But long-term trends in the way search engines rank pages and display results are both changing that. Now, it’s entirely possible to run a successful campaign where none of the target keywords are expected to hit the #1 position.

As search engines evolve from a tool for ranking pages to a tool for driving decisions, this is only going to get more common.

Fortunately, it’s possible to build a campaign around capturing implicit user intents, not just keyword rankings. Reframing campaigns this way will pump up conversion rates and fix a few broken metrics.

The Ongoing SERP Facelift

The most cited, most thorough data we have on search result click-throughs still comes from the notorious AOL data dump in 2006.

Using that information, it was possible to calculate that the #1 result got about 42% of the clicks, while the #10 result got about 3%.

For a while, that estimated amount looked too low: search engines in general got better at deciding what a give user wanted to see when they searched for a specific term, so the #1 result kept getting better.

To a degree, that’s still happening. But search engines now realize that top rankings shouldn’t be a naive rank-ordering of every page that is relevant to a given term—it’s a better user experience.

(One search engine heuristic is minimizing the number of repeat searches someone has to make. Every repeat search means “No, what I meant was X,” and it’s often possible to statistically verify which X they usually mean. Google Suggest is one way to capture this information, but most SERPs are now made up of good results for the term searched, plus good results for the popular variants on the term that show up in suggest.)

As for Bing and Google—yes, Bing is taking the lead, at least on the PR front—are both reframing search in terms of the user intent each search reveals. That’s a powerful change.

Take a query involving a restaurant: a naive ranking might notice that the restaurant has reviews in five different highly-trusted publications, and rank each review ahead of the official site (especially if the site’s in flash).

But an intent-based view would identify several reasons someone might search for a restaurant:

1. They may be looking for the official site.
2. They might want to see a menu (so Menupages gets a boost).
3. They might want to make a reservation (OpenTable gets this one).
4. They might want to see a review (so it’s a toss-up: Yelp, local news outlets, or some combination thereof).
5. They might be looking for directions—search engines tend to just use their own map product for this.

Suddenly, there’s no such thing as being #1 for a single keyword. Now, you can be #1 for any one of several user intents: for some queries, there’s a “#1″ result below the fold.

Picking The Keywords & Targets That Work

How can you tell if one search is satisfying multiple intents? There’s an insanely simple heuristic, though it takes a little legwork. It’s a quick two-step process for every keyword you’re targeting. Type the term into Google, and:

1. Check the suggestions—does one of them match the intent you’re going for?. Great, then:
2. Check the search results: do you see at least one result fitting that intent?

After that, it’s standard keyword research: if the site matching your intent is a nationally-recognized brand, it’s going to be tough to outrank them for that intent.

If the site that ranks is someone you’ve never heard of, with weak content and poor SEO, you have a decent shot. But you don’t just have to use keyword targeting. Within the search results page, metadata gives you tools that can help ramp up clickthroughs. In fact, that’s exactly what search engines want you to do.

What To Do: Using Intent & Metadata

This might sound like giving up on promising keywords. But another way to look at it is that it’s an opportunity: if you’re targeting a specific need that a keyword might represent, you can essentially optimize for the relevant variant on that term.

That gives you the freedom to craft your page’s search engine presence so it specifically turns off some users, if it turns other users on.

There are two obvious courses of action here: refine your metrics, and start using your page’s appearance on the SERP to match user intents, not just keywords.

On the metrics side, this means setting expectations: if you’re not targeting the #1 user intent, you won’t rank #1. But if you did rank #1 while targeting the second most popular intent, most of the extra traffic you’d get would be worthless: you’d be getting lots of bounces, and some confused users, but not a lot of business.

On the campaigning side, there’s a lot to do—and more every day. Schema.org is basically an effort to get the whole SEO community on board with the idea of ranking for intents, not keywords. So a single review looks different from a review site, which looks different from an official site, which looks different from a reservation-taking site.

Beyond Schema.org, you can modify your site’s copy to fit this paradigm, too. Bing calls it “the web of verbs.” And you can run with that in a literal sense: if your meta description starts with the literal verb that your site applies to the keyword noun (e.g. [Read reviews of] + [Restaurant], or [compare rates on] + [financial product]), you’ll capture clicks from the right audience.

As more search engines use click data to refine rankings, your initial positioning will have some staying power.

Photo nesting dolls from Joel75. Used under Creative Commons license.

– Ben Affleck as Jim Young, Boiler Room

You don’t have to be a penny stock promoter to appreciate a good rallying speech about sales (you don’t have to sell real estate, either). But this one hits close to home. No matter what your site does, every page closes a sale:

• It convinces someone to keep clicking on to the next page, or
• It convinces them to leave, but not before they follow your Twitter feed or subscribe to your newsletter, so they can come back when they’re ready, or
• It convinces them to make a purchase, make a donation, or do whatever it is that the site exists to make them do, or
• It convinces them that the most interesting feature on the page they’re looking at is “Close tab.”

