Did e-consultancy outsource its link building?

Having been doing some research into the value of directory links and places to find some good ones recently. On our travels we found various blog & forum posts talking about the value of directory links for SEO, whether we should be doing them at all and the net result of such activity.

While searching around we were a bit shocked to have found a report from a Canadian SEO company which looks like it has worked on behalf of e-consultancy.com (which now redirects to http://econsultancy.com) at some point in the past. I've put the link below for you to take a look at yourself as well as showing an image below.

Take a look for yourself - http://www.seocompany.ca/submission-package-report.html


What we don't know is when this report / web page was first put together. Judging by the fact that it refers to Microsoft bCentral which is now long gone, we would imagine that it is a couple of years old. What I think it is safe to say, is that e-consultancy.com is definitely credited for links and is also being charged 'labor' for time spent getting the links.

What puzzles us is why a website of such power and repute would outsource its link building? With so many paid subscribers, over 13,000 followers on Twitter, other blogs and huge credibility in the SEO world, the gathering of links should be almost an after thought as they have so many. Why they needed to pay for someone to get them seems odd to us.

If anyone could shed some light on this, it would be interesting to know more about what happened.

Is Google controlling what you search for?

In the last year or so, you've probably noticed that Google has made a couple of important changes to its search box. Around a month ago, Google made its search box a lot bigger. They claimed that they did this for a number of reasons including the fact that we now use more words when we search, that users prefer to see bigger characters when they type and that they wanted to focus more on search. How a bigger box does this, we're not quite really sure.

One of the biggest things they have introduced (which has impacted SEO, PPC and search marketing in a big way) is 'Google Suggest'. It went global in Summer 2008 having been in trial for several years and has since been replicated across the major search engines. If you aren't sure what Google Suggest is, it is a drop down list which appears when you are typing something into Google which tries to predict / help you to with your search. An example is shown below

While it does a very good job of this most of the time it seems that Google doesn't realise that Adido means Adido. If we have to see 'audio' one more time, we'll start using Bing...

One of the things that we've noticed is that users have started to use Google Suggest. A lot. Having looked at the analytics for several of our clients, we've noticed some of the top search phrases which generate search traffic have started to look artificial or strange. Why would a seemingly low volume or long tail search phrase start be one of the top search phrases for a particular client?

The answer is Google Suggest. Users are lazy and the idea of clicking a phrase they want to look for rather than type another letter on their keyboard is very appealing to a lot of people.

While the intentions for developing the Google Suggest might seem perfectly legitimate, in that it wants to help make it faster for users to find what they want, it could be viewed that Google is actually trying to engineer or control your searches towards the phrases which is wants you to click on. After all, Google made 97% of its income in 2008 from Google Adwords, its Pay Per Click platform.

It is not clear how the phrases which are listed in the suggest box are put there. Google Suggest help says that it lists the phrases is made up of many things from the amount of searches carried out on a phrase, studying what logged in users have searched for in the past and to how many advertisers there are on the relevant phrases.

Whilst, it might be very cynical for us to say that Google created Google Suggest for its own benefit, one thing that we can say is that it is certainly influencing users in the way that they search. While in the past there may have been dozens of different search phrases for one product, there are now only a handful of phrases which appear in the analytics.

While this might actually make your pay per click campaigns more expensive in the long run (more people searching on less phrases will increase competition) it is essential that you check the Google suggest to get the best from your digital & search marketing campaigns. Miss this, and you might miss out on big amounts of traffic.

Think before you brief a web agency!

We get a lot projects coming to us here at Adido. Having been working with partner agencies and businesses across the South of England for over six years, we get to see all sorts of possible projects before they are built. Some of them see the light of a monitor, some of them don't.

