Times are tough.

In times like these, clients tend to focus on the value proposition. "Throw it at the wall, see if it sticks" is not a phrase you hear a lot in recessions.

Instead, your customers will tend to have their eyes transfixed on your value proposition. "How does this spend make me better off?"

Whilst we may think search marketing services are essential, the spend on search services typically comes out of marketing budgets, and marketing budgets tend to be the first thing companies cut when things get tight.

So, they might need more convincing that usual.

If you weren't doing so already, it can be a good time to go over your proposals and pitch, and look to emphasize, and add to the value proposition you offer.

A few points to consider....

1. Address Genuine Needs

Address the need a client has, which may be different than the need they articulate.

This may seem obvious, but often people aren't quite sure exactly why they need search marketing, or they may have wrong ideas about it. Their genuine business need may be buried. You need to tease this out.

To do so, listen. Hard.

One common mistake people who are "fixers" - seos tend to be fixers - can make is that they'll go through the motions of listening, but really they're just waiting for an opportunity to launch into their solution.

A client will tell you a lot, and perhaps cover a lot of angles you hadn't thought of, if you let them talk long enough. They will like the fact you are interested in them and their problems, and it will make your eventual solution sound more considered and tailor-made.

Because it will be.

If you don't solve a genuine problem, your relationship is more likely to be a short one. Services that don't solve genuine business problems are more likely to get cut.

2.Go Beyond

Look for ways you can enhance your offering.

Look to solve genuine problems in closely related fields. For example, a client may lack a content strategy. They may want to publish content regularly, but haven't got around to doing so. You could enhance your offering by incorporating this work in your offer, reasoning that it dovetails nicely with your SEO strategy, thus killing two birds with one stone.

This can also get you on-going work, if pitched right, and may involve little more than hiring the services of a copywriter.

3. Establish Feedback Mechanisms

Feedback is important.

Not only does it give you added insight into what the client is thinking, it also offers you the opportunity to demonstrate your value proposition in action.

You said you would do X, you do X, then show them you've done X. This helps build trust.

Clients will often elaborate, if given the opportunity, which can give you more ideas on how to "Go Beyond", and how to "Address Their Real Needs".

4. Look At Jobs As Partnerships

If you've ever bought services, you know that selecting a service provider can be a pain. It is time consuming, and there is risk involved. A wrong choice can lead to opportunity cost, and having to repeat the process all over again.

No one wants that. People want partnerships with their suppliers. They want someone on their side.

Once you've landed a client, try to see them as a business partner. This is certainly how they will view you if they like you. They are unlikely to go back out to the market unless they are disastisfied, so try to make their business, your business.

Take the approach that you will boost your own business by building theirs.

5. Every Job Is An Opportunity To Build Hybrid Skills & Knowledge

Let's say you have a travel client.

Learn everything you can about the travel industry. Press the client for information. Research and understand the wider industry, not just the search marketing opportunity within that industry.

One of the golden things about being a consultant is that you get to look inside people's businesses. This information is valuable and difficult to obtain by other means, yet you're getting paid to learn it. You're learning about real business issues, who's-who, and the language of the industry.

You then become more valuable to any other travel-related client as you're now "a travel guy". You can pitch convincing to them, because you speak their language, understand their problems, and you've got industry history.

Over the past year or 2 there have been lots of changes with Google pushing vertical integration, but outside of localization and verticalization, core relevancy algorithms (especially in terms of spam fighting) haven't changed too much recently. There have been a few tricky bits, but when you consider how much more powerful Google has grown, their approach to core search hasn't been as adversarial as it was a few years back (outside of pushing more self promotion).

There has been some speculation as to why Google has toned down their manual intervention, including:

• anti-trust concerns as Google steps up vertically driven self-promotion (and an endless well of funding for anyone with complaints, courtesy Microsoft)
• a desire to create more automated solutions as the web scales up
• spending significant resources fighting site hacking (the "bigger fish to fry" theory)

Matt Cutts recently made a blog post on the official Google blog, which highlighted that indeed #3 was a big issue:

As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.

It sounds like Google was mainly focused on fighting hacked sites and auto-generated & copied content. And now that hacked *GOVERNMENT* websites are available for purchase for a few hundred Dollars (and perhaps millions in personal risk when a government comes after you) it seems like Google's pushing toward fighting off site hacking was a smart move! Further, there are a wide array of start ups built around leveraging the "domain authority" bias in Google's algorithm, which certainly means that looking more at page by page metrics was a needed strategy to evolve relevancy. And with page-by-page metrics it will allow Google to filter out the cruddy parts of good sites without killing off the whole site.

