Our lab project hit 10,000 page views for the month when it was about three months old. This is a significant number because it’s the point at which a site can begin participating in many major ad revenue programs. For a three month old site using nothing but organic search, this is very good. It prompted a discussion around the office.
Should we use this as an example when we discuss SEO and SEM, or not? After all, we don’t want to imply that all sites hit that point after three months. Most don’t.
Rosie used to work for a national weight loss company. All their ads say “results not typical.” However, she assured me, the results they show in the ads are typical — for people who actually follow the program. Most people just don’t.
Equally, most of our clients don’t take our advice. We map out an SEO strategy for them, and they do some of the things we suggest, not all. Often they quit doing anything after a while. Many of them alter the highly-optimized content we give them to something less search-friendly. Very few keep up with blogs, social media, and linkbuilding after we start them off.
Hey, we don’t even do all that for our own website. We have a business to run, just like you. Things like that get shunted to the side so we can do our billable work.
With FreshPlans, our lab project, we’re adding one new SEO or marketing change each week so we can watch the results. We’re continuing with everything that is successful, and adding on a new item each week. We’re not doing anything shady, expensive, or exotic: just the normal things we normally do for clients and advise our clients to do for themselves. We have three people working on this, spending a total of about two hours a day among us.
We’re beginning to feel that we ought to be spending a couple of hours a day on our own website. If we weren’t SEO professionals ourselves, I’d be starting to think that it was time we hired someone to spend a couple of hours a day.
Can you find two hours a day among your staff? If you have twelve people on the payroll, that’s ten minutes each. Could you end a meeting ten minutes early and send everyone off to do some strategic social media participation? Could you automate some paperwork and let your staff spend the time they save creating some excellent content? Could you skip some phone calls and update the meta tags on your pages instead?
We can do a strategic plan for you, and a marketing kit with the words you’d need, and you could do your own ongoing online marketing. We don’t promise identical results, but we can show you some great numbers.
Leave a Reply