For SEO Marketers, Is Deceptive Marketing a Necessary Evil?

I saw a nice post a few decades ago called "The Reciprocity Link Building Method" by Canadian SEO Melanie Nathan, in which she explained a method she often employed to develop high-quality connections for her clients' websites. The idea, as I understood it, was to first identify a website that would be appropriate to link to from your client's site. Then you'd go over their present links to determine if any of them were damaged (went to dead pages or sites). If you find any, you'll utilize this data to start a conversation with the site owner or webmaster, and you'll eventually mention your customer's site as a replacement for one of the broken links. I thought it was a brilliant idea, a terrific opportunity to meet people in your client's business, and a win-win situation for everyone. 

Nick LeRoy, a search marketer in the Minneapolis area, just published another post on the subject. Nick discussed the same general method Melanie had stated, as well as a real-life email example he had sent. He added to the webmaster in his example email that he had a favourite site where he liked to buy things for his son on birthdays and holidays. In a follow-up email, Nick cited "his son" once more, noting that he appreciated the things on this website because they made his son think. So far, everything appears to be going well, right? Nick, on the other hand, does not have a son! On the post, I left the following comment: "I had no idea you had a son, Nick (as per the emails requesting a link). 

If you don't, are you advocating that people form trusting relationships with webmasters by misleading to them?" There were a lot of responses, which you should read on Nick's site. What he did was obviously not heinous in my opinion, but the situation raises a lot of questions. Was lying absolutely necessary? Isn't this the kind of behaviour that tarnishes marketing in general (not just search marketers)? Couldn't he have done things the same way he did them without lying? I believe he could have done so. According to Nick, informing the webmaster that you're looking for links on behalf of a client lowers your chances of getting the link. It would be fascinating to put that hypothesis to the test, and it could very well be correct. Even if you obtain fewer links as a result, lying in any element of business—or life—doesn't justify it. (Are they truly two distinct entities?) Deception in any form is lying. Even if it's just a small white lie, it's a lie nonetheless. Even if you receive more links as a result of it. Even if it means more business for you. Even if it makes you look better in your boss's or client's eyes. 

This leads to another point: How would you feel if you were the boss of someone who used this technique? Any sort of dishonesty within your organisation should be a no-no if your corporate culture is one of honesty. I can assure you that if one of my employees did this, I would be really unhappy in them and explain why we do not engage in misleading techniques. I'd similarly be perplexed as to why I'd have to explain such a concept to an adult. What about the customer? Were they aware that their search marketing firm was deceiving them in order to get links? Is their corporate culture such that this isn't an issue? Or did they have no idea how their connections were obtained? If you're deceiving your clients on their behalf, you should seek their consent and written sign-off first, so it doesn't come back to bite you later. Personally, if I hired a corporation to provide a service for me and they did so in a way that involved any type of deception, I'd be suspicious of what else they were doing.

Is it possible that they overcharged me? Did they really have the abilities they claimed? Not to mention the unknowing webmaster who distributed the link on the other side. How would they react if they later discovered they had been duped? Would they have a negative impression of not only the marketing firm, but also the firm to which they were linking? What if they were so cheated that they decided to share the information on social media? What would the client think if they ended up with a reputation management disaster as a result of the technique? Surely I'm exaggerating here, because we're only discussing a minor white lie. Is it true, however, that the size or colour of the lie makes it less deceptive? And we're talking about link building particularly. There's a reason I despise it and refuse to do it.

As far as I'm concerned, link building is a deceitful tactic in and of itself because it's typically done to secure a phoney "vote" for a website. It's an industry that shouldn't exist, and that wouldn't exist if Google didn't put so much emphasis on links. We'd have a lot less deception (and payment) going on behind the scenes if that component of Google's algorithm wasn't in place. Because ethics are frequently viewed as situational, we can argue them indefinitely and never reach an agreement. What is immoral in one scenario may not appear to be unethical in another. Obviously, life-or-death situations differ from marketing situations. If telling a falsehood is going to save someone's life, then by all means, tell a lie! Marketing, on the other hand, isn't a life-or-death situation.

Most cultures think that lying and deception in order to gain someone's favour is wrong. This isn't a case of "black hat vs. white hat." There's nothing to do with hats in this. I don't care what approaches or methods you utilise to generate more focused search engine traffic when it comes to search marketing. There are no tactics that I believe are more or less ethical than others. I'm not interested in what Google says in their Webmaster Guidelines because I don't need to know. You won't get into trouble with Google if you understand that all they care about is that your website isn't dishonest in any way. They need to know that the information on your site and the information you supply to Google are reliable. That's all there is to it. So many ethical dilemmas boil down to one question: Is it deceitful or not? I'm concerned about search marketers who believe that lying is an unavoidable aspect of their profession if they want to succeed. It's not only wrong, but it's also a depressing reflection on our industry and probably our entire planet.

