Killian & Company Advertising
 

Unlocking the Secrets of SEO

How Search Engine Optimization can bring business to your (virtual) door

There is a downside to creating a massively successful brand. To wit: We xerox documents and sneeze into a kleenex while rollerblading down the street, without a second thought about the authenticity of those branded products. The latest victim (?) of this phenomenon is Google. The verb form "to google," meaning to look something up on a search engine, was once the province of hipsters with ironic Mr. Bubble t-shirts and unfortunate ideas about facial hair. Now it's everywhere.

The Yellow Pages, by contrast, are now in the Living Dead category, feeble but still faintly visible, like air quotes, pagers and Regis Philbin. Today, looking for a new product or service means turning to a search engine (Google, Yahoo, or the seven dwarfs). People under the age of Medicare expect more complete information than that offered by a mere phone book.

Yahoo brings eager new prospects to your website For commodities like books or tickets or music, this can lead to a quick sale. For considered purchases, where you compete on more than price, it is the prospect's first research step to create a selection set, e.g., they enter search term ____________ (your category), and then examine ________, ________, and ________, three links to sites that seem appealing on page one of search engine results. One or more of these websites will be examined to see if it can clearly satisfy the need.

In an ideal world, we can pretend rational decision makers study three to five competitors in a selection set, fill out little charts of benefits with check marks and numerical scores, and add up the results. Dream on, pal. What really happens here on the planet Earth: the first site that seems like a fit gets clicked on. That website gets examined for suitability; if it passes muster, case closed, research stops. Being third in most selection sets is worth very little, since two competitors have to fail before you even get examined. If you show up 57th on Google? You're toast.

Once you get into a selection set, you've got a chance at a prospect knocking at your virtual front door who is pre-sold, knowledgeable, and eager to buy. If you're not in that set, the opportunity is lost; the odds that they'll conduct the initial search again are slim. The key questions: Does your visibility help or hurt your chances of getting in that pool of finalists? Can people who aren't specifically looking for you still find you when they're searching your category? Or are you just invisible?

Self-Googling Is Nothing To Be Ashamed Of

Have you ever typed your own name into an Internet search engine such as Yahoo or MSN to see what people are saying about you? Don't worry, it's (more or less) normal.

But what seems a bit narcissistic in your personal life is just smart business when trying to build a brand. Try this little exercise: start searching, not for your company, but for your category. (If you make widgets in Weehawken, do searches for "Weehawken widget," "widgets," "low-carb widgets," and so on.) Where do you appear in the results? Are you in the first two results? The top ten? The top 1000? It doesn't take much insight into surfer psychology to realize that the top five results are going to get a lot more clicks than results seventy-five through eighty. Is where you are the place where you want to be?

We'll take that as a No.

So. How did the web sites near the top get there? And more important, how do you get there? Welcome to the wonderful world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) where smart strategies plus hard work and clean code take you higher.

We know. We did it.

We have risen spectacularly, as you can see. Searches with a million results still found us high on Google's first page (the magical "top 30") ... and killianadvertising.com even reached the Holy Grail Top 5 on a number of relevant search terms. Feast your eyes on this:

Search term Google Rank, Free (NOT Paid, NOT "sponsored" ) Results
Branding agency #1, out of 10.3 million results *
Chicago advertising agency #1, out of 38.9 million results
Chicago marketing agency #2, out of 21.7 million results
Strategic branding advertising agency #2, out of 9.6 million results
Strategic marketing Chicago #2, out of 17.3 million results

*If you go to Yahoo! instead of Google, our "branding agency" rank is also #1, but out of a mere (?) 3.2 million results. SEO is an integral part of our branding services: this exercise is to demonstrate and validate our skills. These spectacular results were reached after, admittedly, a lot of intense labor. We had to recode, reprogram and redesign our whole site. Luckily, our programmers eat midnight oil for breakfast.

Arachnophobia?

The major search engines employ computer programs called "spiders" that visit and index web sites. Each search engine has its own proprietary method for determining which web sites are the most relevant and useful ones. There are strategies you can use to make your site more appealing to those spiders, and there are mistakes that send them fleeing in panic. (If you read billions of pages a day, you'd get skittish, too.)

