I’m calling you out. You firms who claim to know something about Internet marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing–whatever you call it, and yet who haven’t been able to get your own sites ranked in Google for any terms relevant to the profession.
Richter7 – “We develop Internet marketing strategies…”
Cogbox – “Put us to work if you need…site optimization, search optimization, organic search, search marketing…”
Axis41 – “…we’re highly skilled in search engine optimization…”
Humaniz – “Moonshine 3.0 was recently released with the specific goal to improve search engine optimization for dynamic sites.”
Although these firms may have great capabilities in some areas, SEO does not appear to be one of them. Download this SEO ranking report and you’ll see what I mean.
First, a brief explanation of this report. This represent ranking results from Google and only Google, because for MWI I don’t care about Yahoo, MSN, or any other search engine. We take care of Google and Google takes care of us.
Down the left are the keywords I would like MWI to rank for. Along the top are competing firms. The firms in this report represent a sampling of those I like to keep an eye on because they are our direct competitors in one or more ways. A red arrow pointing downwards means the ranking of that firm’s website has dropped for the keyword to its left. How far has it dropped? That’s what the number to the right of the arrow means. Blue arrows mean a ranking has improved. A blue + and a piece of paper means the website ranks for a term it did not rank for the previous time the report was created. No arrow or other graphic means nothing has changed. A dash indicates no ranking for the respective keyword.
This report goes 30 search results deep. Frankly, for these terms if your website isn’t on the first page of search results (the top 10 rankings) you might as well not be ranked at all. If you’re not showing up in the first 30 results then you’re probably not even trying.
These results change on a daily basis. You can be ranked in the top 30 for a particular keyword one day and disappear the next. But as I’ve looked at these reports over the months I’ve noticed that some of our competitors have never shown up in these reports, yet they claim to have some expertise in Internet marketing, and some claim to have specific expertise with search engine optimization, the very activity that would make them show up on this report–if they were doing it for their own site.
Granted, when Richter7 created the copy on their site that says they “develop Internet marketing strategies” they may have been thinking about something other than SEO. Humaniz doesn’t actually say that they provide SEO services, although if they’ve developed a content management system that is SEO friendly then you would assume they have some expertise and would apply it to their own website. But when Axis says that they are “highly skilled in search engine optimization” and Cogbox lists as specific services they provide “site optimization, search optimization, organic search, search marketing”, and yet they don’t show up anywhere in the rankings you have to scratch your head.
If a company claims to create great brands you would expect them to have a decent logo, right? You would expect a web design company to have a good website. And a firm that claims to provide SEO as a service should have a site that is ranked for terms related to the provision of said SEO services, right? And yet here we are. Think about it, won’t you?