Top To Bottom

People tend to read pages from top to bottom until they get distracted by something.

Internet sales letter aficionados recognize that law of online physics: they produce a long, sometimes boring letter, punctuated with exciting pull quotes, engrossing videos (with compelling thumbnails) and, of course, calls-to-action with all the tact and elegance of a drunken carnival barker.

One easy trick for adapting pages to this paradigm is to escalate your calls-to-action: ask them to follow you on social media first (i.e. to add a little noise to the noiseist information they voluntarily consume), then ask them to sign up for your newsletter, then ask them to tweet/share the page, and only then ask for the sale.

Of course, in between each ask, there should be lots of giving—giving them useful information about whatever it is you’re convincing them to do, where “useful” correlates very well with whatever is true, relevant, and keeps them reading.

This scheme has some interesting advantages rooted in the way people make decisions: thanks to signalling, the availability heuristic, and the endowment effect, people tend to be more likely to do something once they’ve publicly stated that they think it’s a good idea.

It’s a nice way to “bootstrap” your way to a sale: if someone likes your product enough to “like” it on Facebook, the fact that they’ve “liked” it may convince them that they like it enough to buy it.

From Search, Then Side To Side

But what about that first conversion—convincing someone to click forward to the next page on your site? The value of this “conversion” really depends on what kind of site you’re running.

For media sites, this is the name of the game: clicks multiplied by CPMs pay most of their bills.

For e-commerce sites, the question is a little trickier: is someone who browses ten different product pages trying to narrow down their options, or trying to find the one product that calls to them? Or are they “just looking,” and unlikely to actually complete a purchase?

It’s hard to say. But it’s pretty easy to argue that incremental pageviews don’t cost a site sales: what costs them sales is that the most compelling next click doesn’t take someone to a product page. What’s the best fix?

1. UI: give them “soft” purchasing options, like “Sign up to our newsletter to hear about discounts on this product”—depending on your margins, it might make sense to automatically send a short-term, small-scale discount on just that product to people who sign up for product-specific discounts. It’s an extremely cheap form of price discrimination.
2. Offsite: a single session’s browsing history is a rich vein for retargeting: one ad per product viewed can produce an amazing click-through and conversion rate.

Closing The Loop

If you’ve sold someone on following your Twitter feed or newsletter, you’ve more than halfway sold them on an end purchase. Someone who jumps from a product page to a newsletter signup is say “Please, give me a reason to take out my credit card.

That’s true in a mostly negative way: the vast majority of corporate blogs and Twitter feeds are either boring and misguided or irritating. So the only good reason to sign up for this kind of thing is financial: either you’re waiting for a discount or you’re hitting the snooze button on a purchase.

Closing the loop is the most idiosyncratic part of the sales process. Conversion rates on follow-ups vary massively at different verticals and price points.

Some B2B products have a high return-visitor conversion rate because of how people purchase products for a business (realize it’s obviously useful, convince the boss, return to the site). On the consumer side, it’s trickier.

But each tweet and email newsletter post is yet another sales opportunity. And fortunately, “Ignore this and wait for the next one” is an easier sale than “Unsubscribe.”

Photo Short Meeting from BeffudledSenses. Used under Creative Commons license.

Well, one way to think about the situation is that you have a temporary landing page with strong topical authority.

Particularly given the latest algorithm update, your odds of a short-term success are a lot better—and the price of resting on your laurels is that much higher. But here’s the good news: Google is still ranking topic pages, not just news stories. (Just Google any celebrity’s name and see.)

So, how do you keep your page fresh?

Spotting Opportunities With Google Suggest

Let’s say you’ve written a solid, well-researched, and attention-grabbing piece focused on a great keyword. Fantastic. Google can tell you exactly what to write next: type your keyword into Google, hit space, and scan the suggestions—every one of them is a follow-up waiting to happen.

These don’t have to be nearly as high-quality as the original; users would rather find (and Google would rather rank) a 300-word piece whose headline matches a long-tail query than an 800-word piece whose headline is missing half of the words in the query.

It gets better: you can also test out related topics, and see which search suggestions are missing. Google Suggest’s dirty little secret is that they lean on new content, not just search query data.

If people aren’t searching for a simple variant of an emerging keyword, you can write about that variant and literally shift searcher behavior.

