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A Bottomless Cup of SEO
April 04, 2006
At our house, coffee makers seem to last about as long as congressional campaign promises. By the time we realize just how much they've let us down, we can hardly wait until the next election.
In my latest round of pre-purchase coffee maker research, I came across some interesting marketing claims. One famous manufacturer was touting its latest model, and one of its big improvements was that instead of 10 cups, the new model brewed 12. More important, it brewed those 12 cups with a water reservoir and pot that were exactly the same size as the 10-cup model.
Interested, I probed a bit deeper in some shopping forums. Turns out the claims were true. Sort of. The older model brewed only 10 cups. But with that model, each cup was six ounces. The new coffee maker did brew 12 cups of coffee. But for this model, the definition of a "cup" was five ounces. Thus "more" cups with no change in footprint.
The quick moral (and SEO tie-in) is that in an SEO campaign, for clients and vendors alike, you need to make sure that everyone is defining "success" the same way - and the right way - consistently.
One client recently expressed concern that the company's rankings - for a few phrases they had picked arbitrarily before our campaign started, without any sort of keyword research - had declined. This, to them, was a reason for concern, even though search traffic had risen about 30% and the quality of the leads was rising noticeably. Pulling clients away from a rankings-based success model is always surprisingly tough.
Whether you're buying a coffee maker or running an SEO campaign, everyone's goal should the same: a giant, high-quality buzz.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at April 4, 2006 11:32 PM
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Comments
great point. we had the exact same thing happen with one of our seo clients last month. since they started with us, their traffic has gone up well over 300%, to over 1k uniques a day, all relavant traffic. BUT, one of their primary gripes was that they had dropped from 4 to 8 or so for a couple abritrary terms they were focused on from last year. so, in the end, they think they wasted money with us.
go figure.
Posted by: cigarhat at April 5, 2006 12:51 PM