Thinking SEO…in the context of ad agency
My friend recently threw this question on Facebook - “What does it take to be seen as an SEO expert?” And a reply from another friend : “Not much, I got ranked top 5 most of the time for work at home…”
I can’t help pondering on the truth of this - personally I have gathered more than a dozen “proofs” of some keywords which get top ranking in highly competitive categories (competitive here defined as there being multimillion competitive websites for that keywords).
Granted that many got there thru ezinearticles directory where I had posted tons of articles these past few years. Still it brings back to my site - when your article on weight loss gets top ranking, you deserve to be proud - it is one of the most competitive keywords and category in internet marketing world.
Just try keying in - lose weight successfully - there are 1.3m competitive sites for this kw - and I get the first position, and I have held the position for few months already. This is not the only one, like I said I have gathered quite a few, all this is achieved over a period of time.
Article marketing has proven to be damn effective for my sites. Other than tinkering on-site on the meta tags and description tags etc…
I have yet to see any remarkable results from submitting links to directories (blog, website, rss, etc) but I do not doubt this will surface at some point in the future.
And so I beg the BIG question WHY ad/digital agencies do not cover these things as part of their scope of work - I wonder if they even know. Sure it’s safe (maybe even sexy ) to toss words such as “onsite architecture” (which of cos will be outsourced), and some vague reference to backlinks (also to be outsourced), no one actually talks about actual strategies that can be implemented in-house. Content is king for sure, and sometimes a company needs to be structured in a certain way which should be functional to the visitors.
However what is stopping the agency from devising say article marketing strategy - which gets read outside the client’s site but being driven back when other online publishers carry that article on their site (for they too need content) or participating in reviews etc.
There are so many ways to do SEO, it depends on that ultimate objective, which no prize for guessing is almost always - by client’s (or even agency’s) definition is to drive traffic to the site. And then what? Client still needs to make meaningful marketing objectives when business comes from internet, surely there needs to be special price, special treatment - only when you purchase online, you enjoy this price, this rate, this value-adds.
At the heart of it, it is still about marketing. My personal opinion is that client is not only far removed from understanding this, agency knows and sells only what it knows and well, makes me think there’s money that is left on table which ad agencies are leaving behind.
In the days of pennies that agency makes from agency comm (for eg 3% on nett total of 100k annual spend = 3000), I should think providing SEO services is a killer opportunity which can command top dollar.
Most importantly SEO gets to address ROI issue which clients these days are pressured to answer to the higher ups.