I had an interesting dialog recently with a baker. In looking at different ways their website could be set up to improve their search ranking I noticed that if you searched for them by the bakerery’s name you had to drill down at least six pages on Google for them to even come up, and then only as a link on someone else’s website. Heaven only knows how far you would have to look to find them if you searched for them by “wedding cake+their town.” I don’t care how you look at it this is disastrous.
What got me to the boiling point was this baker’s response. She said I was using the wrong search term, I need to use her URL, and then she comes up near the top. Well, dang! I freakin’ hope so.
That is not what search ranking and optimization is all about. It is about coming up high when the search terms your clients use are typed in. If they already know your URL why are they searching???? They are most likely to search for “your service+your town;” but that isn’t the purpose of this rant.
The purpose is that I will bet you money that some SEO “expert” is trying to justify their pay by convincing her that that is how customers search. It’s not. How much money are you paying someone to tweak your search ranking?
I ran across another wedding vendor that asked me to look over his SEO. In looking at his site I found about 50 lines of metatags. Those were great about 4 years ago but darn near obsolete with the way Google ranks sites now. Even more disturbing was that every one of his competitors’ names was in those metatags, some with several different spellings. In my world view that is pretty close to crossing the line of good ethics. Before I said anything to him about it I asked him if he had built those tags or had his web designer. Neither one, he had an SEO “expert’ do it. GRRRRRRRRR. I guess he doesn’t realize that just about anyone can look at your source code with just a click of the mouse.
This same vendor is spending between $300 and $600 a month on AdSense ads, again at the recommendation of his “SEO expert”. Hmmm, I guess even the “expert” knew that his little metatag trick wouldn’t work.
In this age of transparency I am baffled at how people are getting hoodwinked by alleged SEO experts. The only thing that really matters today in search is content. The fresher it is, the more often it is updated and the more relevant it is, the higher you rank. This is only going to increase as the search engines continue to refine themselves. They want to deliver the most relevant page to their users. That’s their job.
OK, so you knew I would bring it back to this…
If you want good search rankings you need a website that is easy enough for you to update yourself that you do it frequently. If you are willing to put in the effort, you need a blog and a social media presence. Long gone are the day when you can just throw cash at a web designer and an”SEO expert” and think it will do it all.
Good search results are structural and part of a good website, as long as your are paying for a website good search results should be included as part of what you are buying. Your website shouldn’t necessitate you having to invest in SEO and adwords.
If you want to read someone else’s take on this, here is a great article by a photo editor.
Christine
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