July 28, 2015 at 12:51Everything on the shelves: when an SEO campaign brings results
Evgeny Moiseev, co-founder of the Kokoc Group, spoke about the results that can be achieved if the optimizer works professionally and the client listens to the recommendations of the agency, the magazine “Internet Marketing” of the publishing house “Grebennikov”.
SEO is not in vain considered one of the most effective channels of promotion. Some business owners, having given the task to outsourcing, act on the principle of “out of sight, out of mind”. And they only remember contractors when the time comes for a monthly report. Unfortunately, SEO doesn't work that way. Search engine promotion yields results only if the advertiser and agency are working together. It becomes effective when the customer is ready to accept the recommendations of specialists, to implement them in time, without breaking the deadlines.
Here are some of the most common mistakes customers make when contacting an agency for search engine optimization.
1. Failure to meet deadlines. The customer implements optimizer recommendations within six months with a minimum period of one month. At the same time, the search engine results often change and how quickly the recommendations are implemented depends on whether the site will improve or worsen the position in the top.
2. There is no perfection in the world. The client refuses to implement the recommendations on the site, because he is confident in its ideality. Unfortunately, often this is not true.
3. Unwillingness to listen to professionals. The customer does not implement the recommendations of the optimizers, because he is sure that he knows better how to help the development of the site. In this case, the question remains: why spend money and time on an SEO agency?
Having figured out the errors, let's look at the example of four cases, what results can be achieved if the optimizer worked professionally, and the client listened and complied with all the recommendations of the agency.
Case No. 1: Young people have a road everywhere
It is not easy for young sites to get into the list of search engine responses to a user’s request. For example, the TOP-10 topics of “taxi service” include mastodons, whose domain age varies from 3 to 10 years. In this case, the search engine policy also hinders taking a place in the TOP. This can be seen in the example of Yandex, which, for most popular queries, primarily issues its own services, for example, Yandex.Taxi or Yandex.Market. They are traditionally occupied with the first lines of search results and no other resource will be able to get on them.
However, everything is not so hopeless. The task of “getting out of the dusk” of search queries the young taxi service website seemed to us somewhat ambitious. We started with the fact that they began to gradually increase the link mass so that the resource was highly ranked by search engines. Link mass is a collection of all external links located on third-party resources and leading to an optimized site. It is an important factor in ranking by search engines: the more links, the higher the position of our “ward” can be. By the way, paying attention to this factor is not necessary for old sites, since the volume of their link mass is already so large.
Also, when promoting the site, we took into account the seasonality of search queries - this helps to maintain traffic and high conversion at any time of the year. It is a mistake to assume that users, for example, request the same thing in spring and summer. In the spring, they can search for “taxi”, “order a taxi” or “taxi in Moscow” in the search engines. And in the summer, when the vacation season begins, the request “taxi to the airport” becomes more popular. Tracking changes in search queries and reinforcing the most popular ones in time is an important point in the work. Otherwise, it turns out that, for example, in the spring the client’s site is at its best, since attention was paid to seasonality. And with the advent of summer, if you do not strengthen in time the requests corresponding to this time of the year, the position of the resource decreases.
The work brought results - for 12 months, the taxi service website began to be visited 16 times more often than before the start of the promotion.
Case No. 2: User requests as a product category.
Correspondence to user requests in search engines is the “guarantee of health” of any promoted site. For example, a person writes in the search bar: "buy a red bike." If there are many such requests, then this is an important signal for action for the optimizer, who is engaged in an online bike store.
In our case, it was an online brick store. It was in accordance with the requests of users that the sections of the site were named: “Brick of manual molding”, “Facade tiles“ under the brick ”,“ Means for cleaning the brick ”. And in the names of the goods - the names of the sections are included, for example, “Facing brick Markinsky brown 1NF” from the category “Facing brick”.
In addition, commercial ranking factors were introduced for all products - indicators characterizing the reliability of the online seller: product price, payment options, delivery information, assortment, contacts. As a result, the attendance of the resource over the year of promotion has grown more than 6 times.
