SEO Goes East: Negative Attitude towards SEO and Search for New Alternatives (Part II)

Search engine optimization is not something new or unknown being present on the market for nearly two decades. For sure, it has gone through the series of changes and now SEO is so much different from what it has been even a couple of years ago. The high speed of its development requires SEO specialists to upgrade their knowledge and skills literally every single moment. However, only a little number of people are able to meet such requirements, and so there is no surprise that SEO is seriously harmed by the decrease of trust, especially in the regions when it is traditionally in most demand: United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe.

In the first part of the article I have talked about the main tendencies that are present within the society of the United States, Western European countries, Canada and Australia. In these countries, people are getting more and more disappointed with SEO because of the low level of competition within the ,market that doesn’t support the development of the overall quality of proposed services. In plain words, the main problem is that you pay a lot and receive almost nothing.

In such circumstances, many business owners that want to develop their business online have started to seek for the alternatives. What can I say here? For sure, they have found them, and the majority of recommended SEO agencies were situated in the region of Eastern Europe. Nowadays, this is the central region of SEO development because it combines high quality and low cost of proposed services. This is supported by the numerous feedbacks, stats and techniques that I have already talked about.

So now I want to do some practise, or rather to talk about it ;) Let’s go to the analysis of the key reasons of search traffic growth that took 145 hours and 13 minutes.

Research feedback

To reveal the ways of guaranteed traffic growth stimulation, we have systematized data on 600 projects that we have been promoting during the last few years.

To keep the maximum frequency of the experiment, all projects with low initial level of site attendance  have been excluded (that’s because the growth dynamics on such projects is too intense and it can seriously impact the research results), as well as projects that had issues with analytics.

We chose the attendance at the end of so-called “first stage of promotion” as our starting point: the first stage has been already passed when SEO audit of the website has already been done by our specialists and technical tasks arising from it have been implemented.

The data on traffic change have been measured monthly for each particular project. The relative attendance was defined by the ratio of the current traffic value to the initial one at the moment of starting the second stage of work.

Then the current projects have been divided into groups in accordance with the quality of implementations (it was defined by the opinion of specialists team that have been working with the current project). The averaging monthly values of relative attendance were calculated for each group.

Implementation quality grading:

Research Results

It seems impossible to imagine how you, the readers of the current post, will be surprised. That’s because it turned out that maximization of search traffic growth requires working with the website. So no buying links, no cheating with behavioral factors, no searching for holes in search engines, but to work with internal optimization.

Thus, the leading SEO topic, the only silver bullet is to implement technical tasks of SEO specialists”. An interesting fact: the opposite is also true: if nothing has been implemented, then search traffic growth will be close to zero.

You can see it on the following graph:

Pretty unexpected, isn’t it?

In fact, it is possible to finish at this stage because it becomes clear that if a client’s software developer doesn’t implement technical audit, than traffic doesn’t grow, but if the ones does - it grows up. But, like in a good American book on business, where the main thought is developed for several tens of times from each side, we will go on after all. The thought on importance of technical working with the site for SEO has to be internalized.

So what is the problem?

SEO market is unique. There are no rules within it: each person sees the service in a way he/she wants, each recommends to the client what he/she considers to be the right choice. And we are not an exception from this rule.

However, we want to convey to the clients one thought, which is probably shared by all specialists within the sphere: “When ordering SEO, get ready to implement technical tasks of the specialists”. We have formulated this message long ago, before it became mainstream, and before search engine filters became so common and quick.

Whether clients understand that? The results of the survey:

As you can see, 28% of software developers are too busy to take part in website promotion. But what delights us is knowing that 34% are able to find time and work in the right direction. We hope that the current research will stimulate 100% of software developers to work for the result.

Anyway, dear SEO customers, in case you want to see a high-quality result and develop your business in the Internet, you have to actively cooperate with SEO specialists. As long as you stay on the sidelines, you stimulate its “dark part”.

Links, behavioural factors, SEO text for robots, searching for other holes — all of it can be used as well for a couple updates. The success of the whole project depends on the initiative of both SEO specialists and customer.

We would like this post to become a symbolic anchor of the message about the importance of the implementation of technical SEO tasks. We would like specialists to be able to give a client link to this post instead of long and tortuous chasing after the client in a style of “implement, please” or “push the developer”. Therefore, let’s return to the research.