The autocomplete fun doesn’t stop there, either. It’s actually creating brands. Lyrics site rap genius is one of the search suggestions for “rap,” and Yahoo!’s “Primetime in No Time” is a top suggestion for the query “Primetime.” And this goes full-circle: the top suggestion for “Primetime” is “Primetime lyrics,” and the top result is from—wait for it—Rap Genius!

Recaps & Context

The problem with reporting news is that you eventually run out of it: no story keeps happening forever. When things slow down, there are two easy angles you can take:

• Recaps: sum up a few other pieces on the same topic.
• Context: run a recap, but of a related topic or story. The definition of “context” in online news is ridiculously broad: if it’s directly related, it’s defensible; if it’s indirectly related, it’s merely a clever parallel. (This is the argument behind, e.g. “[X] Marketing Lessons from [Zombines / Lady Gaga / Rick Perry / My Plumber]” articles.)

As long as it’s original content, on topic, and accurately timestamped, it’s going to look like a continuously updated story. And it’s helpful to readers, too: people who search for a topic right when it gets hot are more likely to be subject-matter experts; the amateurs get active later in the news cycle. So it’s safe to be repetitious, if you’re saying similar things to different audiences.

Twitter-Based Resuscitation

Here’s a trick perfected by Business Insider, champions of fast-twitch news reporting. If you have a story that’s really taking off, post it to Twitter again—this time, swap your headline for a pull quote. If it’s a great story, it’s going to stay quotable; the better the story, the more times you can get away with this.

Compare:

I always wondered what a “McRib” was made of. Now I know http://read.bi/uOow21

to

THE McRIB: A “restructured meat product containing a mixture of tripe, heart, and scalded stomach” http://read.bi/uOow21

Same article, obviously. One headline is straight to the point: one’s a little gross but very good at grabbing attention. (And it doesn’t hurt that McRibs are in the news.) A quick hit like this can revive a flagging article. Don’t abuse it—but you’ll be surprised at how much you can get away with.

After Google’s freshness update, we’re doing News SEO whether we like it or not. Google is pushing for a faster, more reactive Web, with a SERP that looks more like a news feed or a Twitter stream. And part of that means keeping the story moving, not just reporting it once.

Fortunately, they’ve equipped us with the tools to do that exceptionally well.

Image from Flickr user Patrick Doheny, used under creative commons.

But SEO is a viable strategy for political campaigns. Politicians (and campaign managers) work hard to “control the message,” which usually means three basic things:

• Influencing what people say about the candidate. (Sounds a lot like online reputation management!)
• Making sure the candidate’s views on particular news stories and events get heard. (Sounds like typical “real-time SEO” — ranking for news stories during the news cycle.)
• Making sure people looking for information on issues and elections find the candidate’s site. (Classic SEO: evergreen content for evergreen keywords.)

Online Reputation Management

Anyone who is partisan enough to get nominated by one party will be disliked by the roughly 50% of the population that leans toward the other party. And they’ll have up days and down days, so there will be times when public opinion is almost universally against them. Which means that political campaigns exist in a state of permanent reputation-management crisis.

For politicians, online reputation management means:

• Ensuring that their site ranks for their own name. It’s easy enough for Candidate Obama, but not so easy for Candidate Smith.
• Keeping an eye on Wikipedia — it’s against Wikipedia’s rules to alter your own entry, but it’s fine to tailor on-site content toward addressing Wiki-based critiques.
• In some cases, politicians may be able to register multiple domains, in order to control the SERP. [name]2012.com, [name]2012volunteers.com, support[name].com etc. could all legitimately work as standalone pages. They might dilute some link equity, but that can be mitigated by using them to deep-link to content on the main site.

Controlling The News Cycle

Political campaigns get into the news and stay there. Even campaigns that are reportedly collapsing poll better than the ones that aren’t reported on at all. But politicians need to invest in SEO in order to influence how stories get reported.

Just look at Herman Cain, for example: Some recent polls cast Cain as the front-runner, and his “9-9-9″ tax plan defined a recent debate. But the big story about his tax plan is its similarities to the tax scheme in Sim City. That’s natural; even the most popular politicians are subject to vicious attacks.

What could the Cain campaign do about this? In the pre-Internet world, the right way to handle this kind of controversy is to let it blow over. But the Internet extends the news cycle; the story breaks one day, gets reported and re-reported everywhere the next, and gets searched the week after — which turns a “no comment” into a unanimously negative story.

Instead, the Cain campaign could write its own rebuttal, with a title like, “Did Herman Cain get ’9-9-9′ from Sim City? No. He got it from his 19-year business career.” (Yes, that’s going to lead to an ellipsis in the SERP. But an ellipsis on the SERP is better than being out of it entirely.)