Case No. 3: Quantity is not an indicator of quality
Some business owners mistakenly believe that the main thing in website promotion is to take a higher place in the search engine results. This is actually not the case. Of course, the first position, for example, in Yandex speaks of the status of the business, but for the optimizer it is more important to first bring visitors to the client’s site who will later become buyers, and only then raise the resource.
When the agency contacted the site of elite kitchen interiors, we started by determining its target audience. It is pointless to catch a crowd of users on such a resource - when they see kitchens on it for 200-300 thousand rubles, they are unlikely to buy them. Therefore, instead of worrying about traffic, we focused on conversion, that is, we tried to turn the maximum number of website visitors into buyers.
After the client began to receive orders, we started work on improving the status, using for this “high-frequency” and “mid-frequency” requests - that is, those that are most often asked by users in the search process. They do not give much traffic, but raise the site in the TOP. As a result, the business received both customers and status on the Internet: it is included in the TOP-3 of Yandex on the main key requests.
Case No. 4: Come in large numbers
Previously, Moscow agencies promoted their customers' sites, both in the capital and in other cities, if the companies had representative offices there. They simply tied the address and telephone number of an office, for example, in Samara, optimized for the Moscow TOP resource, and due to this they occupied high places in the local TOP. As a result, the regional issuance of search engines was jammed with Moscow companies, whose budgets at this level are extremely difficult to interrupt.
We initially went the other way. Our client, a company selling ventilation systems from Nizhny Novgorod, has representative offices in different cities. But it was important for him to promote the site in the TOP of his native region. Therefore, we acted exactly the opposite: we optimized the Internet resource first for Nizhny Novgorod, and only then for other cities, including Moscow.
Already in the first 11 months of work, the traffic to the client’s site has increased almost 12 times. And here also Yandex carried out a reform, changing the rules of geo-referencing of each specific site. As a result, Moscow companies can no longer use the same resource for promotion in several regions. They have to create a separate site for each city in the TOP of which they want to get. But the changes turned out to be useful to us: the TOP of Nizhny Novgorod has cleared itself of the capital companies, as a result of which the client has received a larger volume of search traffic.
Thus, the coordinated teamwork of the client and the agency and the joint determination of the goals of search engine optimization help put the site on the top of search engine results, increase conversion and, as a result, increase the number of sales and orders.
Posted by Eugene Moiseev - Co-Founder of Kokoc Group
SEO is not in vain considered one of the most effective channels of promotion. Some business owners, having given the task to outsourcing, act on the principle of “out of sight, out of mind”. And they only remember contractors when the time comes for a monthly report. Unfortunately, SEO doesn't work that way. Search engine promotion yields results only if the advertiser and agency are working together. It becomes effective when the customer is ready to accept the recommendations of specialists, to implement them in time, without breaking the deadlines.
Here are some of the most common mistakes customers make when contacting an agency for search engine optimization.
1. Failure to meet deadlines. The customer implements optimizer recommendations within six months with a minimum period of one month. At the same time, the search engine results often change and how quickly the recommendations are implemented depends on whether the site will improve or worsen the position in the top.
2. There is no perfection in the world. The client refuses to implement the recommendations on the site, because he is confident in its ideality. Unfortunately, often this is not true.
3. Unwillingness to listen to professionals. The customer does not implement the recommendations of the optimizers, because he is sure that he knows better how to help the development of the site. In this case, the question remains: why spend money and time on an SEO agency?
Having figured out the errors, let's look at the example of four cases, what results can be achieved if the optimizer worked professionally, and the client listened and complied with all the recommendations of the agency.
Case No. 1: Young people have a road everywhere
It is not easy for young sites to get into the list of search engine responses to a user’s request. For example, the TOP-10 topics of “taxi service” include mastodons, whose domain age varies from 3 to 10 years. In this case, the search engine policy also hinders taking a place in the TOP. This can be seen in the example of Yandex, which, for most popular queries, primarily issues its own services, for example, Yandex.Taxi or Yandex.Market. They are traditionally occupied with the first lines of search results and no other resource will be able to get on them.
However, everything is not so hopeless. The task of “getting out of the dusk” of search queries the young taxi service website seemed to us somewhat ambitious. We started with the fact that they began to gradually increase the link mass so that the resource was highly ranked by search engines. Link mass is a collection of all external links located on third-party resources and leading to an optimized site. It is an important factor in ranking by search engines: the more links, the higher the position of our “ward” can be. By the way, paying attention to this factor is not necessary for old sites, since the volume of their link mass is already so large.