Too Much Traffic? Too Many Leads? Try Search Engine Optimization.

Yes, you read the title right. My organization recently performed comprehensive seo on a customer web page, and the outcomes were incredible. Within a month, look for guests had reduced by over 60%. Inbound brings from look for had reduced by over 50%. And the consumer was absolutely thrilled with the outcomes.
So when is less look for guests better? And when are less brings from natural guests better?
Less guests from look for guests can be better when the website draws the incorrect type of guests, and less brings can better when the website draws the incorrect type of brings.
To give you some background, this particular customer offered a highly-specialized assistance to B2B organizations. The reputation of the organization and the great company's assistance instructed a higher dollar figure per engagement. They were THE significant player in an industry that they had practically developed. However, their before seo agency did not factor in any of these very essential concerns whilst improving the web page.
The company in question was clearly from the “traffic-at-any-cost” school of seo, and they never involved the consumer with the type of concerns that you would expect from a real business associate, such as the most concerns, such as “Who is your target market?” They were not a promotion associate – they were a guests delivery procedure. They were not definitely involved in the customer's achievements, because to them, improved look for guests was the only measure of achievements.
They certainly were not lacking in technical skill – they were able to deliver great quality positions for competitive keyword phrases. And the technique was not suppose, as all techniques were well within the conditions of all significant google. So what exactly was the consumer validated in stressing about?
It turns out they had plenty of genuine problems. Although positions and look for guests were up, revenue were down. Additionally, web type brings were coming in and the phones were ringing, but nothing was closing. The revenue agents was spending lots of your energy and energy following up on brings that were, quite seriously, junk. Confident sales had come to a dead stop because salesmen had walking purchases to follow up on inbound brings, which were certainly numerous.
After a brief research, it easily became clear what the root of the problem was. The before seo agency, with their “traffic beats all” mindset, had converted the website into a magnetic for do-it-yourselfers, small firms or individuals with very low costs, and guests looking for no cost advice.
In their pursuit to obtain the most look for guests possible, the before seo agency had erred with the most fundamental foundations of the strategy – keywords selection. Instead of carefully selecting keyword phrases that were suitable to entice the high-end customers that the consumer was acquainted to, they successfully (in the sense that they achieved great rankings) targeted keyword phrases with modifiers such as “free,” “advice,” and “ideas.” All of these keyword phrases were hugely popular, all of these keyword phrases were difficult to achieve higher positions for, and all of these keyword phrases should not have been utilized in the strategy in the first place.
When you boost for low-quality phrases (“low-quality” obviously means different things, based on a business's goals) you receive low-quality look for guests in return. When low-quality guests transmits a type cause from a web page, it makes sense that the cause itself will also likely be low-quality. This was, of course, exactly what was happening to our customer.
After our research, we broke the information to the consumer that the strategy had been essentially defective. They were not happy to hear this information, but it did match up with their experience. We also told them quite seriously that advancing, we would be focusing guests great quality over amount, and by expansion, cause great quality over amount. They were easily assured that look for guests was not the most essential measurement in a seo strategy, and were thrilled about a new, ROI-based approach.
Luckily, we did not have to throw out all of the work from the previous company. They had laid a company foundation with regards to techniques, which allowed us to recalibrate the keyword phrases and recognize outcomes in a very not much time.
So, to review our achievements, look for guests reduced by 60%, brings were cut in half, and revenue improved considerably. The reducing pace of the incoming brings was more than balanced out by the great company's brings – many brings derived from the Fortune 500 organizations with whom this customer was acquainted to working. Previously, guests from these desired organizations had been converted off by keywords modifiers such   as “free” – they were serious individuals looking for a serious solution and they recognized that what they needed was not going to be no cost.
For too many individuals, such as experts, seo has a very tight meaning – acquire positions and guests from related keyword phrases. Until more organizations understand that seo is a promotion to be assessed and analyzed just like any other, there will be countless examples of strategies considered a millionaire by those who worked on them, but as breakdowns by those who have to deal with the consequences.
By:  Scott Buresh

PPC Bid Optimization Without Conversion Tracking

Lesson 1 of running a PPC campaign: track your conversions. A simple rule that we all try to stick to. But sometimes we can't.
Not all campaigns work so easily. It may be that conversions are too few and far between to make a difference. The website may convert everything over the phone through a system to complex/entrenched to track back to keyword level.
Whatever the reason, there are two techniques you can use to help get your PPC account delivering more value, even if you can't track it.

Option 1: Engagement Metrics

This one is hopefully going to seem like an obvious first step to most of you. If you have Google Analytics linked to your AdWords account, then you can create "engagement goals" and import them into AdWords as a conversion.

