Are clients just hurdles?
Mon, 27 February, 2006 – 10:20 pm
I often wonder if some clients are there to prevent you from doing your job as well as you could. Today was a typical annoying Monday. I've been taking it easy over the weekend (as you could tell from the PHP post yesterday that I've been meaning to finish!) to try and rest and let this illness go away that I've been battling.
I woke up this morning after a good nights sleep (for the first time in a while), feeling all ready to go. I started work at 9am (very impressive) catching up on what I didn't get done this weekend. Whilst sorting a few things out for my contract job, and having to wait for the server to catch up at times I decided to log into Google Sitemaps and check up on the phrases being used for the various sites at work. Now just a quick bit of background info. At work they run their own server. There is a main business site and then each department has their own web site (it's an ego thing for some of the department managers – don't ask!). Since I've been there, despite working on the other sites, getting the copy text tweaked and well written, the department sites don't rank for any general terms, just very very specific ones. However the main business site ranks well and top for all their main phrases so they're happy as the visitors tend to filter through to the right site anyhow. However whilst nosing at the stats today I noticed one of the departments were getting click throughs for very general terms, competitive terms in fact. I checked the phrases in Google and lo and behold there were rankings of 1st, 3rd and 4th for a handful of phrases. Suddenly on cloud nine (sad I know) that one department was ranking I ran over to Digital Point (okay I opened another tab in firefox and clicked the bookmark) and logged in to view the historical rankings data to see when this apparent rankings change had happened. And suddenly the cloud disappeared…
When I first started work part time at work, back in May 2004, I set up the keyword ranker at Digital Point. I targetted around 40-50 phrases, and every phrase was checked on the main business domain as well as the respective department domain. Yes at the time no departments were showing rankings, but there's no harm in them being there. Google's API allows 10,000 searches a day so it's not like I was using those searches up. Then last year the guy in charge of PR and Marketing suddenly found himself a new job to fill his time and took over the checking of the rankings on a fortnightly basis to then have a meeting about the rankings, statistics and other various info with the Managing Director. At the time it was no problem to me. I'd done my job that I'd been hired to do, get the web site back to the top of the rankings for various phrases, so I didn't check the rankings very often. He added a few extra to make the results 'look good', not a problem… Until I discovered today that he had removed all other phrases attached to the other department domains… 
So something has happened to make this major change in the rankings. It only seems to have happened to one domain. It's hard to use the statistics to compare from previous months as there are times when there is heavier marketing for the department, other times it's dependent on the time of year. I set up a visitor tracker at the start of February and that was showing people clicking on these phrases so I know it's been ranking top since before then. I took a look in the raw logs but it doesn't tell me much. To be honest I'm so pissed off with him today. It's hard to explain but I put various tools in place for a reason. Perhaps I never need them but when they don't cost or get in anyone's way are they a problem? No! But right now I could have a major piece of SEO information in my hands but I don't know what it is because he killed my tools. So I've been racking my brains as to what I've changed or added over the past few months. We changed some of the content but that was only in the last week or two and therefore doesn't tie up to the statistics from the start of February. I also added all of the department sites to my Google Sitemaps account, but according to GS, it will not improve your ranking. The sites were already indexed so that's not mad any difference. Otherwise I cannot think what could have made the change, but without specific dates I won't know now at all!
I could spend all day moaning about people putting hurdles in my way whilst I'm just trying to help them out but I won't (I sense a sigh of relief!). However all of that aside I decided to set up my own Google Sitemaps account (the other is using my work email account and for work only) for my own and various client sites. Why? Well most of the information isn't of much use to me yet. I'm reading up on various information about it but I think the main bit of information it can give you is on the first page it shows you. When you click one of the web sites listed in your account it takes you through to the Query Stats page. Here it lists the top search queries and the top search query clicks. The first list tells you what you are ranking for, note when I say ranking that's not the top 10, I've not worked out how far it goes but I've found results in the 30s so I'm guessing the first 50 perhaps (I'll read the help file one day, it may tell me!). At least it gives you an idea of what phrases you have a chance of getting visitors with currently, and then the second set of information tells you who actually clicked that phrase to get to your site. I hope they look to expand the amount of information they give you, or perhaps allow you to download a monthly CSV file instead of just restricting it to the top 15 phrases on screen as the information is so invaluable. Digital Point is great for example, but it's not always accurate. It doesn't communicate with Google all of the time and often drops phrases off the scale and then puts them back the next time. The downside of course is DP is not on the Google server, whereas Sitemaps has direct access to all server info.
