This inforgraphic pretty much sums up my thoughts on client SEO work. If you are in any mildly competitive industry you’ll need to be doing it yourself. Practically all the good SEOs build their own sites. Its just simple economics, you can make X times more doing your own sites than doing client work.

Being a publisher SEO can be easier too. You can look at a SERP for a keyword and decide not to tackle it. If you are doing it for a client then its harder to just dismiss that keyword and move on to the next one.

Good client SEO work doesn’t scale very well. Its time consuming to research the ‘money keywords’. Any idiot can use the Adwords keyword tool to find some keywords but usually it takes some domain knowledge to know which ones will make the money. The smart SEO will spend his time researching these for his own sites rather than yours.

Marketing Infographic by SEO Book

Time for another web site review. This time its the website of an online cheesecake seller.

The first thing I noticed about this site is that its properly designed. The code is so clean, unlike some of the bloated wordpress sites I look at on a daily basis. It is so refreshing seeing a nicely designed but also functionally friendly website.

The only problem I saw with the functionality is that when you add a cheesecake to the basket, the visual cues are not there. It took me a while to work out that the cheesecake had been added to the basket. On a giant monitor, this isn’t much of a problem but 90% of people won’t be able to see the basket section being updated. I’d be tempted to have a bigger visual cue than the add to basket button change subtlety from red to green.

In terms of google rankings, it could struggle to rank due to the lack of indexable content. If you view as a bot, there isn’t much there to index. A lot of e-commerce sites struggle from this. I’d look at getting some type of review system implemented. This could provide content as well as social proof.

As its a brand new site it’s got no backlinks. Looking at the competition they don’t have many powerful links (in terms of Majestic’s AC Rank). Its not a big money vertical so ranking shouldn’t be too hard. As always, if there is enough budget for it, I’d test with Adwords first to get the site converting properly.

In terms of the cheesecake quality, I am fortunate enough to have eaten a fair chunk of the award winning raspberry cheesecake. I would recommend getting them for really special occasions. I don’t think I could justify paying the premium prices for just eating on an ordinary day but if you have something to celebrate, why not splash out?

Link to site Very Delicious Cheesecakes

Quadd is a member of the Google Engage programme for agencies. This allows us to give away free of charge, Google adwords vouchers to people that are considering using Google for advertising.

Google Adwords is possibly the most effective form of advertising there is. When people are on Google searching, they are looking for things at that moment in time. If you are an accountant, someone searching for, say, “chartered accountants sheffield” is almost certain to be looking for an accountant at that moment in time. If your site appears high up on the SERPs then you will get a targeted visitor to your site. Other than word of mouth marketing, I can see no other more effective system of advertising. Word of mouth doesn’t scale that well though. With Google Adwords, you can buy as much traffic as Google can send.

Rich Skrenta of Blekko search explains why search traffic is the best type of traffic you can get.

• Question: It seems like you’ll never match deep-pocketed companies like Google or Bing, so what’s the endgame? How do you turn this into a profitable business?

  Answer: Search is one of best businesses on the Web. Search traffic monetizes really well. It can be 50 to 100 bucks per 1,000 page views (CPM).

  When I was the CEO of Topix, a local news aggregator, we were doing pretty well monetizing local page news, about three or four bucks per thousand. We were getting one dollar even on forums, and those ads are generally worthless.

  If you go to a social network like Facebook, CPM can be 15 cents. People aren’t in buy mode. They don’t possess intent to buy. But if you go to a search engine and type in “Palo Alto Real Estate,” you’ve declared your intention to buy a house in Palo Alto. So real estate agents buy as many clicks as they can possibly get.

  Our intent is to put search ads on the site. We can be a profitable company with far less traffic if you were running a local news site. $50 is much higher than $3.

If you are interested in trying out Google adwords please fill in the form for a free £50 Adwords Voucher.

It’s not often I provide feedback on other peoples’ websites. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. I look back at some of my websites and they are shocking. That’s why I don’t believe that Google cares about clean code and tolerates a fair number of spelling mistakes, typos and false information.

Anyway, I recently did a SEO review for Have a great Stay. Most of these errors should be fixed now but it should give you an idea of the things that Quadd looks out for when doing client SEO work.

Problems found

• No analytics installed. I always recommend getting some type of analytics installed on a website. Looking at server logs is OK for a quick look at what keywords are sending you traffic but if you are serious about your website, you need a professional analytics package. I recommend Google analytics or getclicky. I use both on this site.
  
• Search engines blocked in the meta tag. If you have this in the meta tags of your site, you are basically telling Google not to include your site in it’s index. It’s a schoolboy error but I’ve made that before and seen some other seo professionals do the same.
  
• Company details not displayed properly. Its a legal require for companies to list their registered address on their website.
  
• Magic quotes in the copy. Not much of a problem in modern browsers but it can look nasty in older browsers.
  
• Title tag not descriptive. After links and anchor text, the title tag is the most important part of your SEO.
  
• Need to 301 the old site. May as well get that google juice flowing to the new site.

I have actually used the service to book a hotel room too and can recommend it. You can spend ages on lastminute.com or skyscanner booking a hotel. With Have a great stay, you just tell them your destination and dates. They’ll do the lookup for you and give you a list. You have a look at the reviews on Trip Advisor and decide which one you want to book. Have a Great Stay take care of it all. The price for the hotel I was looking at was cheaper than anything I found online myself. They have special deals with some hotels so you won’t be able to get the deals any cheaper even at the same hotel online.

Get in touch with them here

Quadd has had a bit of a facelift. We’ve decided to pursue other areas of online marketing. Basically, the verticals we work in are extremely tough to rank sites for. Even when you get number 1, the traffic is tiny due to the amount of Google ads cluttering the screen. We figured that paid search is the way forward. As Google have practically killed affiliates in paid search, getting clients is our preferred option.

If you want to work with an experienced online marketing company on your paid search campaigns, get in touch.

Moving forward we are going to be using this blog as a knowledge base for our clients. Check back later for more update or subscribe to our RSS feed.