Rank For Issues — If You Can

Larger, national campaigns may want to target head terms related to specific political issues. It would be a major coup for the Obama website to rank for “unemployment” plus some policy or law-related terms.

That’s a big challenge, since most of the searches for “unemployment,” or “jobs,” “taxes,” “health care” and other such terms, are mostly searches designed to solve associated problems (file for unemployment, find jobs, pay taxes, etc.).

But it’s still possible to do an extended for of online reputation management: Someone is going to rank No. 1 for a term like “Romney health care” or “Obama deficit.” And if Romney and Obama aren’t investing in being No. 1, they’re ceding the terms of the debate to whoever does.

Blogging used to be an effective strategy, but its current popularity is a holdover. And case study after case study obscure the fact that successful blog-driven marketing campaigns are a rarity; unvisited, abandoned company blogs are far more common.

Blogging is not just one of those strategies that needs to be tailored to specific situations: it’s a strategy that, by default, will fail.

The online content business has gotten insanely competitive since blogging started, and only the most aggressive sites succeed. And there’s plenty of over-optimistic competition.

Why Does This Seem Like Good Advice?

Starting a blog was a great way to distinguish your business from a horde of local businesses offering pretty similar services. Even if you weren’t a great writer and didn’t have a ton of insight, merely giving people an inside look at how the business really worked was enough to give you an edge.

That was true from roughly 2003 to, oh say, 2004. But blogs are no longer unique—if you’re writing a blog, you’re competing on writing quality, insight, and marketing chops.

But if you’re writing a blog to promote a small business, you’re probably a dentist, a plumber, an accountant— you’re pitting yourself against professional bloggers, both in the industry and at local news venues.

On top of that, SERPs are less forgiving than they used to be. In the early days, a local florist’s blog with a couple solid links could rank #1 for a term like “[city name] + florist”.

Now, that blog is below three AdWords slots, seven local results, a list of related terms, and a geographic disambiguation page.

For users, that might be positive: an algorithm designed to detect topical authorities is not an algorithm designed to facilitate transactions, but lots of searches are transactional.

Blogging as a marketing tool relies on a sort of viral loop:

1. You write something interesting about being, say, a podiatrist.
2. People hear about your podiatry blog, and link to it.
3. These links make Google treat you as an authority on podiatry; your site copy indicates that you’re in, say, Des Moines, so they rank you for [Podiatry or something similar] + [Des Moines or somewhere nearby].

Now, the viral loop is more like:

1. You write the 10th most interesting thing about podiatry that day.
2. *crickets*

Content produced is growing faster than time available to consume it, so the minimum threshold for interesting content keeps going up.

That’s why big media companies keep launching blogs, and why so many rapidly-growing blog networks focus on consumer-facing content like celebrity gossip.

Idea, Execution, Or Both?

The “macro”-situation isn’t the only problem: even small business blogs that do get read tend to miss some big opportunities.

The classic mistakes that small business bloggers make:

Letting category pages get indexed

The default configuration on many blogging software packages allows massive category pages to get indexed. This does generate some traffic, but mostly from extremely long queries that include keywords found in multiple blog posts. These queries are low-quality traffic with a very high bounce rate.

Not treating blog posts as landing pages

Very, very few people will subscribe to a local business’s blog unless they already like the business. To turn new blog visitors into new customers, every blog post should close with a relevant call-to-action.

If you’re writing about this season’s newest floral arrangements, you’d better be selling them by the end of the post. (That’s going to benefit a blog much more than a comments section with zero comments.)

Prioritizing blogs ahead of newsletters

What’s the best outlet for a small business owner’s blogging energies? A newsletter. Newsletters cut through the clutter, and can be crafted to sell to existing customers. Thanks to services like Constant Contact and Mailchimp, they’re about as easy to set up as a typical blog platform.

Newsletters are a great medium for two-sided offers (“Buy one with a friend, and you each get another one free!”) which can have a multiplicative effect on sales. And posting newsletters to your site gets a big chunk of the benefits of blogging, at a much smaller cost. (It’s no accident that the big group-buying companies are a small business plus email play, not a small business plus SEO play.)

Key Takeaways

These are not purely small business problems, but they’re endemic to the field. The main reason for this is budgeting and rounding: at a big company, someone might work 40 hours per week running an in-house blog and doing related activities.

If they’re not pulling their weight, that will be readily apparent. But at a company one tenth the size, an in-house blogger might spend 4 hours per week on the blog. It’s hard to count that as a direct cost, so it’s hard to measure the return on investment.

Blogging certainly isn’t dead. In fact, its liveliness is part of the problem; there are just too many great writers out there, so competing with them is hardly the optimal way to invest time and energy.

Spend that time cranking out well-targeted, well-crafted static landing pages, and promoting them through email newsletters when it’s warranted.

