Has your SEO been done by a monkey with a hammer?

UPDATE: Video transcript available for ‘Has your SEO been done by a monkey with a hammer?’.

I look at a lot of websites over the course of a week. Usually all of them have had some “SEO” done on them in the past and a lot of money spent. Occasionally you’ll look at the SEO work and mutter to yourself “Well they’ve had a red hot go but they missed a couple of things”. For the most part though it looks like the SEO was done by a monkey with a hammer.

This week I’ve looked at one site that has had it’s home page deindexed, possibly suffering from doorway page penalty and another where a only a third of their site had been indexed. Both had had SEO done. In the case of the former, the SEO was focused on local search, even though the business was totally online with no physical local presence. So what did the SEO do? Setup a page for every suburb in Australia where the only thing that differentiated the pages was the name of the suburb. So essentially a site full of duplicate content which would at best be hit by Panda or at worst a doorway pages penalty but probably both.

Algorithm Chasing

We call this style of SEO, algorithm chasing. As the algorithm changes look for ways that you can exploit the changes. Buying backlinks, cloaking, doorway etc would all fall into this category. It’s a short term strategy though, as soon as the algorithm is adapted you loose the rankings and possibly more. Now it seems there is another exploit that we tested a few weeks back (In the video). Last week I concluded that the technique didn’t work but then the following day our target phrase went onto the front page.

SEO Exploit

With SEO it’s difficult to know sometimes, what caused a ranking rise or fall if you have been doing multiple things on the site. Certainly this was the case with us. After I asked the audience to search for “SEO Melbourne” and to look for this page in the search results and click on it, the following week we did some SEO speed tweaks to the site.  So it’s hard to know if our jump from position 19 to no.6 for SEO Melbourne was because of the exploit or our speed changes. However we also went from no.40 to no.5 for SEO. That’s unusual. We used to rank well for both of these phrases but they are no longer our target market as the buyer persona that searches for these, in my experience is very price sensitive.

Using An SEO Exploit Wisely

I’m in no way suggesting you should jump on board and hire contractors to search and click on your result. There is possibly something you can be doing though; meta descriptions. This was suggested yesterday by Courtney in our office. The meta description tag for a long time has been about displaying a sales pitch in the SERPs. Trying to get users to click on your result and if clicks are a ranking signal… well you see where I’m heading. We’re already running some tests in this area.

Is This Why Brands Dominate?

SEOs have noticed for quite sometime that big brands tend to dominate a lot of searches. Is this why? If people search for a brand typically they would want that brand’s website. If the first 3 results are not that brand the user scrolls down the page until they find the brand page. If enough people do this Google lifts the brand result higher on the page as that is what people usually want.

Do The Simple Things First

Before you rush out and try this make sure you have all the common SEO elements in place. As I demonstrate in today’s show, simply getting your page titles in order can have a massive impact. The growth shown below took me literally seconds to implement.

Will this last?

Well no. We’ve already slipped from no.5 to no.11 for SEO. Probably because the click frequency is down. If you wanted to test this theory simply search for SEO, look for our SEO Melbourne page and click on it. If we bounce back in a few days I’ll be sure to let you know :).

Do The Simple Things First

Join The Live Show

I’d love to have you in the live show. You’ll need to follow me on either the Periscope or Meerkat to ask questions or leave comments. Otherwise just like my new Facebook page or the Stewartmedia Facebook page to watch on the web. Have you tried the exploit above on your own site? Love to know the results.