Guida SEO

The Value of Small Daily Incremental Improvements

Building a well known brand and a sustainable business model in a competitive marketplace is challenging, but if you break things down into pieces and do something every day eventually you win marketshare. People who become successful have large goals like “become the leading source in our market” or “increase profits 150% year over year” but most people who actually achieve those types of goals set smaller goals and work toward achieving them every day.

One of my better habits is writing a to do list. When I scratch things off the list there is a sense of accomplishment which drives further activity. Sometimes the accomplishments are moral victories, learning how to create a little bit of code, or improving the graphical interface of something, while other projects are much more complex, like writing a book or hundreds of training modules. As long as growth is sustainable then all is well. If you stop growing in a growing marketplace then you need to evaluate what you are doing wrong.

• Are you doing too many repetitive tasks that software or a cron job should be able to do?
• Does your site lack viral marketing components?
• Does your site do a poor job of prequalifying leads?
• Are you selling to the wrong market?
• Are you pricing too cheaply and attracting the wrong clients?
• Are you dong a poor job building perceived value?
• Is your conversion process broken?
• Are you doing a poor job of transferring value?

In nearly every growing business at some point in time the answer to every single one of those questions is yes. Each is an area for improvement.

With employees I can come off as being under-appreciating and/or too demanding, largely because I expect people to work as hard as I do, and maybe 2% of people do. When you have the attitude of making incremental daily improvements it is hard for some people to grasp it until you beat it into their heads. I have found it hard to teach most people - especially if they work remotely.

You really need to find that 10% of people who want to add value…and then you need to find the 30% of those who’s loyalty exceeds their greed. It is hard to find good workers. As software gets cheaper I suspect it will only get harder to find and retain quality employees as more of the quality people decide to work for themselves, which means that you need to create ways to get customers to do your marketing for you.

I think the key to smoothing out some of the friction with workers is to teach people to set their own score card. Daily contact off the start is needed to set expectations and keep things progressing. But over time have them ask themselves each day what they did to add value, make a difference, and remove market friction. If you are active in your marketplace, are receptive to feedback, are aggressive with push marketing, give away value, and keep trying to build value each day, eventually the profits roll in. It might take a couple years to work out well, but eventually it does.

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Are You Following Google’s Marketing Strategy?

I just read Google and The Value of Web Supremacy, comparing Google to the history of Venice. It is a great blog post well worth a read.

Google’s position on top of the web allows them to monitor any area of growth, and give themselves the first slot for any area they want to compete in. If they are uncertain of their competitive positioning they can list a couple other competitors alongside until their internal stats show their product is superior. Free exposure and free benchmarking are great advantages.

Their relevancy standards and universal search product allow them to vote for or against any type of information or company. From a business standpoint, anything they buy or launch can be tightly integrated in the search results like they did with YouTube and Google Checkout.

Their protective moat extends out from that position with the following assets

• the default video hosting platform
• the default display & contextual ad networks
• the default blog feed management company
• the leading feed reader services
• the default web analytics service
• the default mobile operating system
• the default standard for map sharing
• free payment processing for non-profits (good for public relations and a cheap way to buy market exposure)
• (soon to be) the default web development platform - Google App Engine

Given the size of that moat and diversity of their offerings, holding Google stock is like holding a mutual fund with a long position on the web. As SEOs we monitor Google too closely to talk about why and what they are penalizing and how to get ahead, but I think you can learn more about marketing by watching what they do to build their brands and dominate their markets, and try to do the same in our markets.

When you have a well known brand, a good idea, and do an aggressive launch sometimes your idea sticks as the default answer for that question. You end up owning ideas - sometimes for years. In some cases idea ownership requires extensive maintenance costs, but in many cases there is little ongoing cost.

• Even if a domain name costs $50,000 or $100,000 it is only $8 a year going forward.
• A good site design might cost $5,000, but earn you that much each month.
• Some software tools and downloads rarely need updated.
• The difference between an average blog post and a piece of feature content might only be 8 hours of production and 4 hours of marketing.

Once you have default status in a category the web’s network economy works for you and works against the competition.

• if you already rank that exposure can become self-reinforcing (until someone creates a better idea)
• if you are already well known it is easy to get listed in DMOZ and get other trusted 3rd party citations
• if you have a well known brand you can charge more and be selective with who you sell to
• if you have a lot of exposure people new to your field are likely to quickly run in to you and help promote you while they learn from you

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Our New Search Engine Rank Checking Tool Has Been Updated

The Rank Checker developer told me he just completed our first major update on the extension. From his email…

• added international character support
• fixed query time saving error in options window
• added status icon (right click on the icon to see the whole menu)
• fixed linux issues
• changed doubleclick behavior (if you want to go to SE results on windows, hold CTRL key and click on the url; on mac hold META key and click on the url), because double click causes some errors on mac os.
• fixed export to CSV
• fixed result scraping when domain has sitelinks
• added dragable columns
• fixed domain.net vs domain.net.au issue

What else do we still need to fix/do?

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Yahoo! to Test Monetizing Their Search Results With Google AdWords Ads

From their press release:

Yahoo! Inc. a leading global Internet company, announced today that it will begin a limited test of Google Inc.’s AdSense for Search service, which will deliver relevant Google ads alongside Yahoo!’s own search results. The test will apply only to traffic from yahoo.com in the U.S. and will not include Yahoo!’s extended network of affiliate or premium publisher partners. The test is expected to last up to two weeks and will be limited to no more than 3% of Yahoo! search queries.

Anyone who syndicates Yahoo! ads or operates a business that relies on selling clicks has to be concerned with this news.

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