Also, when promoting the site, we took into account the seasonality of search queries - this helps to maintain traffic and high conversion at any time of the year. It is a mistake to assume that users, for example, request the same thing in spring and summer. In the spring, they can search for “taxi”, “order a taxi” or “taxi in Moscow” in the search engines. And in the summer, when the vacation season begins, the request “taxi to the airport” becomes more popular. Tracking changes in search queries and reinforcing the most popular ones in time is an important point in the work. Otherwise, it turns out that, for example, in the spring the client’s site is at its best, since attention was paid to seasonality. And with the advent of summer, if you do not strengthen in time the requests corresponding to this time of the year, the position of the resource decreases.
The work brought results - for 12 months, the taxi service website began to be visited 16 times more often than before the start of the promotion.
Case No. 2: User requests as a product category.
Correspondence to user requests in search engines is the “guarantee of health” of any promoted site. For example, a person writes in the search bar: "buy a red bike." If there are many such requests, then this is an important signal for action for the optimizer, who is engaged in an online bike store.
In our case, it was an online brick store. It was in accordance with the requests of users that the sections of the site were named: “Brick of manual molding”, “Facade tiles“ under the brick ”,“ Means for cleaning the brick ”. And in the names of the goods - the names of the sections are included, for example, “Facing brick Markinsky brown 1NF” from the category “Facing brick”.
In addition, commercial ranking factors were introduced for all products - indicators characterizing the reliability of the online seller: product price, payment options, delivery information, assortment, contacts. As a result, the attendance of the resource over the year of promotion has grown more than 6 times.
Case No. 3: Quantity is not an indicator of quality
Some business owners mistakenly believe that the main thing in website promotion is to take a higher place in the search engine results. This is actually not the case. Of course, the first position, for example, in Yandex speaks of the status of the business, but for the optimizer it is more important to first bring visitors to the client’s site who will later become buyers, and only then raise the resource.
When the agency contacted the site of elite kitchen interiors, we started by determining its target audience. It is pointless to catch a crowd of users on such a resource - when they see kitchens on it for 200-300 thousand rubles, they are unlikely to buy them. Therefore, instead of worrying about traffic, we focused on conversion, that is, we tried to turn the maximum number of website visitors into buyers.
After the client began to receive orders, we started work on improving the status, using for this “high-frequency” and “mid-frequency” requests - that is, those that are most often asked by users in the search process. They do not give much traffic, but raise the site in the TOP. As a result, the business received both customers and status on the Internet: it is included in the TOP-3 of Yandex on the main key requests.
Case No. 4: Come in large numbers
Previously, Moscow agencies promoted their customers' sites, both in the capital and in other cities, if the companies had representative offices there. They simply tied the address and telephone number of an office, for example, in Samara, optimized for the Moscow TOP resource, and due to this they occupied high places in the local TOP. As a result, the regional issuance of search engines was jammed with Moscow companies, whose budgets at this level are extremely difficult to interrupt.
We initially went the other way. Our client, a company selling ventilation systems from Nizhny Novgorod, has representative offices in different cities. But it was important for him to promote the site in the TOP of his native region. Therefore, we acted exactly the opposite: we optimized the Internet resource first for Nizhny Novgorod, and only then for other cities, including Moscow.
Already in the first 11 months of work, the traffic to the client’s site has increased almost 12 times. And here also Yandex carried out a reform, changing the rules of geo-referencing of each specific site. As a result, Moscow companies can no longer use the same resource for promotion in several regions. They have to create a separate site for each city in the TOP of which they want to get. But the changes turned out to be useful to us: the TOP of Nizhny Novgorod has cleared itself of the capital companies, as a result of which the client has received a larger volume of search traffic.
Thus, the coordinated teamwork of the client and the agency and the joint determination of the goals of search engine optimization help put the site on the top of search engine results, increase conversion and, as a result, increase the number of sales and orders.
Posted by Eugene Moiseev - Co-Founder of Kokoc Group
