Even though SEO does not work well, my advice is don't buy links from link brokers...they won't work, and such services are almost always a scam. The websites selling the links have inflated/useless metrics... Hiring an SEO agency also not worth it, unless you have millions of dollars. Any mid tier SEO service is almost is guaranteed to be a scam. They will bill you $2,000/month for links they buy for $200 that you can buy yourself.
Buying links off forums worked well in 2005-2007 before Google cracked down and removed the pagerank metrics.
Zillow can spend millions buying links to rank for all the real estate and mortgage keywords, because they have a blank check. Few have that privilege.
In 2005-2007 SEO was much easier..now all those techniques no longer work well.
The problem is google changed their algos to discount links from many sites (such as Reddit and elsewhere); second, they have put much more emphasis on domain-niche authority. That means, if you write a viral article about daytrading and it gets shared and voted thousands of time on a social media sites, it may temporarily get a good SEO boost for those competitive keywords, but then slide back to page 8 or so. A the old, established daytrading sites established news websites will outrank, due to authority."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"Ask HN: Competitor is successful with black hat SEO"}},"_tags":["comment","author_paulpauper","story_13913228"],"author":"paulpauper","children":[13916657,13918364],"comment_text":"SEO does not work that well anymore, unless your budget, I suppose, is absolutely astronomical and you spend years and millions of dollars to build a brand http://greyenlightenment.com/seo-is-a-waste-of-time-and-mone...
Even though SEO does not work well, my advice is don't buy links from link brokers...they won't work, and such services are almost always a scam. The websites selling the links have inflated/useless metrics... Hiring an SEO agency also not worth it, unless you have millions of dollars. Any mid tier SEO service is almost is guaranteed to be a scam. They will bill you $2,000/month for links they buy for $200 that you can buy yourself.
Buying links off forums worked well in 2005-2007 before Google cracked down and removed the pagerank metrics.
Zillow can spend millions buying links to rank for all the real estate and mortgage keywords, because they have a blank check. Few have that privilege.
In 2005-2007 SEO was much easier..now all those techniques no longer work well.
The problem is google changed their algos to discount links from many sites (such as Reddit and elsewhere); second, they have put much more emphasis on domain-niche authority. That means, if you write a viral article about daytrading and it gets shared and voted thousands of time on a social media sites, it may temporarily get a good SEO boost for those competitive keywords, but then slide back to page 8 or so. A the old, established daytrading sites established news websites will outrank, due to authority.","created_at":"2017-03-20T17:33:27Z","created_at_i":1490031207,"objectID":"13916025","parent_id":13915610,"story_id":13913228,"story_title":"Ask HN: Competitor is successful with black hat SEO","updated_at":"2024-09-20T00:32:27Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"qax"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"I'm part of an offline healthcare provider specializing in a procedure pioneered by our founding doctors. For the past six months, we've been paying an SEO agency $6,000 per month to increase awareness of this new procedure and help reach more patients. However, we're not sure if it's worth the investment. (We've looked at other SEO agencies, and the minimum cost seems to be around $3,000 per month.)
From what we've observed, SEO agencies seem to focus on 3-4 main areas:
1. On-page optimization (HTML/JS improvements which our team can handle with WordPress/Yoast)
2. Keyword analysis
3. Content writing
4. Getting backlinks
The SEO agency has been boasting about the backlinks they're getting us from their "partner" websites with high domain authority scores, and we know that backlinks are important for SEO. Maybe it's just us being used to medical journals and such, but the websites providing these backlinks look quite spammy to us. Does the value/importance of these backlinks justify the cost? Will Google's search algorithm changes announced yesterday render our SEO agency's questionable backlinks useless?
We're hesitant to contribute to the further deterioration of the web by engaging in questionable SEO practices, but we also want to ensure that we can reach potential patients effectively.
Additionally, it's difficult to prove the direct causality between the SEO efforts and increased traffic with concrete data. While we've seen an increase in visitors since working with the agency, we're not sure if it's due to their SEO work or our other PR and awareness marketing efforts.
We're considering handling the technical SEO ourselves and hiring a competent freelance content writer to create blog posts. We have a unique position and knowledge in the field, such as long-term efficacy papers. It's not easy to turn those papers into easy-to-read blog posts, and our SEO agency has been doing a surprisingly good job. But if original content writing is the most important part, wouldn't it be better to hire a freelance writer than an SEO agency doing a good-but-not-great job at writing with questionable backlink services?
