Search Engine Optimization Expectations

Reasonable Expectations

Expectation #1: SEO is not an exact science.

All of these and many other uncontrollable factors influence the success of an SEO campaign.

• The SEO efforts of competitors
• changes to search engine algorithms
• a client's SEO-unfriendly Content Management Software platform, directory structure, file-naming protocol, or META tagging standard that’s not going away anytime soon
• an upper-executive’s selection of keywords to target

Expectation #2: Rankings are important, but not the whole story.

A narrow focus on rankings alone ignores other important considerations, ones that can make the business case for SEO much more effectively and concretely than rankings alone.

Rankings are affected by many factors, not all of which are within our or the client's, direct control. For instance:

• Traffic from organic search-One of the major reasons for achieving high rankings in the first place is to increase the amount of traffic to a site. If traffic numbers increase noticeably after SEO improvements go live and maintain over time, SEO efforts can receive the credit.
• Conversions from organic search traffic-The quality of organic search traffic can be another measure of SEO’s success and value to an organization. One way to measure this is to track conversions from organic search traffic, and compare the quantity pre- and post-SEO efforts.
• Branding, credibility and competitive advantage-While less easy to measure directly, improved rankings (even if not the #1 spot) translate into more visibility for your client’s site and less for their competitors. Every results spot filled by a client’s page is one more chance for them to appear in front of their potential clients and customers.

Expectation #3: SEO is judged by improvement, not arbitrary targets.

Move away from a hard numeric goal ("We have to be #1 for ‘lawyers’") to one of improvement over time is key to managing an SEO project. While we may not guarantee a specific ranking, in our experience we can guarantee overall improvement in rankings, traffic, and visibility.

Expectation #4: Trends are important. Minor fluctuations are not.
Everyone’s experienced it. An optimized and link-built page finally hits the top five, only to drop three positions the next day. Panic time? No.

We’re more interested in data trends than individual data points. We need a broader view than a single day’s worth of data to give quality advice. Yes, perhaps we dropped three positions today. But when we look at performance over the past month or quarter, what’s the trend? Of course, we slice and dice trends in various ways to gain as much clarity as possible. For instance, we might look at an individual page’s performance for its targeted keywords, or look at organic traffic trends for a group of strategic keywords. And of course we pay special attention to trends pre- and post-optimization efforts.

Expectation #5: Improvements depend on implementation. 
A caveat to Expectation #3 is this - our recommendations have to actually be implemented in order for them to work. For some clients this is no problem, but many have technical or other restrictions that limit the amount or type of tactic we are able to employ for them. So, to help set expectations in this area we set priorities, indicate which approaches would be most effective for the client, and clearly communicate the possibility of reduced results if the most effective tactics are not implemented.

Expectation #6: A ranking is more valuable if it’s for the right page. 
Here is an area where we differ with some SEOs, because it goes directly to visitor experience. We think a top ranking for a page that provides a poor experience isn’t much of a win because it’s not sustainable.

Visitors who click through a result listing only to find a confusing, difficult or irrelevant page aren’t likely to return. Or remember your company’s brand with affection, if at all. So what do you have to show for your top ranking but a bunch of useless, bouncing traffic? (unless your business model is based solely on traffic numbers).

In summary:

• SEO is not an exact science.
• Rankings are important, but not the whole story
• SEO should be judged by bottom-line improvement, not arbitrary Google rankings

1. The Search Engine algorithms are based on over 100 factors, are complex and highly secret and are constantly being amended and improved. In highly competitive markets, it can be quite difficult to determine why at a given time the top 3 or 5 ranking websites are in the order they occur.
2. Provided a website is featured in the top 3 or 5, then it will appear ‘above the fold’ and so will be visible in the initial screen view from the Google search. Which website gets the click, depends not only on the order but also on the snippet of text that appears.
3. Usually a given keyword or keyword phrase will be only part of what the customer actually types into Google. Related searches will far outnumber those for the precise keyword. What counts is the total number of clicks that the web page gets, most of which come not from the precise keyword but from related phrases. This is the so-called ‘long tail phenomenon’.
4. Whether a visitor to a web page will ‘convert’ and make the purchase depends on many other factors relating to the website. If you accept that it’s the bottom-line that counts, then you should be aware of all these factors and make sure you put the priority on the factors that will bring the most immediate returns.

There are no guarantees any degree of SEO effort will make you rank number one or even in the top ten for a given keyword or phrase.

The good news is that SEO can and will help search engines better understand what your site is about and will enable your site then to be served in results for search queries that are relevant. And I’m not just talking about that one high-volume "gold" word but rather all the other limitless iterations of phrases that people might type into a search box to find content on that topic.

Gaining top position for that high-volume keyword is the holy grail but even if you don’t it doesn’t mean you can’t gain a significant share of traffic from organic search results by understanding how customers refer to your products or services and then writing to address that audience using their language. You might not see top ranking for the gold word but you might be surprised to see that hundreds of related phrases are driving smaller numbers of visitors to your site as a result of your optimization efforts. Many times these variations of phrases are more likely to convert because the searcher is more specific about what they want and if you’re offering it, and speaking to it directly, they’re more likely to click through and find what they’re looking for.

SEO is a long-term effort and on-going. No reputable SEO company can guarantee you top rankings for any keyword. If they do make that promise, be very cautious and make them put their money where their mouth is – i.e. tell them you don’t pay unless they get you there. They will quickly disappear. And if they don’t disappear, be extremely cautious of what their SEO tactics might be. You could find your site banned from a search engine index if the SEO provider employs black-hat tactics that spam the search engine spiders. Even if your site does pull off a top rank for your target keyword today does not mean you will hold that position or even the first page tomorrow.

I saw an example recently where a top manufacturer of a product was ranked #1 for a high-volume keyword in Google. Then Google changed their algorithm and they dropped to page four – literally over night. You can imagine what that must have done for their referrals for that query. That’s why it’s important to always be monitoring and paying attention to your natural search referrals. It’s one thing to gain a top position but it’s important to watch overall to ensure that a shift in the market or the engine algorithms or some other butterfly effect doesn’t create a significant problem for your site in search engines.

The expectations we like to set with our client's is that we will make the best recommendations for optimizing their web site for search engine visibility. Regardless of whether they rank well for a targeted term following implementation, we will guarantee the site will be crawled more thoroughly and will provide the search engines with more focused and more targeted content from which to evaluate relevance.

There are over 200 factors that are considered when a search engine is determining rank for a particular query. Some are well-known in the industry and there are best practices around implementing those. Many, however, are kept secret by the search engines (Google likes to refer to it as their "secret sauce") as they don’t want webmasters manipulating and spamming the search engines to gain top rankings for sites that don’t offer relevant, valuable content for their users.

The factors we can control for our clients are on-page optimization, content and meta tags, and web site structure, to make it easy to crawl and index by the search engine spiders. As part of our role as SEO Consultants, we implement or give guidance to our client's webmasters and developers on how to create a crawlable and indexable web site. We also provide detailed guidance to content managers on how to create more relevant content from both a search engine and user perspective, that will establish a foundation for being successful in organic search results.

Other factors we can influence are links. Links are incredibly important in SEO as the search engines see links as votes of authority from other sites. And it’s not just the quantity of links that matter; it’s the quality as well. In fact, one link from a high-quality site based on their longevity, popularity and relevance can provide much more link juice than 100 links from small, non-authoritative sites that don’t have related content. In fact, if the engine senses that the link was acquired only for SEO purposes it may be considered spam.

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