The net result is the same kind of work, with a much higher return. It won’t show up in fancy case studies or popular blog posts, but it will make an impact on the bottom line.

Image used under Creative Commons, via Flickr.

Your password is memorable to you, but uncrackable. Moreover, your forum’s moderators are sleepless and relentless: nobody gets away with spamming you, and the only followed links you allow forum posters to contribute is a single followed link on their profile page. Plus, you don’t let people mass-create accounts.

So you’re safe from spammers, right?

Hardly. Sites that fit that profile are being targeted by a clever set of hacks: hackers exploit vulnerabilities on other sites, and “launder” their links by pointing them to individual profiles on larger, trusted sites.

Where They Get Links

In some ways, this is a classic link-spamming operation: hackers target sites using older content management systems with known vulnerabilities; they take control of the site and insert dozens or hundreds of spammy links.

These links are mostly disregarded by search engines, and nearly all discounted at first—but it can take time for the search engines to fully catch on, and in that time, the target site will get a rankings boost.

What differentiates this from traditional link-spamming is the target site: instead of linking directly to the page they want to promote, they link to another page, usually a profile page, on a site that allows user-generated content. This generally happens on large forum sites on which users have a profile page with a followed link. That link goes to the target site.

The upshot of this is that everyone being exploited has a harder time detecting what’s going on: the hacked site sees links to a fairly legitimate site, and the forum page just has one spammy link from an inactive profile — making ithard to notice in the first place.

Why “Laundering” Works

Link laundering takes advantage of the non-spammy link profile of the middle-tier site—the forum with a single link back to the spammer’s site. That page is authoritative on the spammer’s topic of choice (usually porn, pills, or poker).

The site itself has a large enough link profile that a burst of links like this is still a small percentage of the total inbound links, so the pages are fairly trusted.

Basically, link-laundering arbitrages Google’s domain trust and pagerank tools in a way that just barely sneaks by spam detection filters.

However, that’s not to say that it’s foolproof. In most cases, it’s hard to detect any ranking effect from link-laundering schemes caught in the wild, since they tend to be old, on average. This could mean it’s a short-term strategy.

It could also be a strategy that is easier for Google to detect than spammers realize—which means it’s still a threat to webmasters, until spammers know for sure that it doesn’t work.

Takeaways For Webmasters

1. Keep WordPress, PhpBB, and other common platforms updated.
2. Nofollow un-trusted links.
3. Check for suspicious links—inbound or outbound, they can hurt your site’s reputation.

A good SEO campaign focuses mostly on creating and curating valuable content, and promoting it effectively. But webmasters who aren’t on the alert for tactics like this can find that their efforts or wasted—or worse, used by unscrupulous hackers promoting harmful products.

Ultimately, this is a problem caused by link-based search algorithms, so it’s up to the search engines to squash it. But in the meantime, link-laundering the hurts the user experience on hacked sites and on intermediary sites.

Until search engines crack down and spammers give up, it’s up to webmasters to defend their sites and spot similar exploits.

Image used under Creative Commons, via Flickr.

Most SEO consultants advise you to create fact-dense or emotionally-compelling content. And that absolutely works. But creating controversial content is far, far easier, and often more rewarding.

That’s not to say that making controversial blog posts or business decisions is always the right call. In most cases, it’s a last resort; in other cases, it’s never a good idea in the first place. However, for a marketer who doesn’t have the time or energy for one more densely informative, well-crafted report, a bit of opinion-mongering will do just fine.

The best controversy-courting content is fact-based, but picks a side. This isn’t just the right thing to do; it actually makes it much easier to argue. You can borrow good talking points from your side.

Even better, you’ll give respondents a chance to do a point-by-point rebuttal of your argument, which will likely lead to even more links.

Picking Sides Versus Making Enemies

There are a few great examples of the genre:

• The Wizards of Bullshit. (Alternative title for people who don’t care about getting links: “I disagree with the way Fortune values private companies.”)
• SEO is Bullshit. (Alternative title: “… But Linkbait is Awesome!”)
• If Dropbox Used Github’s Pricing Plan. (Alternative Title: “I wish services I liked didn’t price themselves to make the most money possible from corporate customers with infinite budgets.”)
• Almost anything by James Altucher, especially July 4th is a scam.
• Index Investors are Evil Freeloaders. This is one I wrote a while ago; it got a fair amount of attention in the investment community. (Alternative Title: “Index fund investors have found a way to benefit from the stock market. Just like everyone else.”)

A few patterns emerge:

• Strong language works well.
• It’s more attention-grabbing to attack a person rather than an idea. Even better, one can attack a person by category.
• The title is critical, and should make the point as emphatically as possible.

