by Scott McAndrew on October 4, 2008
This is another entry that bubbled to the top in the marketing contest from last month. It was submitted by Jason Baer who runs the online marketing consultancy Convince and Convert.
One of the problems I consistently see with SEO execution is the intersection between the SEO company and the client’s in-house Web team and/or the client’s 3rd Party Web team.
Here’s a real-life example that happened to me. I am leaving out the company names of all involved for obvious reasons.
Excellent SEO company is putting together a killer program for e-commerce client. Verbal cue analysis, editorial calendar, backlink outreach, anchor text tweaks, alt image tag optimization. The whole show.
3rd Party company is managing the Web site proper. They are the only ones that can touch the actual site code, per client insistence.
SEO company sends tons and tons of metadata, content, etc. changes to 3rd Party, who installs it on Web site.
Time goes by…..
SEO rankings do not improve. Not one bit.
More backlinks are procured, more editorial is written, etc. More time passes. Still nothing.
Finally, a full audit of the program is ordered by the frustrated client.
It turns out the 3rd Party Web development company was running a semi-bizarre database that essentially rebuilt the site each day. Whenever that happened, it overwrote any changes made to the metadata, etc. As a result, changes to the site were wiped clean each night at midnight. Google indexes fast, but not THAT fast!
A couple of lessons:
1. Fewer cooks in the kitchen is definitely better
2. SEO team really needs access to the site
3. Monitor your work and make sure the great site optimization changes you are making are actually showing up on the live site
Thanks for your entry, Jason. Great SEO recommendations that never make it to the clients public web server certainly is a frustration that many online marketers are familiar with.
by Scott McAndrew on September 25, 2008
A few weeks back I created a little contest that would award the best online marketing mishap story with a shiny new iPod Touch (not just new as in retail boxed, but the brand spankin’ new iPod Touch Apple just released).
After receiving a healthy dose of entries, I enlisted a few online marketers from different disciplines I work with to pick the winner.
Congratulations to Steve for the story he contributed regarding some suspiciously high PPC bills received by a credit union he works at for an unlikely phrase: “es sex.” Steve, your iPod touch was ordered on the Apple Store online this evening and is en route to you.
Here’s Steve’s story in his own words:
I work in the marketing department of a mid-sized credit union. We hired a paid search firm out of Austin that had been recommended to us by another credit union in Dallas.
Our initial set-up was about $15K and our monthly spend was determined to be in the $25-30K range.
Shortly after kick off the firm provided us with a massive list of keywords/phrases to review and approve. Not having any real experience doing this we asked some questions about the list but trusted the firm knew what they were doing.
About two weeks after the launch of the program our webmaster noted some peculiar visitor data. We were getting a huge amount of traffic from the phrase “es sex”. Not surprising those visitors had a near 100% bounce rate.
When we contacted the agency they assured us they would look into it and get back to us. About a week later we still hadnt heard back from them but still saw the massive amounts of traffic coming to the credit unions website from that term.
About 23 days past the launch they called to tell us our budget had depleted quickly and we should consider increasing our spend the following month. When we demanded to see some reporting we found that nearly $8K had been spent to drive people to our site for the term “es sex”.
It turns out there is large credit union named Essex. When they did their keyword research that term came up and they decided to target it. They were never able to explain exactly how Essex became es sex or how the ads they were running were even relative enough to the term to cause so many people to click through to our site but needless to say we refused to pay for their mistake and dumped them for other similarly stupid mistakes about two months later.
Thanks again to everyone who participated, and look for another contest in a month or two. I’ll be posting a few of the other entries that finished close behind Steve’s in the upcoming days; hopefully you’ll enjoy them as much as I did!
