Beware of What Is Sold As SEO!

By Chris Frerecks • February 10th, 2010

organic_vs_paid_search_image

Beware of What Is Sold As SEO!

Yesterday, while doing some client related research on a [a paid] real estate plugin for WordPress, I had a concerning experience I felt we should share. Namely, the company I spoke with told me their solution was a key for SEO. And they are wrong! Now I believe their plugin offers content oriented value and I’ll eventually share that with the clients we believe it can help, but I won’t dare suggest there is some SEO magic here… like I was told. The suggestion that someone or something is outsmarting Google and you can just buy SEO off the shelf is highly unlikely!

This is important! – The dynamic nature of a networked web, the constant modification of search engine ranking methods for content and the random activity of your competitors surrounding content makes organic search results unpredictable from day to day. If anyone does guarantee top organic search results, ask them what proprietary [ = unknown] information they have about the constant adjustments made to [content] ranking search algorithms? And then ask what exactly they know about your specific competitions content, their day to day activity online and how that will affect competitive rank outcomes? There are pros’ out there who actually sit on the leading edge of research, like Aaron Wall and Rand Fishkin,  and even if there were proven gaming techniques they would probably tell you organic search results are never standing still! In fact, you might compare SEO services to hiring a fighting force in a ‘war of attrition’  [in a battle versus deep pocketed search engines] that you’ll likely never win for good. It will just keep costing you more and more money! For some more detail, give the ‘Laypersons Guide To Understanding SEO’  a try.

Now, we’re not trying to expose anyone here. Not at all! There’s too much misinformation out there so we only want our experience to serve as an example.  AND we want to throw you some caution about ‘buying SEO’. Anyway and never taking anything we believe for granted, I asked why the plugin was so key for SEO. The first argument was that clients normally outperform Realtor.com & Zillow.com. I thought, “Hmmm, do some searching and so do our clients.  And, at least to date, without this plugin”. I should add that neither Realtor.com, Zillow.com or Trulia.com, nor us for that matter, have outsmarted Google’s ranking algorithm. We may all be doing some of things right some of the time, but no one should ever believe they have gamed Google for top search results. Not when over 200 hundred signals are used to compare your page to all the others with the same key phrase. Think of it this way: if every time you searched real estate in a local area [or any subject at all] the Google search results page served up Realtor.com [or any aggregator site] why would you need Google? If so, we could just go search Realtor.com… and that wouldbe limited. Being that Google depends on [organic search] consumer satisfaction, loyalty AND pay per clicks!, how would Google make a living with limited results?

Moving along, the gentleman asked I go to a clients’ WordPress blog: a particular WordPress blog [it just so happens] I have observed for several years as one of the more well documented, back linked and organically search engine optimized real estate blogs in North America. A blog I later found out had only added this plugin a month or two ago. Again and regardless of what we were going to find results-wise, it would be difficult to take credit for any SEO… certainly not in this blogs’ case.

We pulled up, copied and pasted a particular posts’ title  into Google so that we could search it as proof of SEO. The post was titled by its’ exact street address, town, state abbreviation and zip code. When we did, the posts highly specific title was the 3rd result in a little over 1,500 pages indexed. Number 3 in 1,500 is pretty good, but was it the plugin or was it the years of time, effort and money invested in this blogs competitive placement that got it there? And if not all that effort, could it have even been that WordPress, when configured correctly, is highly search engine spider friendly?

Flaws In the Above SEO Results Argument

  • Is the result due to the plugin or all the positive organic SEO signals this blog has accumulated [back links, subscriptions, book marks, feed connections, SERP choice activity, etc., etc.] in 5 years time?
  • With over two hundred signals used to compare pages, is it the plugin?
  • Is the actual phrase we searched even sought after by the competition?
  • Without the use of quotes, does the phrase searched exist on any other page in that exact word sequence?
  • Search results change every day: is anything we’re seeing going to sustain competitive positioning tomorrow and the next day?
  • Google search results are now personalized, so does this example even matter to the personalized masses?

Folks, our point here again is NOT to suggest anyone is purposefully being misleading. They may be less informed than they need to be to make such claims, but they wouldn’t be the first. And we’ve certainly heard worse claims for ‘the silver bullet SEO solution.’ No, the point here is discern what is being sold as SEO: understand SEO is based upon 1) focused, well formed & consistent content, 2) a measurable reaction to that content [back links, SERP activity, bookmarks, subscriptions, feed connections to other sites, time on page, etc., etc.] and also 3) well configured / easily crawled sites.

The fact is, there is no silver bullet… truly sustainable SEO requires time and some effort!

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