Getting The Most Out Of It: Social Promotion

If an article makes a blatantly unfair point backed up by superficial data, and no one’s around to read it, does it rile anyone up?

Controversy-stirring linkbait is more dependent on social media than other channels. It’s tough to write something in this genre that ranks well—if the topic is broad enough to matter to most people, it’s probably too broad for one incidental article to be the canonical resource.

But social media is highly and indirectly useful: it’s a great way to get your controversial post distributed to the kinds of people who will write angry, denunciatory, link-heavy responses.

It’s usually best to seed this kind of piece in a few general interest communities. If you’re willing to lose a friend or two, Facebook and Google Plus are a good place to start. Twitter also works, although it’s better to retweet the first person to find your article and post it on their own. And social bookmarking sites are also a great venue.

One thing to avoid: don’t get bogged down in arguing with people in the comments. It’s a big waste of time. One trick you can do, though, is to write a follow-up blog post rounding up responses to the original piece, and responding to them in turn. That’s a lower-reward, lower-risk way to get a few extra links.

Run The Numbers: When To Cut It Out

A controversy-courting strategy works very well in some verticals, but it falls flat in others. Here are some guidelines:

• In pageview-driven sites (i.e. media sites), controversy is a very powerful tool. Just read the headlines at Gawker, Business Insider, or Mediaite.
• In consumer-focused e-commerce sites, courting controversy is smart because it can give the site more link equity, but few people will do enough research to find controversial views with which they disagree.
• For B2B sites, it’s worth avoiding unless you have one particular market segment you can target, but only by giving up on others. (For example, an SEO agency could write a post like “Why I’m Firing All my Diet Product Clients.”)
• In any reputation-dependent context, don’t overdo it. Aside from Christopher Hitchens and Noam Chomsky, nobody gets paid to disagree with everybody.

Getting Started

Image via Hikingartist on Flickr

What should you write? The possibilities are endless. A few options:

• Why [popular product used in the industry] is [overrated / absolutely essential / a scam].
• I Will Never Again [thing people in your industry do every day].
• The End of [competitor, or, to be more gentle, category of competitors].

With some work—actually, with a lot less work than you’d put into most other categories of linkbait—you can create content that drives fresh links and great social media mentions.

Search engines are leery of using sentiment as a ranking factor, but the average Web writer is sensitive to criticism.

This creates exactly the kind of discrepancy that the SEO industry has learned to take advantage of.

Image used under creative commons via Flickr.

In fact, some SEO consulting firms act as a high value-added “interface” between clients and a largely outsourced workforce. The agency knows what firms are worthwhile and what to look for, the outsourcer gets steady work, and the client gets their campaign done at a low cost.

But while this strategy has its perks and its champions, it’s very much a creature of its time. Outsourced SEO relies on:

1. A big labor price differential
2. Comparatively cookie-cutter campaigns
3. Flexibility to allow slow turnaround

Over time, all of these advantages are disappearing.

It Works (Mostly, for Now)

Overseas outsourcing is still a big part of SEO. Most major SEO agencies can easily divide their work into high value-added parts (e.g. complex technical edits, crafty linkbait campaigns) and more mundane parts (e.g. writing product descriptions, submitting to directories). And it makes plenty of sense from the agency’s perspective to outsource this more routine work.

When I worked at an agency, clients sometimes balked at this. My usual response was to ask why anyone would pay Madison Avenue overhead for something that could be done in Mumbai. (As it turns out, Mumbai’s cost of living is quite high. Thanks, in part, to the rise of outsourcing.)

The reason it works is that there are plenty of countries where a large portion of the population speaks English, local opportunities are limited, and there is Internet access available.

But that’s part of the problem. If everyone has Internet access, information flows easily. That makes pricing transparent, so people are able to raise their rates to whatever the market will bear.

The ease of outsourcing is its own undoing, in a way: that high cost of living in Mumbai is in part due to the fact that people in Mumbai are competing against people in London and New York, and earning compensation to match.

Easy To Spec = Easy To Spot

Even if price differences don’t persist, differences in specialization still do: different locations have tended to create clusters based on skill set. New York, for example, is full of agencies with great client relations (and great client lists), but not a lot of people willing to do grunt work.

In other places, it’s harder to find great clients, but easier to find people willing to do some of the more repetitive aspects of implementing SEO campaigns.

For example, many SEO campaigns will outsource tasks like:

• Article writing and submissions
• Directory submissions
• “Stub”-page copywriting (i.e. writing 200 words each about black socks, gray socks, and navy blue socks)

What do these tasks all have in common? They’re easy to spec — one of the most common pitfalls of outsourced work is insufficiently detailed specifications for exactly what the buyer is looking for. Conversely, the strongest case studies in favor of outsourcing involve a product that was rigorously specced in one place, and then faithfully implemented elsewhere.

