Tech Talk : SEO Jacking & Cloud Computing For Non Profits
Have you ever spent years and years building something that you’re so proud of? Those countless hours of work, blood, sweat, and tears, the trials, the tribulations, the wins, the losses. Last weekend, something I’ve worked on for over 13 years was basically stolen from me, and my latest podcast breaks it down for you and gives you some pointers on how to keep your DOMAIN and business safe.
Tom Craig and I also break down the cloud for non-profits and show you how to keep your tech provider honest, we’ve seen way too many non-profits AND businesses getting completely taken advantage of by their tech provider and we’re sick of it, damnit!
I really appreciate the listen and would love it if you’d share this podcast with a friend. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Google Play or where you listen to your podcasts.
Publish Or Perish : Winning At SEO
Some very good friends of mine are college and / or grad school professors. You’ll often hear them say, Publish or Perish. Simply put, if a college professor isn’t churning out intelligent content in the form of papers, studies, white papers, findings, etc., they are typically DONE within the institution. Institutes of higher education thrive on content creation and if you’re a new professor, the best way to prove yourself is to publish and defend your brilliance, CONSTANTLY.
SEO has seen an overabundance of changes in terms of alogorithms with cute names such as penguins, pandas, tarantulas, anteaters, (I made the last two up…) etc.. The almighty Google has strived to keep its search engine results pages squeeky clean, but unscrupulous SEO types have always managed to find a way to game the results. This manipulation has caused Google to constantly refine it’s formulas in order to provide clean, relevant results to users.
So, now that I’ve painted a gloom and doom scenario, how do you truly win at SEO? You take a lesson from those professors. You publish. You publish amazing works of your brilliance that let your hungry audience know and admire your expertise. People / customers want to buy from experts, from leaders in the industry. Your mission is to not only feed your audience, but to alert Google know that your web presence has it going on. You simply do this by publishing.
Some publishing keys to SEO success:
- Create with purpose.
Build an editorial calendar based around your brands sales cycle. You know what products are hot when, you know when your audience needs one service over the other, so develop a calendar that fleshes out content ideas around those cycles.
- Create with meaning.
Be inspired. If you’re not inspired, get inspired. Visit blogs in your industry, read, listen to music, go to the gym, weave a basket underwater, whatever sparks your plugs, but write with purpose. Don’t simply write to write.
- Create with your audience in mind.
It’s not about you. The Internet belongs to the people, give it to them. Know what your audience looks like in terms of demographics and feed them what they want. If you don’t know what they want, simply ask them.
- Create it to be shared.
True SEO gold is when your content gets shared and talked about around the Internet. Make your content shareable, make it easy to be shared, make it so juicy that it begs to be shared. Include photos, videos, commentaries, styling, make it amazing.
- Create it to be engaged with.
Make it easy and lead people to interact with your content. Make sure that your blog is easy to post comments on, make sure that you ask your readers to engage, lead them and respond to them.
- Create it to be talked about.
I’m not a fan of creating controversy for controversy sake, BUT, make your titles and content remarkable / sexy / enticing. We need people to want to click, read, share & engage.
Most importantly, keep your eye on the prize. Keep writing for your users, not just for SEO. The more you put your users first, the more Google will reward you. Google, in its webmaster guidelines spells out the following and tells us exactly what they are looking for:
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.”
- Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Thanks for reading / sharing. Now, get to work. Your users are hungry for your wisdom, Google is anxious to get your brilliance found.
It’s Not You, It’s Us. Oh Wait, No, It’s You.
Being in business for over 10 years has exposed my company to a wide variety of characters. I’ve meet amazing people. I’ve meet not-so-amazing people. I’ve meet people who would give you the shirt off of their back, I’ve met people who live to rip other people off. I’ve met people who tell the truth, I’ve met people who don’t have an honest bone in their body. Over the years I’ve learned MANY lessons. Lessons of humility, lessons of practicality and PLENTY of lessons about humanity.
I do consider myself a good judge of character but sometimes, I completely miss the call. I’ll see a prospect that I think we should pursue, their story checks out, their budget seems legit, they talk the right talk, they agree and shake their head when I try my darndest to manage expectations, I take on their project and within a month, I regret every second of it and EVERY dollar of it.
We recently took on a digital marketing job that was packaged just right. It looked right, the product looked right, the foundation was in place, but when I met the folks in our conference room, I could tell that something wasn’t quite right. I should have trusted that feeling. 2 months went by, after we went overboard explaining what to expect out of an SEO campaign and then they wanted to meet. No big deal, it will be an opportunity to show them the amazing results that our team has produced. Analytics were all way up over the last 3 months, search results were WAY up way quicker than expected, leads were up by 60% over the previous quarter, things were looking way up.
24 hours after that productive meeting, they fired us. The ex-client exclaimed how SEO just takes way too long. They noted that they received 0 leads, (totally incorrect.) They noted that their search results were not as expected (despite several number one rankings in 2 months). They noted that their son-in-law could do the job and will do it for free from here. This is always frustrating for my team. They truly put their hearts and souls into each client campaign. They all go the extra mile, they all take a loss personally. I feel partially responsible for that. I should have said no to their business from the beginning. I should have realized that they would bail as soon as they actually started to get rankings. This would probably explain why they had been through 4 SEO / Digital Marketing companies in a one year period. Lesson learned.
A wise man once told me, you can’t expect your business to grow if you never say no. In fact, I read an article just this week that illustrated how some of the world’s most successful CEO’s say no 78% of the time. Saying no means saying no to new business that just doesn’t feel right. Saying no means not letting customers work around your boundaries. Saying no means not dropping your pants on pricing just to get the business. Saying no can sometimes SUCK. But, it HAS to be said. It’s not easy. It’s not fun. It’s NEVER popular, but at the end of the day, it’s your organization. It’s your products and services that people need. It’s your business process, employees, your bottom line, your life. I should have listened to that wise man AND my gut with this particular client.
The bottom line, if you ever feel that the person / company you’re about to do business with is not above board, you owe it to yourself, to the integrity of your business, to the sanity of your employees and to the bottom line of your company to walk away. Practice saying no. Practice it often. You can still provide excellent customer service by creating boundaries. Could you lose clients? Sure. Will some clients expect a YES all of the time? Yes. The truth is, great clients will understand that you need boundaries, that you have a process, a system and a method to your operations. Those, my friends, are golden clients.