Free SEO

People in other industries don’t provide their would-be clients with “spec work” for free. That would be asinine. So, why do advertising agencies continue to do it?
It’s not a new question. But Toronto agency Zulu Alpha Kilo really illustrates just how ludicrous it is—in the great video below, in which a guy approaches real men and women (not actors) in other businesses and asks them to provide him with a product or service for free, to see if he likes it before committing to more.
via AdWeek

An once they are signed… The Vendor Client relationship – in real world situations

13th January Top Day for Digital Jobseekers

Last Tuesday, January 13th, was expected to be the most popular day this year to search for a new job in digital.  A survey undertaken by Manchester based recruiters The Candidate found that people are most likely to consider their career options on the second Tuesday in January than on any other day in the year – perhaps a case of post-Christmas blues.

The agency polled 100 candidates who contacted them on the second Tuesday of January in 2014 to ask why they were looking for a new position at this time.  The majority (61%) of those surveyed said that a reassessment of their lifestyle after Christmas prompted their search as they wanted a new challenge for the new year whilst almost a fifth (19%) of job searchers had made career advancement a New Year’s resolution.

Judging from my LinkedIn inbox on 13th January digital marketing recruiters are well and truly aware of this fact!

Here’s some Google Trends data for a selection of UK job search terms

Not An Advert: Torn-Jean Wearing, Open-Collared Hooligan Required, North London

Are you a torn-jean wearing, open-collared hooligan?  My client is a recently launched digital marketing agency backed by a high profile individual which has just received significant investment to grow their team.

Based in freshly carpeted London offices our leadership team have developed an unbelievable white hat ethical SEO product which gets page 1 results and will change the way SEO is done in the UK.

This is an exciting opportunity for someone who has experience getting sites up the pecking order at an agency which is forecasting massive growth in coming years.

Key duties and responsibilities:

  • Delivery of SEO product
  • Delivery of PPC product
  • Attending 2 client meetings in the first month and one per month thereafter
  • Ability to build and rank a site for its brand name an advantage

Our award winning digital marketing agency director has been testing products for more than a week and is now ready to help businesses be top of natural or paid search.

Must have own computer and chair.  Desk and mouse-mat provided.

£25,000 per annum.  Any more and you’re fired.

▶ Apply Now on Company Website

Also required: 10x Telesales Executives – experience with email phones preferable.

(this is getting old now?)

Climb Online Website Launch Odds

Climb Online Logo

Climb Online launches tomorrow.  That’s climb-online.co.uk

“product” ugh.  I do hope this has been thought through in the last 6 months.

Here are my odds.

  • 10-1 site launches with meta noindex intact
  • 15-1 search spiders blocked from crawling entire site in robots.txt on launch
  • 4-3 site contains populated meta keywords tag
  • 3-2 site is accessible both with and without www. URL prefix
  • 3-1 “as seen on BBC” banner on homepage
  • 4-3 massive image of Mark on homepage
  • 3-1 cheesy stock images
  • 2-3 main images without alt attributes
  • 3-1 doesn’t load on mobile
  • 4-1 broken links
  • 5-1 mentions SEO tactics such as directory submission
  • 15-1 link wheel diagram
  • 5-1 “get up the pecking order” appears on the site
  • 4-1 offers “guaranteed results”
  • 3-1 offers three-tiers of package: silver, gold and diamond.
  • 3-1 contains testimonials despite tomorrow being the launch
  • 3-2 contains “about us” page with no details of anyone who has worked in SEO or PPC delivery for longer than 12 months
  • 10-1 contains exact match OBL in footer
  • 1-3 Someone complains about Mark’s use of <h1> tags on Twitter within 2 hours of launch
  • 2-1 more than 5 audits of the site appear online within 48 hours of launch
  • 3-4 gets free press links thanks to massive promotion on license-fee payer funded BBC
  • 2-1 gets a link from the BBC
  • 3-2 FrankPR get Mark on at least three BBC local radio shows this week
  • 1-5 more tweets about Katie Hopkins that Mark Wright tomorrow
  • 1-2 site is still outranked by climbonline.co.uk for its brand name in 2 months time
  • 4-3 climb-digital.co.uk sees a mysterious upturn in business
  • 1-3 other £150/month agencies bid on [climb online]
  • 2-1 backlink profile acquires large quantity of exact match anchor text links within 3 months of launch

The Problem with “X SEO Experts Share…” Posts

You know the kind of post:

Free content and Egobait rolled in to one.  Haven’t we had enough of these already?

It’s a numbers game.  Ask a hundred SEOs, get free content out of 30 in exchange for a link back and hope they will share or link to your post.

Unfortunately the catch-all approach has some problems.  Like if you ask the wrong person.  And don’t know any better.  And press publish.

Introducing 46 SEO Experts Reveal their $500 Link Building / Content Marketing Secret (free link for the LOLs).

About half way down the page Kevin Bland aka TheShitSEO shares his thoughts about client expectations for a 6987% ROI, buying 20,000 directory links from Mali, thinking outside the box, building links for fetish sites, demanding links in exchange for Lidl ale and Kim Kardashian’s private blog network.

As a bonus the same round-up also features Neil “only one spot left” Patel who responded to another round up asking for the “best link building strategies that don’t require content” with the gem “why not generate infographics?”. Seriously.

ASA Adjudication on Claim Resulting from Squidoo Lens

  • In January the Advertising Standards Authority investigated a mail service provider for “making an unproven claim” that they were award winning
  • In their response the mail boxes provider “said they believed that using the term wasn’t misleading because they had been voted top virtual office by ‘Mail Services Finder’ on a website which rated virtual offices in the UK.”
  • The website?  Squidoo.
  • Someone with the username MailServicesLondon made a single Squidoo Lens “Top 10 Mail Forwarding & Virtual Office Company Awards 2012
  • This Lens linked out to only one of the ten mail service providers listed – the one being investigated.

What a coincidence.