Four Myths of SEO

Ready to tame search engine spiders? The first task is to find out what doesn't work:

Myth #1: Brute force will get the job done. Nope. This isn't 1999. Just repeating a bunch of hidden keywords on your page or in your <META> tags no longer fools any major search engine. The algorithms that propel search engine software have gotten far, far more sophisticated, and pulling cheap shenanigans is more likely to hurt your position than help it. (Yes, you read that right. Multiple repeating keywords can actually lower your score, the way owning 16 credit cards can depress your credit rating.)

Myth #2: Traffic is everything. Many people believe that search engines measure popularity by the number of clickthroughs, and so they "click themselves" repeatedly in order to boost their position in the pecking order. They're wasting their time. Spiders and 'bots don't care about traffic.

Myth #3: "I can buy a cheap and easy solution from those nice (and numerous) people who sent me an e-mail out of the blue." Oy. Forget it. Don't fall for one of those phony-baloney "We'll submit your URL to all major search engines" spammers. It's a ripoff—you're paying good money for a clerical job. Even if you did it yourself, you run the very real risk of getting positioned far lower. It's a little like membership at Augusta National ... if you say you want it, you're disqualified. Key search engines regard repetitive submissions as a sign of desperation. (Robots smell fear.)

Myth #4: "But a Search Engine Optimization service guaranteed that they'd get me a top 10 spot on Google!" And would you like some Florida real estate, too? Guaranteeing "top position" is a sure sign that you're dealing with a snake-oil salesman (well, besides his business card from "Billy and Earl's No-Frills SEO and 24-Hour Bail Bonds"). The scam goes like this: they guarantee top position ... but they pick the search term, which is so specific to you that only your mom would be likely to use it. Sure, you'd own a (very very narrow) category, but that's like being, as they say, the tallest building in Wichita.

Smarter Spiders

SEO is a more technically complex field than it's ever been. The shortcuts to great search-engine positions have long since been spotted and crushed underfoot by the search-engine companies themselves. (It's not nice to fool Mother Google.) Rising high has a lot to do with

... how you write the HTML code to satisfy the spiders who crawl your site looking for content.

... how well you avoid the "trip wires" that send spiders away.

... where on the page certain keywords appear.

... how you use JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets.

... where your formatting instructions occur in relation to your text. If you depend on a wysiwyg code-writing program (Front Page, GoLive, etc., software we used to use in the good ol' days of 2003) you almost certainly will get a much lower score from the 'bots. Sorry.

Thank goodness we have a team of people in place who monitor the battlefield day and night. Search Engine Optimization is not something you can take an hour out one time to work on and then forget. To make matters even more complex, all major search engines change their algorithms from time to time. Eternal vigilance is the price of high Googleosity.

What About Pay-Per-Click?

So far we've just been talking about organic ("free" or "natural") listings, which are totally separate from sponsored ("pay-per-click" or "PPC"), links. Pay-per-click has an important role to play in your brand's overall strategy, too, and we work with clients to design pay-per-click strategies that are cost-effective and eye-catching. In most cases, it's important to have a well-balanced portfolio. A high organic positioning, especially on a site like Google, with its reputation for returning highly relevant results, confers legitimacy on your brand that a sponsored link cannot. By the same token, weak search engine visibility dictates a more aggressive PPC strategy. See our White Paper, Pay-Per-Click 101 for the scoop.

Sound Complicated? It is.

There are lots of ways to go wrong, but the results you get from doing SEO and PPC well are both cost-effective and highly leveraged. A well-planned, more Googleable strategy will quickly yield measurable results — improved search engine positions and an uptick in eager (predisposed) visitors to your website. Hey, call us. We'll explain it all; we'll even do an audit/analysis of your current website effectiveness versus your competitors.

The truth is that there's no substitute for real expertise and hard work to get a top position. Fortunately for you, Killian & Company offers you both the insight and the blocking-and-tackling labor. Want more branding mileage out of your search engine strategy? Call Bob Killian, brand guru (who really uses the word "Googleable") at 312-836-0050, or send us an email to start the process of making your brand more visible.

Surely, you know someone who needs to read this. Maybe two people.
So tell them.

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