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?
Interesting analysis. Where’s 10xMarketing on this list?
I’ve worked with Humaniz on a development project and let me just say that they…well in the spirit of being civil I won’t say how I really feel about them. I once asked Humaniz if they do SEO and put this very question to them of where they rank on these types of keywords. They stumbled over their answers - it was obvious they didn’t know what they were doing.
You still have to tip your hat to the guys who are number 1 for terms like “Utah Web Design Firm”, “Web Design Utah”, “Web Site Development Utah” and “Utah Internet Marketing”. These are very competitive and probably highly searched terms and you are out ranked on all these terms by your competitors. I’d rather be number 1 on the term “Utah Internet Marketing” then number 1 on the term “Application Development Utah”. Still ou have a much more impressive overall showing then your competitors.
You say that you “don’t care about Yahoo, MSN…”. Why? If you aren’t using Yahoo, MSN and other search engines then you are cutting yourself out of 55% of the search traffic on the Internet. Why not go after all of them? Are you saying that you get traffic from these SE but don’t care where you land on these SE? I understand optimizing for Google but that other 55% is still a huge chunk of the search market. Can you explain this in more detail? If I were looking for an SEO guy like you this statement would concern me.
At any rate, having been a former client of MWI I can tell you that Josh has a good thing going. He saved me from the (insert four letter adjective) at Humaniz after they totally screwed me on a project I gave them while I was at Speaking Roses. Keep up the good work, Josh.
I’m adding 10x to the list, so by the time anybody reads this comment they may be in the file.
The number one term for MWI is “utah web design”. Its performance has been worth more to us in the past than all other keyword phrases combined and it’s the phrase we focus on the most. Of course we’d like to be #1 for all the phrases on that whole list, but you can’t be #1 for everything so you have to pick and choose. But it’s not always a straight trade off. In this case we can’t opt to be #1 for “utah internet marketing” instead of “utah application development” because there is a lot more competition for “utah internet marketing.” The fact of the matter is we’re not even really trying to be ranked for “utah application development,” it just happened with no effort. The same is true for a lot of the keywords for which we rank. But since we’re ranked for them and they’re at least somewhat desirable I still track them just out of curiousity.
MSN and Yahoo together make up a large chunk of the searches going on out there, but Google is #1 by far. Of course that’s for all search terms. We’ve found that we get better results from a good ranking in Google than we do in Yahoo and MSN, and the difference between those results is greater than the difference in market share between Google and Yahoo and MSN.
But it’s not that we don’t care about Yahoo and MSN, it’s that we don’t necessarily need to. If you go to Yahoo you’ll see that we have the #2 and #3 spots for “utah web design” in Yahoo. For “utah seo” and “utah search engine optimization” we’re in the top five. In MSN you’ll see mostly similar results. Those are results we’ve attained in those search engines while completely ignoring them. Of course we could do better, but I have limited time to play around optimizing MWI’s site, and if I’m going to get good results in Yahoo and MSN without even trying, but Google is the real money maker for me, why would I spent time focusing on Yahoo and MSN when I can be spending that time on Google where the ROI on my time is greater?
In the case of our clients it’s slightly different. The primary focus is still Google since it has the highest ROI, generally speaking, but we do pay attention to Yahoo and MSN as well.
Something else I should note–We just did a major overhaul of our site within the past few weeks, so as of the time of the report many pages that existed previously are being dropped from the search engines while the new pages are being added. This means that while we have maintained our rankings for most keywords, we have dropped for others. But with time we should regain our prior standing for all the keywords we previously ranked well for (other than those keywords that are no longer relevant due to our new, restricted focus on core services), and actually our rankings should improve since the new website was specifically designed with SEO in mind.
Quick Questions for you,
What is the KEI of each of those Search Terms?
Perhaps some of your competitors are optimizing other Keywords instead?
