02
May
06

Search Engine Optimization and Print Marketing = Risky

By Joshua Steimle 4 Comments Categories: Marketing

Sometimes you have to laugh at the thing you do that don’t work out as planned. Case in point, MWI just ran an ad in Connect Magazine that says “MWI does search engine optmization. Go to Google and search for ‘utah search engine optimization‘ and then come get a proposal from us.” The idea is that people go to Google, do the search, are super impressed by MWI’s #1 ranking for this term, click through to our search engine optimization page, and then hire us to run their SEO campaign.

There’s just one problem. When the ad was sent to Connect MWI had a #1 ranking, but by the time the ad came out in print we had dropped to #4 and one of our competitors was listed at #2. Whoops.


How did this all happen? First, we had a #1 ranking in Google for “utah search engine optimization” for some time, perhaps a month or two. I figured we were safe.

Second, I’ve sent new ads to Connect before and they didn’t print them, they just kept printing the old one, so even though I noticed we had dropped before the ad came out, I figured “Ah, they won’t print it anyway.”

But not only did they print it, they printed it faster than I expected and they put it in a prime spot on the inside back cover.

So what’s an SEO professional to do? I and one of my SEO specialists spent a bunch of time doing whatever we could to bump up that ranking. Luckily we hadn’t done much to get to #1 so there was plenty we could do.

However, almost a week has passed since the magazine was delivered and all we have to show for our efforts is a measly jump from #4 to #3. Sometimes Google works the way you want it to within hours, but sometimes it takes days or weeks, and even we, the professionals, can’t control it like we would like to.

If there’s any bright side to the picture, it’s that we have done a lot of work that should ensure that over time we will gain the #1 spot back and be better able to keep it. And we’ve also learned our lesson about the risks of using print media to promote something that can change at any time and which over you have only limited control.

Related posts:

  1. The Difference Between Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization
  2. Search Engine Optimization Success
  3. Boston Search Engine Optimization
  • http://www.smoothharold.com Blake

    Man, that’s too bad. I commend your telling of the story though, Josh. Two of my sites took a PageRank hit from 5 to 4 last month, for what reason I don’t know.

    I can’t wait for the day when we can stick it to Google and don’t give a crap about PageRank. Traffic will be the new google (maybe)

  • http://www.russpage.net Russell Page

    Josh -

    I saw the ad. I thought it was brilliant. And, if I were to look it up online, I think I would be looking for MWI anyway and not your competitor.

  • http://www.paulmayne.org Paul

    I’ve heard that in the URL, hyphens (search-engine-optimization) give you better ranking than underscores (search_engine_optimization).

  • http://www.mwi.com Joshua Steimle

    Apparently this used to be the case (see http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/) but Google appears to have moved past that and as near as I can tell it indexes a page with the part of the filename “search_engine_optimization” the same as “searchengineoptimization” or “search-engine-optimization” as evidenced by looking at the search results for the following:

    “utah search engine optimization”

    “utah search engine”

    “utah search-engine-optimization”

    “utah search_engine_optimization”

    We can see that the url is highlighted (bolded) in every case except for the search for “utah search-engine-optimization,” although even in that case the page ranks quite high. I believe of greatest interest is that even for the search “utah search engine” the part of the url “search_engine” is highlighted in the search results, implying that Google is ignoring underscores except in cases where the search uses another symbol in place of the underscore.