What would you recommend we do in this situation? Is it worth investing in an external SEO agency, or are there better alternatives? Are there solid, preferably open-source tools that will allow use to see the impact/ROI of the SEO efforts more clearly than just the vanity metrics we see in Google Analytics?"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"Ask HN: Is it worth paying $6k/month for an SEO agency?"}},"_tags":["story","author_qax","story_39638177","ask_hn"],"author":"qax","children":[39638189,39638315,39638685,39638782,39641489,39642021,39644630,39648588,39650061,39650096,39650390,39652277,39665777],"created_at":"2024-03-08T05:50:47Z","created_at_i":1709877047,"num_comments":36,"objectID":"39638177","points":12,"story_id":39638177,"story_text":"I'm part of an offline healthcare provider specializing in a procedure pioneered by our founding doctors. For the past six months, we've been paying an SEO agency $6,000 per month to increase awareness of this new procedure and help reach more patients. However, we're not sure if it's worth the investment. (We've looked at other SEO agencies, and the minimum cost seems to be around $3,000 per month.)
From what we've observed, SEO agencies seem to focus on 3-4 main areas:
1. On-page optimization (HTML/JS improvements which our team can handle with WordPress/Yoast)
2. Keyword analysis
3. Content writing
4. Getting backlinks
The SEO agency has been boasting about the backlinks they're getting us from their "partner" websites with high domain authority scores, and we know that backlinks are important for SEO. Maybe it's just us being used to medical journals and such, but the websites providing these backlinks look quite spammy to us. Does the value/importance of these backlinks justify the cost? Will Google's search algorithm changes announced yesterday render our SEO agency's questionable backlinks useless?
We're hesitant to contribute to the further deterioration of the web by engaging in questionable SEO practices, but we also want to ensure that we can reach potential patients effectively.
Additionally, it's difficult to prove the direct causality between the SEO efforts and increased traffic with concrete data. While we've seen an increase in visitors since working with the agency, we're not sure if it's due to their SEO work or our other PR and awareness marketing efforts.
We're considering handling the technical SEO ourselves and hiring a competent freelance content writer to create blog posts. We have a unique position and knowledge in the field, such as long-term efficacy papers. It's not easy to turn those papers into easy-to-read blog posts, and our SEO agency has been doing a surprisingly good job. But if original content writing is the most important part, wouldn't it be better to hire a freelance writer than an SEO agency doing a good-but-not-great job at writing with questionable backlink services?
What would you recommend we do in this situation? Is it worth investing in an external SEO agency, or are there better alternatives? Are there solid, preferably open-source tools that will allow use to see the impact/ROI of the SEO efforts more clearly than just the vanity metrics we see in Google Analytics?","title":"Ask HN: Is it worth paying $6k/month for an SEO agency?","updated_at":"2024-09-20T16:36:31Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"franze"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"first: i will not comment on the actual findings teased in this blog post, because we miss lots of information, data and context (javascript to make rendering faster, was it really the first pageview that was faster or was this aimed at the second, client side rendering actually makes rendering of the first pageview slower (please, proof me wrong))
second: this is the way SEO should be done - a systematic analytics dev. dirven approach - and they solved one of the challenges big sites regularly face SEO wise: running multiple onpage (SEO is just one aspect) tests simultaneously over chunks of their sites.
most of the time you are stuck with setting a custom variable (or virtual tracker) in google analytics of the pages you changed (and a control group)\nthe issue with this approach is that GA only reports a sample of data (50 000 rows a day) and for big sites this sample becomes insignificant very fast, especially if you run tests.\nadditionally it's not easy to compare the traffic figures of the tracked page-group with log-data like crawling, so you need a custom built solution to connect these dots.
this leads us to a serious limitation of the GA and pinterest approach: connecting their data with google serp impressions, average rankings and clicks. yeah, traffic is the goal of SEO, but it is pretty late in the funnel, crawling is pretty early in the funnel, you can optimize everything in between. for the in between we are stuck with google webmaster tools for reliable data (at least it's data directly from google and not some third party). so to get most out of such tests you must set them up in a way that they traceable via google webmaster tools.
and to make something traceable in google webmaster tools basically means you have to sice and dice them via namespaces in the URL.