Research in details

Let’s have a look at each particular research segment.

Less than 30% or no technical tasks are implemented

Projects analytics with maximum ignorance of technical tasks:

It is obvious that software developers working with the current projects are doing absolutely nothing.

About 50% of technical tasks are implemented with significant delays.

Now the graph that illustrates the dynamics of traffic growth on the projects where the situation with implementations is slightly better:

Interesting facts:

Apparently, software developers that got in the current segment, are very busy.

No less than 80% of technical tasks are implemented with slight delays.

Nearly perfect graph on attendance growth was received for projects sampling where the major part of technical tasks is implemented, but some of them aren’t performed to the fullest extent or not quickly enough:

Average data on attendance growth:

Probably, the current sampling includes projects, the owners of which like to argue.

100% of technical tasks are implemented without delays

Below you can see a sampling of projects, implementations within which are performed as quickly and qualitatively as possible:

Long live 34% of software developers that are successfully dealing with the technical tasks implementation.

The averaged dynamics for all initial projects of the attendance changes sampling:

Without grading on implementation quality on average, the project receives:

For more detailed analysis of the “tyranny of averages” excluding gradation on implementations quality we have divided projects into two samplings with different values of initial attendance per unit of time.

The value of a relative attendance “100%” corresponds the traffic values at the moment of the first stage of works:

SEO is not magic.

There is no sense in talking about SEO’s “death” or “ineffectiveness”. It is high time to also close a particularly beloved topic “SEO specialists are pests”. The task of SEO specialists is the develop sites, make them more “understandable” for search engine in terms of its structure, content, technical component. But all of that can’t be done in case customer won’t give the resource in a form of software developer and customer’s will for discussing and approving one or another refinement.

But what if my SEO specialists are managing without technical implementations?

Usually, if a customer doesn’t need to implement anything and there are no tasks on website development, SEO specialist is proudly telling about how much money he spends on links. To be fair, it has to be underlined that sometimes over one third of a budget and is spent on links. And those links work.

Everything seems to go smooth: traffic goes and conversion start to grow. Till the first “non-minor” update of search engine. Sometimes the one can get lucky: website can hold several updates. But sooner or later it will inevitably go down. Then a filter is applied over the website that SEO specialist presents to the client as a force majeure: “None is guilty as none knows what Google or Yahoo did not like, I will text them immediately…”.

But who can overcome sanctions? Only specialists. That is why a terrified client waits for another six months till SEO specialist will remove the purchase links and the another update will take the site out from under the filter. In the future, history repeats itself and can last for years till business finds a way to understanding that there is another way, even though it is much more labour-intensive, but it is exponentially more profitable in the long run.

Why is this happening at all? In addition to the old school SEO specialists’ “habit” to purchase links, there is one more purpose: it is way simpler for specialist to purchase links.

What is the reason for straining and constructing a new site structure, collecting semantics or tens of thousands of requests, convincing client in the necessity to make serious modifications on the website, pushing his software developer when it is possible to run the project in some kind of an automatic promotion system and do nothing?

Just to be fair: what would you choose if you were a SEO specialist: to earn money without spending time and stressing your neurons or constantly enforcing yourself to think and work? It is unwillingness to work (diligently and busily) under the new rules of SEO market is still keeping the culture of SEO “old schoolers”.

Conclusions

Prior to ordering SEO, ask yourself the following questions:

In case at least one if your answers to the aforementioned questions is negative, say no to search engine optimization. However, if you decide to go on a long-term and complicated SEO journey, be sure: your courage will be rewarded. Especially since SEO promotion is second channel after email marketing by ROI level.

P.S. For SEO agencies

The main aim of the current article is to convey a simple message: “SEO requires implementation of technical adjustments if the website”. We are sure that the whole market will benefit from clients’ awareness of this simple though. That is why we want to address to the agencies.

Write in the comments who is ready to cohesively and collectively convey to the market that clients have to work with the sites? Netpeak resources, as the resources of any other agency within such a fragmented market. Will not be enough to convey this idea to each potential customer.

Let’s clean up together the Augean stables of links, cheating the behavioral factors, positions and other staff.

Let’s do everything possible to help SEO market get rid of the old school SEO specialists and go from shamans’ ents to business centers.

Let’s finish off the old link-based SEO of the past! :)