For anyone unfamiliar with the term “KEI” stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index which is an index created within the Wordtracker software. It is used to gauge which keywords a website should be optimized for based on the amount of competition and the amount of search for a particular term. That is, if you are starting to do SEO for a website and want to get the biggest return you can as fast as you can you will optimize for those keywords that are being searched for a lot but for which there isn’t a lot of competition.
I don’t know the KEI for the terms in this report because I don’t use Wordtracker for optimizing the MWI site. Like I said in the previous comment, I have limited time to play around optimizing MWI, and I’m only able to get to 10% of what I already want to do. I guess you could say that MWI is a victim of “casual optimization.”
Maybe I should mention that I’m an amateur at SEO. I don’t do any of the work for our clients. That work is performed by our main SEO guy Eric Morgan and others who are the true professionals. I just like to play around with it myself.
As for the second question, I’m not sure exactly what you’re getting at, but I assume you mean that maybe our competitors aren’t showing up on the report because they’re optimizing for other keywords. That could be, but if they are then they’re missing out on the keywords that would give them the best ROI, or even any kind of ROI. If somebody is providing SEO services with a specific focus on the market in Utah and they’re not ranking in the top 30 for the terms in that report then I can’t see any way to explain that other than that they don’t have a clue what they’re doing or they don’t care about optimizing their own site.
I am surprised to see i4’s rankings on there. They did a site for a company I worked for (before I worked there) and charged them for SEO. But it is obvious they didn’t know anything about it because the menu is 100% generated in javascript and there are no other links on the home page to any sub pages. And their rankings definitely show it. Maybe i4 has learned more since then (I believe they did it back in ‘04).
I just thought it was funny because the owner of the company I worked for said to me that they have had their site optimized and nothing came of it. It is obvious why.
I mean no offense to i4. I am sure they are a great company. But it makes me wonder how many people are getting charged for “optimization” but they are clueless about what that actually means.
Very interesting report, thanks for sharing. Would you mind throwing Patrick Henry and Associate into the mix as well? They came to us and did a top notch sales presentation on Internet Marketing but I couldn’t find them in any of the SERPs for Utah SEO keywords I searched.
Based on your report I was a little surprised at who your top four competitors are. At least in my mind there seems to be a disconnect between branding perception and actual keyword performance with the companies listed.
Patrick Henry has now been added to the report.
When you say “top four competitors” are you talking about Richter, Humaniz, Cogbox, and Axis? If so, let me clarify that I listed them not because they’re our top competitors, but because they served as relevant examples for the content of the post.
When I said top four competitors I should have said, “the four competitors that rank in your report for any of the listed keyword search results”. I guess I assumed that i4, Convina, Infogenix, and 97th Floor were your “top four” as they are they ones with rankings in your report. In reality your actual top four competitors might not even be in the report.
Gotcha. There are other “competitors” out there that we don’t track because we don’t see them as true competitors in the sense that we’re going to end up competing for work against them, such as MarketingTool.com which is a directory. The firms we track the closest are those that purport to provide the same services we do, rank well or are moving up, and which pose a real competitive threat. The firms that don’t rank anywhere in this report are generally not tracked on a frequent basis since while they may be competitors in every other sense, they aren’t competitors for rankings. I only included them in this report to demonstrate the flaw in their claiming to provide SEO services when they don’t rank for SEO related terms.
I gotta say Josh, I was wondering when you would finally bust a post that got me to comment. You should throw webtargeted.com on their as well. Also the funny thing about Utah is there are a million companies claiming SEO, yet were are they on the engines?
Good Post - Good Blog
Kudos for for posting this. You make a valid point about the value of “practicing what you preach.” There are a lot of firms that admit they don’t do SEO, which is fine, but if they say they know their stuff, they should back it up with results. That being said, I’m sure a lot of local firms are like my own, we’ve been so busy working on our clients’ stuff and other projects that we haven’t really tried to show up for any of those keywords. As you know, SEO is largely about keywords in links these days, and those keyword links typically don’t happen “naturally” — you’ve got to actively acquire links with your keywords, so it could be partly due to a lack of attention, rather than ability of expertise.