As Google has tackled many of the hard core auto-generated spam issues it allows them to ramp up their focus on more vanilla spam. Due to a rash of complaints (typically from web publishers & SEO folks) content mills are now a front and center issue:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception.

Demand Media (DMD) is set to go public next week, and Richard Rosenblatt has a long history of timing market tops (see iMall or MySpace).

But what sort of sites are the content mills that Google is going to ramp up action on?

The tricky part with vanilla spam is the subjective nature of it. End users (particularly those who are not web publishers & online advertisers) might not complain much about sites like eHow because they are aesthetically pleasing & well formatted for easy consumption. The content might be at a low level, but maybe Google is willing to let a few of the bigger players slide. And there is a lot of poorly formatted expert content which end users would view worse than eHow, simply because it is not formatted for online consumption.

If you recall the Mayday update, Richard Rosenblatt said that increased their web traffic. And Google's October 22nd algorithm change last year saw many smaller websites careen into oblivion, only to re-appear on November 9th. That update did not particularly harm sites like eHow.

However, in a Hacker News thread about Matt's recent blog post he did state that they have taken action against Mahalo: "Google has taken action on Mahalo before and has removed plenty of pages from Mahalo that violated our guidelines in the past. Just because we tend not to discuss specific companies doesn't mean that we've given them any sort of free pass."

My guess is that sites that took a swan dive in the October 23rd timeframe might expect to fall off the cliff once more. Where subject search relevancy gets hard is that issues rise and fall like ocean waves crashing ashore. Issues that get fixed eventually create opportunities for other problems to fester. And after an issue has been fixed long enough it becomes a non-issue to the point of being a promoted best practice, at least for a while.

Anyone who sees opportunity as permanently disappearing from search is looking at a half-empty glass rather than one which sees opportunities that died reborn again and again.

That said, I view Matt's blog post as a bit of a warning shot. What types of sites do you think he is coming after? What types of sites do you see benefiting from such changes? Discuss. :)

Google's Take On SEOs

Google likes to make SEOs look like fools. Some are, but some are simply privy to less information. Or, in some cases, thrown under the bus by a new wave editorial policy in the gray area. Inconsistent enforcement is a major issue, but even if you go beyond that, the truth is most businesses have a range of revenue streams from pure as can be to entirely parasitic.

Google is Sleazier Than Microsoft

Recently we saw Matt Cutts play investigative reporter & literally create a story about how dirty some of Bing's affiliates are. Here is the litmus test though: when Microsoft became aware of it they immediately canned the shady distribution partner. Meanwhile, Google still funds toolbars that put AdSense ads in them AND to this day Google still funds google.bearshare.com, which *is* driven by the same kinds of home page changes that Matt found distasteful.

In Manufacturing Consent Noam Chomsky highlights that we should judge actions based on an equality of principals & that we are responsible primarily for our own actions. Yet Google complains about Microsoft. It took Microsoft less than a day to clean up their act, while Google still hasn't fixed issues that were highlighted publicly 6 years ago!

Many Subjective Warnings

Not only is Google trying to police their competitors, but recently they have offered warnings on all sorts of subjective issues, like...

• warnings that menus might be seen as spam
• webmaster notifications of 'unnatural links'
• an out of context tweet on cloaking: "Google will more at cloaking in Q1 2011. Not just page content matters; avoid different headers/redirects to Googlebot instead of users."

Individually, each of those issues can be debated.

In our new site design our navigation is aggressively repetitive in some areas. The reason we did that was some people complained about not being able to effectively get around the site. To help make the navigation more intuitive and consistent we use drop downs and in some cases have 3 or 4 or even 5 links to the same location. Is that optimal from a search perspective? Probably not. But then again, search engines don't convert into paying customers. They are simply a conduit...a means to an end. When an engineer views a site they might not view it through the same lens as a customer would.

What is an unnatural link profile? Does it depend on who is building the links? We know that at an SEO conference when some of IAC's cross linking was highlighted Matt Cutts stated "those don't count" but didn't qualify it any further. Likewise when it was highlighted how Mahalo was link farming we were told that they deserved the benefit of the doubt. Since then the link farms have grown and mutated. I won't link at ask.inc.com/when-should-i-hire-a-company-for-lead-generation, but if I was told that the following is "natural" and "good to go" then I would have no problems building a few million links a week. Then again, I bet it would be "unnatural" if I did the same thing.

The part about treating Googlebot different from users is a bit perplexing. As technology has evolved this area has become quite blurry/murky.