Engagement goals consist of tracking visitors who meet a threshold time on site or pages visited. In the screenshot above you can see how a goal would be set up to create a pages visited requirement of greater than 1. Doing this would let you see a goal in AdWords for any visits that did not bounce.
Based on the type of website you're running you really need to think carefully about which metric (time on site or pages visited) is going to be more useful for you, and what your requirement is going to be to log it as a conversion in AdWords.
Remember! Google Analytics does not track the time the user spent on the final page of their visit. If the user read that page for a long period then left the site, you won't see how long they spent on that final page. This can make time on site a slightly misleading metric for websites where visitors won't view many pages.
If you want to log pages per visit, then decide what kind of visitors qualify as "engaged" enough to be worth logging. You will find that many visitors will either bounce, or look at everything on the site. Averages suck. Your averages are being skewed by bounces and by visits with many many pages viewed, so don't base your assessment on logging visitors who visit more pages than your site average.
Visiting more than one page (i.e., not a bounce) can be a good signal. If it takes at least two clicks to reach a product page or view a price, then your ideal threshold may be greater than two pages viewed.

Option 2: Relative Weighting

For some sites you can't even accurately track the above behavior. One page visits might still be worth a lot to an information or blog site. You may have organizational reasons that you can't use Google Analytics or other web analysis packages.
You need to be more creative in these situations.
Step 1

Take your top 20 keywords by traffic. In most cases these will account for the majority of your total clicks, but if not then take 30, or 40. Don't take too many at this stage, or you're making a lot of extra work for yourself for not too much value. Exclude any of your brand keywords from this list.
Step 2
Rank these keywords by a "likelihood of conversion" factor. You need to know your business really well here, but you have to put your keywords into order sorted by how relevant and targeted they are. A particular keyword might suggest that everybody searching for it is looking for exactly your product. Alternatively it might have other meanings or be more generic. Rank these keywords by their "awesomeness" factor.
Step 3

Give each of these keywords a score from 1 to 10 for relevance. The best and highest should be 9 or 10 (this won't always be the case, if none of your best keywords are in your top 20 by traffic) and work from there. Don't feel like you need to go all the way down to 1. If the lowest keywords have maybe half the likelihood of conversion of the highest keywords, then respective scores of 5 and 10 would be appropriate.
Step 4

Add a column to your list that indicates the potential value of a conversion. This is only really necessary if different keywords imply a different value (e.g., they might be searches for a different product). If your website sells just one service, or value is not related to search term at all, skip this step and just add "1" to this column next to every keyword.
Step 5

Multiply these scores together for each keyword, and divide each one by the total sum of all scores added together. What you have now is an estimate for what proportion of your budget you should be spending on each keyword.
Remember that these keywords didn't make up your total spend. If the top 20 keywords spent 80 percent of your budget, then these proportions you've found are proportions of the 80 percent.

Deciding the Bids

You should now have each of your top 20 keywords with a score from 0 to 1 representing the proportion of your spend that should be going to this keyword. Achieving this takes some time. You're going to need to analyze your spend levels on a daily basis, and make changes accordingly.
Each day, download the keyword data for the previous day from the account. For each keyword in your list, work out how much it spent (proportionally) compared to your target. If the keyword's spend is too high, reduce the bid by 10 percent. If it is too low, increase the bid by 10 percent. Set a sensible level of tolerance on this, or you'll be changing your bids even if your keywords are reeeeeeally close to perfect.
The process that will occur is this: every day each keyword that is spending too much will have its bid reduced a little. If the next day it is spending correctly, then you'll stop making that change to that keyword and it's nicely on target. If it still hasn't reached target then the process will happen again.

The Inevitable Complication

You're working from assumptions based on gut instinct and guesswork. These aren't accurate and they never will be.
Don't go crazy looking to make each keyword fit your target perfectly, since your target is an educated guess at best. The process outlined above will give you a bidding strategy to meet your target but it doesn't validate it if you were wrong.
The second issue to be aware of is that every time you change your bids, the proportion of budget spent by each keyword will change. But it will affect the proportion spent by all your other keywords too.
If we imagine a situation with two keywords, "keyword a" and "keyword b". "Keyword a" spends $10 per day and "keyword b" spends $20 per day. If I conduct this analysis and increase the bids on "keyword a" so that it spends $20 per day, then "keyword b" is now spending a lower proportion of my new, higher budget. And if my budget is limited, then I may need to reduce "keyword b" to compensate.
Each action on a keyword affects the proportional spend on the others. Don't be surprised if your keywords overreact.

In Summary

Having a lack of good conversion data is no excuse for not optimizing bids in a campaign. The campaign can still perform better and deep down you know it!
The two methods in this article will give you some pointers to go about pushing your spend towards your best converters and most profitable keywords, but your overall budget must still be determined by the profitability of PPC as a whole.
Re-assess your assumptions regularly. Don't take your first best guess as fixed. Make changes and improvements over time as your knowledge grows and you can keep making the campaign better and better.
By: Alistair Dent