SEO Is Free So I Don’t Have To Budget For It!

It’s not unusual for prospects to be under the mistaken impression that natural search (SEO) is free. It takes ongoing investment, that investment comes at a cost, and that cost has to be budgeted for.

But while these prospects are trying to hire our firm they are also sending us a very mixed message: “We don’t have any budget for SEO”. These words make any SEO want to scream. It’s like trying to hire a construction company to build your company a new headquarters and informing them in your first meeting “Just so you know, we aren’t likely to have the money to pay you.” This tells me that my and my colleagues’ time – and expertise – are not being truly valued.

Maybe it stems from the misguided notion that they are entitled to the traffic – it’s their right and anything blocking them from their rightful share of free traffic can and should be swept aside. Simply throw a few dollars at the problem (i.e. buy the minimum number of SEO consulting hours required) and make it go away. Then the tide of “free” traffic will wash over them for years to come.

It’s my job, and the job of my sales team, to convince them that SEO is an ongoing investment, that it must be resourced properly, and – this is the most important part of all – that they should pay us for value received rather than hours clocked. You can’t blame them for being stuck in the dollars-for-hours paradigm when that paradigm is pervasive: it’s the modus operandi for accountants, lawyers, and consultants of all sorts. Tell me the minimum number of hours I need to buy from you in order for you to complete my tax return, to draw up a new legal contract, to retool my business process. The euphemism for this is: “Can’t you just get us some quick wins on the board??”

It’s time to think differently, folks! If you put a dollar in, and you can get 8 dollars back, you should beg, borrow and steal as much as you can to keep putting dollars in. Keep plowing money in – as long as you feel confident that you will get a good return on your investment.

There are hard costs and soft costs to which you must allocate budget. The hard costs include hiring staff, allocating internal resources, engaging an SEO firm, and outfitting your in-house team with on the tools of the trade (SEOmoz Pro, Internet Marketing Ninjas, SMX and SES conference registrations, SEOClass, SEOTraining SEMPO, etc.).

There are soft costs associated with SEO too, which are fuzzier and harder to define than the hard costs. These include the missed opportunity cost, time-to-market cost, and the cost of competing opportunities. For more on these, read my Search Engine Land article.

Getting to the top of the rankings isn’t free. And guess what? Neither is staying there. Keep that budget up year after year. Making a “one time investment” in SEO is a recipe for failure.

Case Sensitive Google Queries

I’ve always taught in SEO training sessions that Google queries are case-insensitive. Indeed, Google states this in their online documentation in no uncertain terms:

Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.

Yet, as my Netconcepts colleague Chris Smith recently noted, this is not currently the case. We get different results in the 8th position for “george washington” vs. “George Washington” vs. “gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN”, when expanding out the number of listings per page in the Google preferences.

In another example that Chris found, “fossil watches” and “Fossil Watches” returned different results. You can see this in this screenshot:

I found that the new “whois” shortcut query, which returns a domain lookup from domaintools.com as a shortcut at the top of the results, only works if the domain name is entered in lower case. You can see this to be the case in the following screenshot:

Could this be the start of a new era for the SEO industry – an era of case-sensitive rank reporting, case-sensitive keyword research and case-sensitive optimization? God, I hope not!

YouTube and Video Optimization

From a social media marketing standpoint, YouTube isn’t an ideal social site because of the way it hoards PageRank (video pages can’t have external links on them, and external links are nofollowed everywhere anyways, including on your user page), so it can’t be leveraged to increase your site’s rankings in the same way that a site like Digg can. That’s why a lot of SEOs and SMOs prefer submitting link bait articles to social news sites versus making videos for YouTube. When a video goes viral, it’s YouTube that tends to benefit in terms of inbound links rather than the original site. So, if the link juice and thus the search engine visibility benefits don’t transfer to your site, what’s the point you may ask?

True, YouTube limits your opportunities to add external links and then nofollows them. But you can be at peace with that fact. Instead, get the YouTube video itself to rank in the SERPs. Long live Google’s “universal search”!

With universal search, YouTube now wields a lot of power to rank in Google’s web search results — which means that getting into video is a good idea. Video blogging or trying to create something that has the potential to go viral can be a great thing for your business.

I especially love the “plus box” in universal search — the clickable plus sign in a YouTube video containing Google SERP that allows searchers to watch the video right there, without leaving the page. It’s a great opportunity to make a brand impression over a course of minutes, while the viewer watches your video.

So how do you optimize video content?

Obviously the spiders can’t see what you say in the video so how are these things going to rank? When you upload a video to YouTube, there are a few important areas to optimize are:

• the title
• the description
• tags (keywords)
• and your YouTube username

What you call your video, the words you use in the description, and what tags you assign it, will make a difference when it comes to its ranking in the SERPs and for which keywords.

Step 1: When coming up with a good title and description for your video, remember to use the words you are trying to rank for. This might sound obvious, but it’s just like if you were writing good titles and descriptions for a regular page on a site you were trying to optimize. Do not be too exact, but don’t be too broad either. YouTube has the ability to rank for some fairly competitive words especially if there are not many videos about it. At the same time, however, if you title your video “Sports video” you’re just wasting your time.

Make copious use of tags on your videos (assuming the tags are all relevant to the content), spread your tags out among your clips, use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube’s default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories), match your title and description with your most important tags, and don’t use throwaway words like “and” or “to.”

Your YouTube username is an often neglected but important piece, because it can drive traffic to your site and help burn your brand in the viewer’s brain. Consider the famous “Will It Blend?” videos from Blendtec, where they blend iPods, rake handles, light bulbs and the like. Blendtec cleverly set their username to “willitblend.com” to promote their microsite. Granted, it’s not actually an external link (it still points to a YouTube user page), but it provides bloggers and journalists with a URL to use in their blog post or article besides (or in addition to) the YouTube video URL.

Read more on YouTube marketing in this article I wrote for MarketingProfs last year.