On a sidenote I've also noticed my Alexa Traffic Rank is dropping/increasing, depending on how you look at it. The traffic is increasing (this I can see in my stats anyhow), the figure is dropping. I'm going to try another little trick that I read about on Graywolf's SEO Blog whereby I add the traffic rank button to this site and see if my figure drops any lower. Of course the figure is only currently accurate for the number of users with the Alexa toolbar, but I'm presuming that by having an actual image on the site it will hit Alexa for every visitor. It's currently around 142,000 so lets see if I can get it into 5 figures 
I'll be adding a new side column to take this along with some adsense. Now if only I could work out how Site Point do their snazzy 'hide nav' trick, then anyone who doesn't want the ads could just hide them
Wow Sarah, you really do like to blog – and I thought I went on a bit
Interesting post – I havent got a lot to add about your experiences at work, other than the fact that I can imagine any sort of SEO work must be very frustrating, both for the client/employer and the contractor/employer. It is simply very hard to guage accurately, at least thats my experience. I have done all the work on my shop site myself and am very reluctant to contract any of it out – I just worry too much about the fact that I may know as much as the so called "specialist" SEO companies. Of course, I could be wrong and I am sure that there are many out there that could imrove things for me – just lacking in trust I guess.
With regards the Alexa rankings – your blog really does surprise me – that is one high ranking for a personal site. Justification for your posts I guess.
The adsense block? Dont spend too much time worrying about it. Until you mentioned it in your post, I didnt even notice it. Its a bit of a catch 22. Do you want people to leave your site? Or would you prefer they hung around a bit? As it stands, I would think you may get a few leavers but it certainly doesnt get in the way.
It would certainly be appreciated if you let us know what kind of a return you do get back from adsense, as well as the changes in your Alexa rankings – Which reminds me, I really should re-install the toolbar.
Cheers,
Rich
By richandzhaoyan on Tue, 28 February, 2006
Hey Rich. I find blogging lets me get some of the thoughts running through my mind out on paper. Sometimes at night I have so much going through my head on work and events that I have such restless nights because of it. But I know I can easily type a lot, definitely quicker than I can write!
SEO can be hard at times. It's not my primary subject and it's something I'm constantly reading about, finding new ideas and suggestions or, in the case of yesterday, improvements that I don't know how they came about! It's hard with clients however, they expect instant guaranteed results and I'm always careful to put in a quote that nothing is guaranteed. It's hard to explain to them why other companies that guarantee positions are just scammers, afterall the client wants rankings and will go to someone who guarantees them. I've heard so many stories from so many people on this, people who get duped, naive people who just trust what they're told. It winds me up that there are scammers like this out there preying on people who are usually great in business but desperately trying not to get left behind in the Internet race. SEO is often a case of try and tweak, and try again. Studying any statistics available to you, understanding visitor patterns too. Clients just see visitor counts as great, they don't take into account that a site can have hundreds or thousands of daily visitors but if sales aren't made then there's something wrong. Trackers need to be run to see what the visitors do once they hit the site etc. I guess that then spills to marketing but it all goes hand in hand.
As for the adsense. Well my idea is that certain ads may be of interest to people. I've often seen adverts for sites that I'd never have seen otherwise if it wasn't for adsense so I'm hoping that it compliments the site. The money part isn't a major issue to me considering I earn more in 2 hours than I do for a month of adsense! To be honest I use my adsense earnings as a measure of success with my SEO. If the adsense is up then I believe my SEO has worked better, be it content writing, more visitors etc. It's a bit of fun trying to beat the previous month's earnings (which I've almost done this month too). We'll see how it goes
By Sarah on Tue, 28 February, 2006