• Sometimes when clicking into big media sites that are 'first click free' I get kicked right to a registration page. In the past some iTunes pages would rank & force you into the iTunes software (though that may have recently changed).
• Google ranks certain Youtube content in international markets, even where said content is unavailable.
• Scroll cloaking has been around forever.
• Tools like Google Website Optimizer can be used to alter user experience significantly.
• There is an SEO start up which pushes search visitors to sites like CNN to a heavily ad wrapped & paginated version of the same content.
• I accidentally screwed up using a rel=canonical on a page (cut the source code from a dynamic page and pasted it as the basis for a similar static page & forgot to remove the rel=canonical tag). Eventually I figured out what was wrong & fixed it, but both the correct and incorrect pages ranked for weeks at #1 and #2. And isn't the whole point of the rel=canonical tag to give the search engines a different type of header than an end user (telling the search engine that the content is elsewhere while telling the user nothing of the sort)?

But which of those is a problem? None of them? All of them? Does it depend on who you ask? Does it depend on perceived intent? And that is the tricky part because the same impact can be had with many different tools like 301 redirects, meta refreshes, javascript redirects, and rel=canonical. Should they penalize the technique, the intent, or the result? How do they imply intent?

Relevancy vs Market Manipulation

Spam is in the eye of the beholder, as is relevancy.

The thing is, Google is in a position to imply intent as they see fit. They are in a position to tilt the playing table as they see fit. They claim to be open and sometimes they are fighting the good fight, but businesses have a range of revenue streams from pure as can be to entirely parasitic.

The leaked internal Google documents about copyright and ads on trademarks certainly highlight that Google has no problem with a foot in each pond.

Syndication has long been a part of the media landscape, where portals chose what bits to mix in from where. But how much is fine & what should be done with duplicates? When does something go from 'legitimate syndication' to 'overt spam'? We see official Google blog posts which claim that AdSense ads are not allowed on unoriginal content, while Google has multiple large partners that wrap Google's search results in the AdSense feed and then serve it back to Google. Site categories which were described as 'shoot on sight' become viable enterprises when a person puts a web 2.0 design, venture capital & some public relations into the same basic business model. If Google is going to put out some 'thou shalt not' styled commandments under the label of 'fact vs fiction' they should have consistent enforcement of obvious issues that have been brought up publicly numerous times, including on the very post highlighting the policy. But we know they won't! They only care about dirty business practices if they are not getting a taste of the revenue stream (as shown by their BearShare partnership while policing Bing affiliates).

Based on that sort of activity, when Google announces a preference while promoting "openness" it is easy to see it as a step backward, hypocritical, or even as a farce. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

As Google pushes more to advertise itself on its ad network it is no surprise that they were eventually forced to disclose payout percentages. But it took a lawsuit to do it.

After purchasing Youtube Google rolled out their universal search & was fine with aggressively promoting Youtube over other video services. Only recent government reviews have pushed Google to give 3rd party services a fair shake, but the network effects and lead are likely already too great to overcome.

Due to past search bias, Google might get blocked out of completing the ITA deal. The good news going forward for publishers is due to increasing regulatory heat Google will only go after a small number of verticals where they payouts are huge. The regulatory blowback will be too great for them to try to be all things to all people.

When Google's head spam fighter is doing public relations AND the Washington Post covers his lobbying you know Google is nearing a breaking point.

Microsoft Revenue Per Click Equals Google's

Microsoft adCenter has recently increased their revenue per click to match Google, in spite of having a small chunk of the search market share (maybe 25% between Bing and Yahoo! Search to Google's ~ 75%).

All we hear about Google's love for the scientific method, the superiority of their relevancy algorithms, them creating the best thing for advertisers, etc. has prettymuch been reduced to fluff.

Google is much more aggressive at forcing searchers down a set path, has a broader ad feature set, has more (~ 3x) search marketshare, and yet Microsoft is able to compete. And they have done this against a competitor which keeps making incremental changes to build additional yield.

The Arbitrage Game

How was Microsoft able to increase their yield so much? If you go back 5 years, at the time Yahoo! powered a greater share of search traffic then than Microsoft does now, and their ads were powering both MSN and Yahoo! Search. How did Microsoft catch up with Google when Yahoo! failed to compete?

One word: arbitrage.

I have long railed on Yahoo! for screwing advertisers with fraudulent traffic sources. Arbitragers destroyed the value of Yahoo! clicks & it wasn't until 2010 that Yahoo! allowed you to opt out of the fraudulent traffic.

Even today, Yahoo! still arbitrages search traffic through their home page's trending now section.

Notice the word highlighted in yellow. In most cases Yahoo! will typically spike one or two commercially oriented keywords into their trending box. Having ranked for numerous of these keywords, I can tell you that they can drive thousands of search clicks...which can be an expensive shot of traffic if you are paying $5 a click for them. The 'high blood pressure' might be a Dollar or two, but I have seen some expensive finance keywords in there as well.

