A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a business person in Los Angeles who wanted some help with SEO Services for his Joomla website. He was a self taught expert – he had learned everything through experimentation. A week later he fired me when Google changed the ranking on one of his pages.
We hadn’t touched the page or done anything that remotely would affect the page. But he was the “expert.” Except he really wasn’t.
Let’s call this client Joe. Somewhere along the line, Joe had paid someone for SEO services and they helped him rank #1. You could see it right there on Google. But his business hadn’t grown as a result. He decided that he needed to be #1 for more keywords, and he knew how to do it.
Winning the Wrong Horse Race
His old SEO Services company had helped him win a race that no one was running except him It’s really a pretty common tactic among less than scrupulous SEO characters.
Here’s how it works:
- Choose some long-tail keyword that sounds important.
- Make some changes to the homepage and maybe create a handful of links to that page.
- Take credit for making the client #1 and sign a bigger contract.
“You Too Can Be #1! Buy Our SEO Services!”
The truth is that Google is so good, you can highlight just about any unique 10 word phrase on your home page, paste it into Google and you’ll be #1 – or close to it.
To prove my point, here’s an example from my homepage, a not so unique phrase: “A mobile website design is simply one designed for a small smartphone display.” My site is #3 for that. That’s great, except nobody is searching for that phrase.
In this case, Joe’s phrase was roughly equal to “Ford Fairlane Repair in Santa Monica California.” Yes, Ford made a Fairlane model 50 years ago. Yes, Santa Monica is in his service area. Yes, Google found 426,000 related pages to put in the results. No, that doesn’t make it a valuable keyword.
I did the research: no one is searching for that phrase today. You can’t guess at this, you need to research your Keyword Phrases.
The number one rule of SEO: “Getting on a list of 5 million results isn’t important, getting to the Top of any pertinent list is critically important.” In this case, he missed the “pertinent” part.
Winning a race that no one else is running won’t build your business. Choose your keywords carefully.
McColley Marketing Media is a Phoenix SEO Services company. We can help your website become a profitable marketing vehicle for your business. Want to know more? Call Lynn McColley at 480-258-4135.
P.S. I didn’t even bother sending a bill. Joe’s last web designer and his last SEO are buying Adwords for his personal name to warn that Joe doesn’t pay his bills. Ouch! Maybe that’s why his name is almost hidden on his site.