This leads to an increasing problem in the post-Panda age. Google is paying increasingly close attention to highly templated content and links. And anything that can be specced and scaled is likely to fit that criterion.

Which task is more likely to get outsourced: “Contact our hundred lowest-priority link outreach targets with a form email,” or “Build a relationship with our five most valued link outreach targets”?

Turnaround Matters

One of the disadvantages of outsourcing any project is the extra lead time added by having different working hours. In some projects, that’s actually an advantage: one team is ready to start work just as the other team leaves, so there’s progress at almost all times.

In an SEO campaign, it’s a factor both sides can work with: usually, an outsourced team will work on a longer-term piece of the project, so day-to-day feedback isn’t as important.

Increasingly, search engines are weighting rankings towards timeliness, and timely activity. The speed at which a piece of content gets retweeted or Facebook-shared affects how widely it will disperse (since each act of social sharing has a small viral coefficient).

If this trend continues, minute-to-minute communication and reaction time will matter more and more compared to day-to-day cost-effectiveness.

This, of course, serves search engines’ interests, too: the more their results can reflect the immediate interests of users, the more they’ll be the default start for more Internet browsing sessions, leading to ultimately higher ad revenue.

The Future Of Outsourced SEO

Outsourcing will never die. There’s talent everywhere, and sometimes the right person (at the right price) is offshore. But multiple unrelated factors have converged to chip away at outsourcing’s long-term advantages.

It’s still the right decision for many campaigns, and a drop in “outsourcing” may just mean a shift towards doing more business locally, wherever “locally” might be.

Stock image from Shutterstock, used under license.

One key choice that SEO campaign managers need to make is where their content should live. The standard practice is to write some good content on the site you’re optimizing, but to also sprinkle some guest content on other sites, both for recognition and for links. But in the most competitive verticals, maybe it’s not always ideal to have the sales funnel start on the site you’re optimizing.

Sometimes the best place for a landing page is on a site you don’t control.

When To Put Your Landing Page On Someone Else’s Site

There are a few common scenarios in which the right place for a landing page is on someone else’s site:

1. You have good relationships with reviewers, but little time to invest in building a site that ranks. In this case, it makes sense to reach out to reviewers and give them whatever help you can in order to get a thorough review. (Don’t worry so much about how positive or negative the review is: people tend to buy products with grammatically correct reviews, even if they’re negative.)
2. You’re selling a specific product that people find by searching for generic terms. In this case, the long-term economics of search favor the retailer over the producer. In one campaign, I worked with an electronic publisher—they spent many fruitless months working hard to rank for generic terms related to their product, and only stopped when it became clear that Amazon, Target, and Walmart would all derive at least 5X the marginal profit from any given visitor.
3. You have a limited budget and a narrow list of targeted terms. Some businesses just aren’t worth a full-time marketer’s full-time attention, but could still get some useful traffic. In that case, it can be a waste to move a site from ranking #150 to ranking #15, when you could get them linked from the page that ranks #1.
4. You have a partner with a great online presence. If you’re selling a product through an online retailer or a joint venture, it can make sense to optimize a page on your partner’s site, rather than on your own. This can be used for good or for ill, but it’s a nice technique to keep in mind.
5. You can finagle a lot of good guest blog posts. If you know lots of bloggers and know they’ll let you post on their sites, you can use their established audience to your benefit by cranking out guest posts. One technique is to use Google’s timeliness factors to your advantage: stagger your new posts so that one of them will always be earning a timeliness bonus, rather than running them all at once.

In these cases, your “landing page” won’t be the typical “hard sell” you’d be able to pull off for a PPC landing page or a page that ranked #1 organically. But it’s often better to create an off-site page that can create some interest and convert a few visitors, rather than building an “orphan” page that never ranks, on a site you own.

How To Get SEO Value Out Of Off-Site Landing Pages

The three best ways to get SEO value out of the third-party landing pages are:

1. Promote Branded Searches. If your third-party landing page promotes Bob’s Widgets, and Bob won’t ever rank for [widgets], it’s still beneficial to get more people searching for [bob's widgets] by name. (In fact, you can even try for [widgets by bob] so you have a chance for some white-hat Google suggest optimization.)
2. Use targeted anchor text. If you create a guest blog post about [widgets], you can still link to your [fuzzy blue widgets] landing page. That’s a good way to divert the link-juice in a way that benefits your business.
3. Target the sophisticated customer. If your blog posts talks to a generalist audience, you can still hit a more sophisticated group of customers with your on-site content. Most blogs are more general-interest than the sites they link to, so it’s entirely possible to write a 400-word blog post that leads in to a 2,000-word exposition on the same topic. By treating the blog post as the widest part of the conversion funnel, it’s possible to draw in more users. This works expecially well in complex B2B SEO campaigns, but it’s a fine tactic in other cases as well.