You’re might be asking for it by posting this report, but chances are it won’t make much difference in the level of competition for your keywords. If they knew what they were doing they’d already be competing. Expect to see more competition for the SEO-related keywords, though–mostly from firms not on your report
Josh,
Long time no see. I have been keeping tabs on you ever since your mentored our class at UVSC. MWI’s doing SEO now eh? Well, Word on the Grape vine says that 10Xmarketing is leaving town. Packing their bags and running to Washington with their tail tucked between their legs.
I also heard that your SEO team did a presentation at Corporate Alliance a few weeks ago. Looks like you guys have a good thing going. Patrick Henry you know does training, they really are not a competitor. Unless you plan on getting into training.
I look forward to competing with you, cheers.
Hi Bart, nice to hear from you. I know 10x got bought out a little over a year ago by an out of state company, but I hadn’t heard anything about them closing down their Utah office so that’s news to me.
We’re actually doing a presentation at Corporate Alliance in a few weeks, on the 18th of January to be precise. I’m hoping we’ll be ready by then to introduce a new SEO service we’ll be launching soon.
Actually Patrick Henry does do SEO. Well, at least they’ve got clients paying them for it, whether or not they’re doing it is another matter. That’s all I’m going to say about that for the time being.
Oh I forgot, if your going to post about SEO I would take the non related SEO search terms. Like Utah web development. Plus WEB CEO keyword generator only gets keyword meta tags. I like Web CEO and am looking forward to the client manager to get out of beta. However, meta keywords don’t really give the complete picture of all the SEO related keywords in the Utah area.
But of course you wouldn’t post the really good easy keywords for your competition to look at.
You might also consider that some of the SEO firms might not consider MWI as a competitor. Since SEO is not the main focus of the company, some companies like to outsource to companies that specialize. Although there are a lot benefits to having a staff with as many competencies as you do. So long as they integrate with each other and don’t end up not communicating your firm could be the best SEO firm in the state.
P.S. http://www.AlmostAdvertising.com is broken.
Cheers!
I assume you mean “take out” the non-related SEO search terms. I suppose that would make it more concise for this post, but I think I’ll opt on the side of being lazy and leave it as is.
We don’t use the keyword generator in Web CEO. In fact we probably only use 20% of the functionality in Web CEO.
Yeah, work on AlmostAdvertising.com has sort of stalled while we work on TheOrganicSEO.com. All in good time.
Hello Joshua,
My name is Jacob Kerr and I am one of Utah Web Services SEO/SEM Specialist. I have noticed allot of progress for MWI over the last year when it comes to SEO/SEM and branding and would like to say that you guys seem to do very well. Utah Web Services has expanded allot over the last 1.5 years and is starting to become a larger player in the SEO/SEM industry here in Utah (we have always been good at SEO/SEM, but have not invested as much time into our own online operation as we should have). I’m sure that Utah Web Services will soon be part of you SEO reporting or competitive analysis.
This is a great topic and it’s nice to see so many local names commenting. I wanted to respond to Chris’s post about the term “utah internet marketing”. My old side business MidScape ranks #1 for both “utah internet marketing” and “utah online marketing”. Josh has it right though, “utah web design” is the most valuable keyword in the industry at this point. This term will lead to far more conversions than “utah internet marketing” which has a very low search volume. MWI has done an excellent job in it’s strategy. I’ve also noticed the guys at 97thFloor doing well in the SERPs.
Well my old site WAS #1 for “utah internet marketing” for the past few years. As of today utahinternetmarketing.com is #1. Curse all of the MWI blogs and their nicely placed links!
I found one datacenter that still loves me. I’ll just keep refreshing the results on that IP the rest of the day to soothe my pain.
Nice work MWI. Wow…2 days after bragging about being #1…