simple setup
www.example.com/ -> verify in google webmaster tools\n www.example.com/a/ -> verify in google webmaster tools to get data only for this segment\n www.example.com/b/ -> verify in google webmaster tools, ...\n ...\nthe issue there is that to have a control group you need basically move a comparable chunk of the site to a new namespace i.e. /z/ \nand site redirects are their own hassle but well on big sites most of the time are worth it. also you don't have to move millions of pages most of the time a sample on the scale of 50 000 pages is enough (p.s.: every (test) segment should of course have it's own sitemap.xml to get communicated / indexed data)
one more thing: doing positive result tests it actually quite hard - doing negative result tests is much easier. make a test group of pages slow, see how your traffic plumbles. make your titles duplicate, see your traffic plumble, ... yeah, these tests suck business wise, from an SEO and development point of view they are a lot of fun.
shameless plug: hey pinterest, check out my contacts on my profile. the goal of my company is to make all SEO agencies - including my own - redundant. we should do stuff."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"Demystifying SEO with experiments"},"story_url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"http://engineering.pinterest.com/post/109318939139/demystifying-seo-with-experiments"}},"_tags":["comment","author_franze","story_8955771"],"author":"franze","comment_text":"first: i will not comment on the actual findings teased in this blog post, because we miss lots of information, data and context (javascript to make rendering faster, was it really the first pageview that was faster or was this aimed at the second, client side rendering actually makes rendering of the first pageview slower (please, proof me wrong))
second: this is the way SEO should be done - a systematic analytics dev. dirven approach - and they solved one of the challenges big sites regularly face SEO wise: running multiple onpage (SEO is just one aspect) tests simultaneously over chunks of their sites.
most of the time you are stuck with setting a custom variable (or virtual tracker) in google analytics of the pages you changed (and a control group)\nthe issue with this approach is that GA only reports a sample of data (50 000 rows a day) and for big sites this sample becomes insignificant very fast, especially if you run tests.\nadditionally it's not easy to compare the traffic figures of the tracked page-group with log-data like crawling, so you need a custom built solution to connect these dots.
this leads us to a serious limitation of the GA and pinterest approach: connecting their data with google serp impressions, average rankings and clicks. yeah, traffic is the goal of SEO, but it is pretty late in the funnel, crawling is pretty early in the funnel, you can optimize everything in between. for the in between we are stuck with google webmaster tools for reliable data (at least it's data directly from google and not some third party). so to get most out of such tests you must set them up in a way that they traceable via google webmaster tools.
and to make something traceable in google webmaster tools basically means you have to sice and dice them via namespaces in the URL.
simple setup
www.example.com/ -> verify in google webmaster tools\n www.example.com/a/ -> verify in google webmaster tools to get data only for this segment\n www.example.com/b/ -> verify in google webmaster tools, ...\n ...\nthe issue there is that to have a control group you need basically move a comparable chunk of the site to a new namespace i.e. /z/ \nand site redirects are their own hassle but well on big sites most of the time are worth it. also you don't have to move millions of pages most of the time a sample on the scale of 50 000 pages is enough (p.s.: every (test) segment should of course have it's own sitemap.xml to get communicated / indexed data)
one more thing: doing positive result tests it actually quite hard - doing negative result tests is much easier. make a test group of pages slow, see how your traffic plumbles. make your titles duplicate, see your traffic plumble, ... yeah, these tests suck business wise, from an SEO and development point of view they are a lot of fun.
shameless plug: hey pinterest, check out my contacts on my profile. the goal of my company is to make all SEO agencies - including my own - redundant. we should do stuff.","created_at":"2015-01-28T07:38:27Z","created_at_i":1422430707,"objectID":"8958610","parent_id":8955771,"points":null,"story_id":8955771,"story_title":"Demystifying SEO with experiments","story_url":"http://engineering.pinterest.com/post/109318939139/demystifying-seo-with-experiments","updated_at":"2023-09-06T23:22:50Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"zenincognito"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents.
Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bring ton of revenue every day.
Ofcourse, Google is trying hard to monetize every little real estate but still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years.
The other aspect of this the "paid ads" also immensely valuable to advertisers. We have people spending 3 million dollars a month on paid ads returning 8X ROAS. Google & FB are still the most lucrative channels for ecommerce."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"As the public begins to believe Google isn\u2019t as useful, what happens to SEO?"},"story_url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results"}},"_tags":["comment","author_zenincognito","story_38097938"],"author":"zenincognito","children":[38106138,38106315,38106482,38106555,38106572,38106722,38106794,38106803,38106962,38107196],"comment_text":"SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents.
Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bring ton of revenue every day.
Ofcourse, Google is trying hard to monetize every little real estate but still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years.