These pages are not a substitute for a standard SEO campaign, but they are a good way to reframe an SEO campaign in a tough vertical.

Putting These Pages In Context

In many ways, this isn’t a new idea: every good SEO manager knows the importance of positive press, and marketers all know that there’s more than one good distribution channel out there. In a way, this is more of a measurement paradigm than anything.

In a world where a single post on Mashable or TechCrunch can get more social media attention in an hour than the destination site gets in a year, it’s important to measure what matters—the number of people being exposed to a given sales pitch—rather than what’s measurable (i.e. the number of times Google Analytics’ Javascript snippet gets executed).

Don’t underestimate the importance of measurement, though. A good campaign evolves based on what works and what doesn’t, and what works is defined by how success gets measured.

Business-to-business SEO doesn’t play by those rules.

In B2B SEO, you’re targeting a sophisticated buyer. They might read 10,000 words of copy before they start the purchasing process—half on the site they eventually buy from, and the rest on several other sites they consider.

Your content needs to be flawless, or at least really strong, and you have to expect that you’re writing for an audience of experts.

There’s one shortcut that can make all of this easier: use jargon, and lots of it. Most copywriters advise against jargon, but it’s incredibly effective for B2B SEO copywriting:

• Jargon lets you target the searches laypeople won’t do.
• Jargon lets you identify yourself as an expert.
• If you learn insider lingo for the industry you’re marketing to, you can become an expert.

Dodging The Consumer Bullet

One of the biggest problems with B2B SEO is the “consumer-facing” trap. Pick any keyword that you could use to go after a five-, six-, or seven-figure sale, and there’s a good chance that the results you get from searching that term are mostly targeting a much smaller sale.

Take any term related to high-end IT spending: someone searching for “email backup,” “database software,” or “servers” could easily be scouting out a multi million-dollar purchase. But the search results all target a much lower price point.

That makes sense, to a point: on a click-by-click basis, for most broad terms, there’s more gross profit available from selling to consumers than selling to businesses. One reason for this is that consumers buy high gross-margin products with a minimal sales cycle: if you buy $50 worth of tax preparation software from Intuit, their marginal cost of goods sold is about $.00. But if you buy a million-dollar audit from KPMG, they might end up spending 90%+ of that on salaries, expenses, and overhead.

But the fastest way to target keywords is to target them by jargon. Instead of talking about email backups, talk about Sarbanes-Oxley; instead of talking about income taxes, talk about depreciation schedules; don’t mention databases when you can drill deep into the enterprise features that make those databases powerful.

Talking Like An Expert

The number one obstacle to making a B2B sale online is sounding like an amateur. Oddly enough, most of the good copy online is written by non-experts; it’s more economical to hire a good writer who can craft an optimized headline than to hire a good writer who knows their way around SEO and whatever corner of the industry you’re working in.

But in a B2B scenario, that math doesn’t work. You’re asking people to trust you for a big investment—for some people, every purchasing decision is to some extent risking their career.

You want to make that a good risk for them, and the only way to do it is to use the language they use. If you’re selling high-end databases, immerse yourself in the discussions they have. If you’re writing about corporate law or accounting, read the blogs BigLaw employees read or the sites Big Four accountants frequent. (Yes, in case you were wondering: there really is “An Online Tabloid for Modern Accounting & Finance Professionals.”)

Be The Expert

A funny thing happens to online marketers and copywriters who immerse themselves in a complicated market – after a long time of sounding like an expert, they’ll actually become experts. After a while, you can’t talk confidently about a topic without understanding it on a fairly deep level.

Fortunately, that’s exactly what you need for a strong B2B SEO campaign. B2B SEO is built on useful email newsletters, thorough whitepapers, and a staggering level of technical detail in on-site copy. The B2B sales process is extensive, and involves lots of in-person information sharing; if you can shift even a small fraction of that online, you’ve made your campaign far more scalable. (Replacing sales calls with pageviews is a massive, massive win.)

It’s daunting to look at a complex sales process and try to boil it down to a few landing pages that get the point across and rank well. But the good news for SEOs is that they’re on the right side of history: more and more decisions start online, and more and more research happens in front of a computer screen.

The B2B SEO process gives a savvy marketer numerous chances to capture and recapture their audience, and with the right dose of jargon a good copywriter can slip into character as an expert.

Stock image from Shutterstock, used under license.