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Diary of an SEO trial (part 3)

Project milestones so far:
? Supplier selection confirmed: SEO company in India.
? SEO service selected to optimise 20 search keyphrases.
? The actual 20 search keyphrases are agreed.

One week in: The Project plan
With an email from our friendly project manager (he always starts his emails with "Hi David, Cheers Up!") I now have our SEO project plan, how exciting. This is a spreadsheet containing a 52 point project plan. Each point has an action, a status and a target date spanning a six month period. This is very encouraging. My major concerns about using an offshore SEO company was communication, this type of plan will help me to understand what they are doing each month. I feel reassured. In my reply email I include a hearty "Cheers Up" back to the project manager (even though I am not sure if he thinks Cheers Up is a British colloquialism and uses it for my benefit or a phrase he uses himself in everyday language, somehow I feel it is probably the former).

Two weeks in: Initial rank report
I received a report showing how dismally my website responds in the search engines for my selected search phrases. For those of you who missed the last edition, I had to choose 20 search phrases for optimisation, these are phrases that people type into Google to search for products like mine. The SEO company helped me choose the best search phrases which had proven to be used over the past year, but were not intensely competitive. For example, the term "Epos" is highly competitive and would need a great deal of work to get us on the first page, so I chose phrases like "Epos retail software".

The ranking report shows that my website did not show up at all if anyone typed the selected phrases in Google or Yahoo and only one search phrase produced my website in MSN. It was hardly surprising really since the search phrases we selected were not exactly flowing English, for example; "Epos retail software" is not something normally written in a sentence. However the SEO company did tell me they had evidence that people did search on the phrase. So, because my website didnít contain any of the phrases selected, it is no surprise to me that they did not appear in the search listings. I guess from here, the only way is up. One other point to note here, they were reporting results in the top three search engines; Google, Yahoo and MSN. I did some research on whether this was reasonable. According to an internet research company Hitwise, 91 per cent of internet searches are powered by just three search engines; Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

In the UK Google continues to dominate the search engine market powering 77 per cent of all internet searches. Google's closest competitors, MSN Search and Yahoo each power just seven per cent of UK internet searches. So, having just the three search engines in the ranking report seems reasonable.

Three weeks in: Choose commercial and non commercial approach
I found out today that an important task for an SEO company is to write copy for my selected key phrases. The copy will go into pages that become "key phrase honeypots" for the search engines. Here they can find a rich assortment of information related closely to the search phrase.

I received an email about the copy they are going to write. They want me to choose a particular approach. Do I want their copywriters to write in a style of selling product features and benefits, or in the style of a news article? I suppose it makes sense really, their copywriters need to know the style I am looking for, but I feel a little surprised by this, I had asked them to optimise my website and I didn't expect to have to make decisions on articles that will be written for publishing on it. I don't know which approach would be best for this purpose. But at least they have provided a couple of examples to help me decide. A few days later, after mulling it over I felt the best approach was to write in a news style as I already had product information in other pages and I didn't want duplicate content (search engines will identify duplicate content and ignore it). So, it seems that I am going to have 20 pages of news on my website, this could get interesting.

Four weeks in: Analysis of software and giving access to website
Today, a dilemma! The SEO company want to change some code on the website. They are asking for full access to the live website. Well, I don't want them to have live access to my website. I want to check what they are doing before anything is published live! My company has a policy not to give anyone full access to the live website servers, including our own website designers, it's far too dangerous and just bad practice. A simple mistake can bring the whole server down and bring down not just our website but many others. Instead I will give them access to a copy of the website, they can make changes there. Only after I have signed off the changes will I copy the changes to the live server.

When I told them about this approach they didn't like it much but reluctantly agreed. It then took them three weeks to work out how to get access to the copy website. Painful for such a simple task but they got there in the end. I bet this type of difficulty is common whenever a third party SEO company wants to access a website owned by another company. Anyway, once they had access, the SEO company sent me an email saying they had added some code to the website for reporting purposes. They used Google Analytics. In my opinion a good choice, this is a superb free tool from Google. I used to use a paid tool for tracking my website performance, then Google Analytics came out, completely free, and it was better than the one I was paying for. In their fight against Microsoft for global internet domination, Google has probably cost a lot of smaller companies a lot of money. It's not just in retail where giant corporations trample over smaller companies! Now they have added the Google Analytics code to my website, my own Google Analytics reports have stopped working. Oh well, I frankly don't have time to fix this, it's not the end of the world, they would provide me with monthly reports anyway.

In summary, this month I have seen some positive progress. However from my upbeat feeling at the start of the month I now have started to feel a few wobbles creeping in.

September/October 2010
issue 61
available now