A Look Under the Hood of Smaller Search Engines

The thing to understand about paid sources of traffic is that as soon as you add the element of payment there becomes a set of mixed incentives along the value chain.

I won't tell you which search engine it was, other than to say it was a publicly traded one, but about 4 years back a second tier search engine sent me a spreadsheet of [keywords * their bid prices] and wanted me to "generate traffic" for them.

1). Direct Partnership - Pull our ads to display on the site(s) for high paying keyword terms. The traffic must be unique and convert well for the advertiser (search engine traffic is the best). We can display ads in a variety of format and target the top terms on our network. Makes for a good compliment to other revenue streams.

2). Aggressive Referral Partnerships - I will compensate you and/or any other contacts in the black hat SEO realm up to 10% of all revenues generated by referred partnerships. (There are some SEO guys out there doing 1K+ per day in revenue - 10% = 100.00 additional per day for the life of those accounts). I am definitely willing to compensate nicely for referral of these contacts for Direct Partnership deals.

That second tier set up is of course why so many affiliate blogs recommend signing up for every affiliate network in the world. But the big issue with Yahoo! was that (in spite of being a major leading search engine) they were still operating like the 3rd tier folks, with certain publishers being able to access high payouts and CPC stats. Some of the folks running the Overture feed where whoring out out to others & one well known webmaster even has the word "clickbot" in his nickname. Yahoo! made it hard for advertisers to opt out, and that is what killed their click value.

What coincided with Microsoft's increasing revenues per click? They reined in the arbitrage folks.

"Although the Yahoo-Bing integration has been ongoing for several months, during which time we were able to adapt well to the volatile environment, in mid-December we began to experience average revenue per click decreases and the strategies we customarily deploy for responding to such decreases were not as effective," said Geoffrey Rotstein, CEO. "As a result, we are maintaining substantially lower traffic levels until we have better insight into the factors contributing to this issue. The Company is currently working diligently with the teams at Yahoo! in an effort to implement any necessary adjustments to this new marketplace."

"We have always been able to adapt quickly and positively to changes in the industry as a result of our intense focus on data and analytics. We intend to apply this same discipline to respond to these issues, as we continue to receive information from Yahoo! that will assist us to adapt our system for the new advertising marketplace," added Ted Hastings, President. "We intend to make whatever changes are required within our Company to ensure a fast and sustainable response to this new market".

SEO = Still Amazing

But the purpose of this post is to point back to the value of SEO clicks. Advertisers spend over $30 billion a year buying ads from search engines & the organic search results still get the bulk of the clicks. Of course search engines are pushing to eat the organic results as well, but for anyone who has a strong organic traffic stream it is easy to under-appreciate the value until you realize how scarce and expensive pure & clean search traffic is.

Make hay while the sun shines! :)

A lot of folks have been hammering away at sending out automated link exchange emails for Wordpress driven sites.

The hallmarks of many such efforts

• URL with something cheesy like "partners" or "friends" or "roundtable"
• automated emails without a name that mention a search engine ranking and (falsely) apologize for being sent multiple times
• auto-generated content that is overly boastful & looks like it comes from one of those internet marketing review sites that has fake comment bots which say *everything* is the best thing since sliced bread / a genius in motion / a deity of your choice
• Thumbshot previews
• a bit of technical trickery

Nice bit of false empathy there. ;)

The technical trickery mentioned above is that if you visit the link they put in the email the linking post will appear *all over* the site that is "linking" to you. But if you open up a new browser from a different IP address and try to visit the parent category page before visiting the individual post page you will see that the post is only visible to a person who knows exactly where it is. So the people are not only mass automated email spammers, but they lie at hello as well (by deceiving folks into thinking there is an on-the-level exchange of some sort, while screwing them over with a page that is invisible to everyone but them).

The stuff is so out of hand that even new age doomer movies about 2012 are using it & are sending the emails to sites about SEO, offering sources of 'enlightenment.' :D

Clearly they are enlightened. ;)

Some tips & strategies:

• The easiest way around such issues is to delete unsolicited commercial messages, especially if they are not personalized. But if you want to give someone the benefit of the doubt, then the best way to do so is check the source code of the page inside Google's cache. If the page isn't cached by Google then generally Google probably doesn't care much about it. (Yes there are exception to that, but the people who are sending unsolicited emails probably do not deserve too much benefit of the doubt.)
• If you are out sending emails asking for links then it goes without saying that you don't want to look like the above folks (though I have received *far* worse emails from some SEO companies & PR folks). Automated tools can be dangerous things when in the hands of tools!