Social Media Systems Social Media Marketing and Website Design Company

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I recently posted a giant ranting comment on one of the most popular SEO blogs (seomoz). It was in a response to a post outlining a fictitious plan for how a catering company in Seattle could crush their competition in the Search Engine Results Pages. Their advice, although creative and well written, illustrates one of the biggest failings of large search engine optimization firms, especially ones targeting small and medium sized companies.

The list of items reads like a map to create the coolest catering website possible complete with forums, food photography, sexy graphic design, recipe guides - it goes on and on and I’m not even to the marketing part of it yet.

Here is the problem, what spurred my ranting comment and why I’m writing this article. The post attempts to boil down search engine ranking successes to creative ideas that involve very detailed and expensive web development projects. It makes it seem like it’s some kind of amazing creativity or resourcefulness that makes the difference between a site that ranks and a site that doesn’t. It’s not true. Ideas are great, they’re also online for free, millions of them spreading like viruses at this very moment.

If you look at that article it’s full of 40 ideas for improving a caterer’s website, but of course I wouldn’t expect most of them to pop up anytime soon. Why? Because it’s not about the idea or trying to be extra creative, that’s what may appear to be why a site ranks, but it’s really about the execution. That part is hard and rarely done well.

So why aren’t Seattle catering websites already equipped with such a dream lists of features and marketing? Because they’re stupid? No, because they’re busy doing business and don’t have the means to execute those plans effectively (or don’t think they do with their current SEO / Web contacts). It’s the execution that’s the valuable part now and although many SEO consultants talk about grandiose ideas and plans, it’s apparent from their broken sites and blogs they like to talk more then do.

I don’t like to be self-promotional in my blog posts, but for this one I’m making an exception. I and the rest of the social media system team try to focus on the execution. We are constantly asking ourselves what we can accomplish with a realistic budget and within the resources of our clients. We spend more of our time doing and less talking about what we’d like to do or in being too detailed (and thus wasting time and money) in our initial plan or overly detailed research. We call it performance based marketing and that’s why we bundle web development with search marketing to help us execute plans more effectively, so our customers see the fastest ROI. We treat it as a series of steps, with each one designed to make you money and improve your online presence and visibility instead of one grandiose dreamlike plan that costs a fortune initially and requires such a deep commitment before you see any results.

Technorati Tags: seomoz, seo plan, search engine optimization plan, search engine marketing plan

2 Responses to “A good plan gone wrong | reaction to seomoz, an SEO firm”

1. Caleb Whitmore Says:
   March 26th, 2007 at 3:24 pm

   Solomon,

   Interesting points regarding the SEOmoz article. I think what this really boils down to is a fundamental problem with web development and the general lack of understanding regarding SEO by most web designers/developers/development companies out there. The ideas Rand talks about are simply good web design ideas, as you noted… so why aren’t those done from the beginning when the website is first built or during the next redesign? Probably because the developer or development agency isn’t SEO-savvy. They may be brilliant designers and developers, but unless they integrate SEO best practices into their process, the client will have to engage an SEO firm to essentially redesign the site.

   Anyway, good points and thanks for brining them forth!

   Best,

   -Caleb

2. kabababrubarta Says:
   March 26th, 2007 at 4:20 pm

   Nice site! kabababrubarta

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