examples of content marketing, he used a keyword phrase to trigger the content. When challenged about his statement of keywords being dead he implied that individual words are useless and we need to think of clusters of words. Not to split hairs, but are clusters of words a list of related phrases? I suppose it didn’t sound as appealing, and two prospects for my tool decided not to use it since the keynote stated that any efforts related to keywords were no longer important.
In 2016, the opportunity will be to debunk some of these statements and be more vocal about the basics of search and data mining.
#7 Frustration – Still Optimizing Pages and Not Templates
It is now 2016, yet some SEOs still conduct audits and optimization on a page-by-page or phrase-by-phrase basis. I just had a friend ask me if $10k was a fair price for an audit of 50 of their words and pages. I was shocked that people still pitched it that way. I asked him how many page templates he said he did not know. In about ten minutes of looking with him, we identified five core templates. The goal would be to optimize a template, and then all word types for that template would perform better. Yes, you may need to look at links, etc., for specific words and pages, but too many companies give me the same list of problems 20 times.
As I mentioned above with the loss due to removing the H1. We found this problem because we focus on templates. We looked at all the words that dropped in rank. We then pulled a PLP (preferred landing page) report from DataPrizm for those words, loaded the URLs into Screaming Frog, and looked for the template ID. We found 2 pages, the category page and the product page were 100% of the pages that had word drop in rankings. We reviewed the page, and the only change was the removal of the H1. We rolled the pages back, and in less than 10 days, the rank was back, as was the traffic. It took less than 30 minutes to identify the core problem.
I see this problem a lot globally. Where agencies audit the various country versions, we end up with 10 to 20 identical reports. For 2016, I will try to detail a global site audit process that will help reduce this waste.
I will try to rant less and put out some quality content so that I don’t piss off the readers. Let me know what you would like to write about, and I will try to dust off some of the half-completed articles and get them posted.