One of the things that we are still struggle with is the lack of understanding shown by companies before they go to tender. We were made aware of a few tenders for website redesigns in the last few weeks which made us scratch our heads. Below shows a small part of the briefs we received;

• "website needs to be dynamic and utilize features such as search engines, web directories"
• "comprehensive visitor count facility that enables collection of data relating to hits for all pages"
• "knowledge of HTML and other design programming languages (such as JavaScript, ColdFusion, Dynamic HTML, ASP, etc.)"
• "critical that the website is written in line with our branded image" 

We appreciate that those who have no idea about websites, digital marketing or search engine optimisation will find it hard to explain to those in the know what they want from their website. Whenever you try and enter a new industry or explain to people what you need/want without really knowing everything that you should do, things are often very hard.

The issue that businesses that are looking to improve their websites and the results they get from them face when trying to find their potential digital agency is showing up their distinct lack of knowledge. By publishing a brief which is either very hard to understand or makes reference to practices which are years behind the time will only do bad things. From an agency perspective, the following is most likely to occur;

• If a brief is really bad, the agency simply will not have the time to get their head around what is needed for the client. This will mean that tenders are rushed or not submitted at all.
• If the agency doesn't understand what is needed, then the tender will have to account for all of the unknowns available. This could increase the quoted cost and timescales dramatically. 
• If all agencies are forced to give high quotes, it could lead to the project not happening at all or a lesser alternative being selected on price. This could then up costing the client twice as much in the long run as not all issues would be looked at or resulting in missed opportunities which stunt the growth of the business.
  

Our main concern, like any other good web design agency, is being able to quote on what is actually needed rather than what might be perceived to be needed. If a potential client is unsure of what should be asked for when putting a website or digital marketing campaign out to tender, then there are many places to go to get helpful advice.

We've published our own website requirements document and have sent it out to hundreds of users in the last few years to help them with their website planning & build. There are dozens of other websites which can give good introductions on how to brief a web agency, including Business Link, Headscape and Vidoni to name but a few. You can always speaking to any good web design agency (ahem :) who will be more than willing to come and sit with you for an hour to understand more about what you are trying to achieve and help you put a more comprehensive brief together.

Google Adwords Log Out problem with Opportunities tab

We've been using Google Adwords this morning and have found a problem with the Opportunities tab. No matter who logs in or the browser we use, it does not work. When you try and use the page, it fails to load up all of the tools & options available and shows a message saying 'Your Adwords session has expired. Please refresh this page to try again'.

Have any other PPC companies picked up on this? Does anyone know how this can be solved?

Is the recession over? Maybe Google knows...

Look at any newspaper or news bulletin on the TV in the last couple of years and it would have probably touched on the 'current economic climate' at some point. Yes, the UK is in recession and has been for a while. Despite some companies posting some very healthy growth figures in 2009 (including ourselves I might add :), there is still much talk about how bad the economy is and how bad 2010 will be for sales.

What happens next year is anyones guess but certainly there seems to be an upwards trend in the economy at the moment and a more positive outlook from a lot of the business people we speak to.

Perhaps one of the best indicators of this is website traffic. Sure, there are lots of things which you can do to improve your online traffic but looking at an overall picture, you're bound to get a good reflection of the general feeling across the country by looking at the amount of website traffic and searches carried out each month.

If anyone is going to know about user behaviour, it's Google. Since Google launched its Google Analytics product a few years ago, its usage has become the near de facto standard for most digital and web agencies. Perhaps one of the little known facts about Analytics however, is the fact that Google owns all of the data is collects. If you stop using the product, you can't take the information with you.

Google by now must have billions of visits and hundreds of billions (I'm sure there must be a term for that) of page views recorded in it's servers. If anyone is going to know about trends, then they're the ones to know.

The reason why we think the recession might be ending is that our own Google Analytics information is showing a huge upward trend at the moment.

As the screenshot above of just some of our accounts shows, there has been growth of around 80% of the websites we monitor in the last month. These range from small brochure sites which receive handfuls of traffic a day through to huge multi national ecommerce websites getting hundreds of visits each hour. Regardless of size, promotion work (to a small extent) and industry, there are pretty much green numbers across the board.

Is the recession over? Only time will tell but for now it seems that users are voting with their fingers in a big way.