The other aspect of this the "paid ads" also immensely valuable to advertisers. We have people spending 3 million dollars a month on paid ads returning 8X ROAS. Google & FB are still the most lucrative channels for ecommerce.","created_at":"2023-11-01T22:06:39Z","created_at_i":1698876399,"objectID":"38105987","parent_id":38097938,"story_id":38097938,"story_title":"As the public begins to believe Google isn\u2019t as useful, what happens to SEO?","story_url":"https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results","updated_at":"2024-09-20T15:31:50Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"sharkweek"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"I should clarify by saying I wouldn't bother hiring an SEO agency anymore - definitely not worth their billable rates. BUT, if I were a smaller company growing a marketing team I would definitely look for someone with a legitimate understanding of this as a marketing tactic, it's getting better but it is still the wild west in a lot of ways as well, so at least being able to monitor and interpret what is going on is ridiculously important. And if I'm a bigger company, I would hire at least two strict SEOs, one technical, one content."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_sharkweek","story_8972822"],"author":"sharkweek","children":[8973337,8973371],"comment_text":"I should clarify by saying I wouldn't bother hiring an SEO agency anymore - definitely not worth their billable rates. BUT, if I were a smaller company growing a marketing team I would definitely look for someone with a legitimate understanding of this as a marketing tactic, it's getting better but it is still the wild west in a lot of ways as well, so at least being able to monitor and interpret what is going on is ridiculously important. And if I'm a bigger company, I would hire at least two strict SEOs, one technical, one content.","created_at":"2015-01-30T18:00:10Z","created_at_i":1422640810,"objectID":"8973295","parent_id":8973246,"points":null,"story_id":8972822,"story_title":"Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?","updated_at":"2023-09-06T23:24:10Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"rlucas"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"There\u2019s a reason that works (sorta, mostly, and when it does).
The infrastructure of web navigation and search is foundationally built on textual, first party published content that enjoys some presumptions of good faith authorship: that it was written to be read, by a reader, and meant to be informative, persuasive/argumentative, or recreational/entertaining.
Think: journal articles, Usenet debates, faq compilations, RFCs, product spec sheets, forum postings, IRC logs, ur-blogs, even the original social media content types (tweets, wall posts, comments).
The cycles and epicycles of architecting atop this \u201creal\u201d content gives us mechanisms that reward and incentivize content produced neither for the ends of the writer writing nor any reader reading, but rather in service of manipulating search and driving ux patterns of various darkness.
All the good stuff on the internet is reborn in a spasm of returning to people creating content they care about for other people who care. Then eventually with success it gets polluted into shit with bots, seo, mass media and agencies, influencers, etc.
One silly rubric I use is: could this page / app / venue have been there in 1999? If so it\u2019s probably worth reading. If not, who knows.
(Of course there are cesspools that qualify too, like the chan world and certain subreddits, but there were cesspools in the early days of the web as well.)"},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"The internet is an SEO landfill"},"story_url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"https://docs.sendwithses.com/random-stuff/the-internet-is-an-seo-landfill"}},"_tags":["comment","author_rlucas","story_20256764"],"author":"rlucas","comment_text":"There\u2019s a reason that works (sorta, mostly, and when it does).
The infrastructure of web navigation and search is foundationally built on textual, first party published content that enjoys some presumptions of good faith authorship: that it was written to be read, by a reader, and meant to be informative, persuasive/argumentative, or recreational/entertaining.
Think: journal articles, Usenet debates, faq compilations, RFCs, product spec sheets, forum postings, IRC logs, ur-blogs, even the original social media content types (tweets, wall posts, comments).
The cycles and epicycles of architecting atop this \u201creal\u201d content gives us mechanisms that reward and incentivize content produced neither for the ends of the writer writing nor any reader reading, but rather in service of manipulating search and driving ux patterns of various darkness.
All the good stuff on the internet is reborn in a spasm of returning to people creating content they care about for other people who care. Then eventually with success it gets polluted into shit with bots, seo, mass media and agencies, influencers, etc.
One silly rubric I use is: could this page / app / venue have been there in 1999? If so it\u2019s probably worth reading. If not, who knows.
(Of course there are cesspools that qualify too, like the chan world and certain subreddits, but there were cesspools in the early days of the web as well.)","created_at":"2019-06-23T18:40:16Z","created_at_i":1561315216,"objectID":"20257753","parent_id":20257209,"story_id":20256764,"story_title":"The internet is an SEO landfill","story_url":"https://docs.sendwithses.com/random-stuff/the-internet-is-an-seo-landfill","updated_at":"2024-09-20T04:28:18Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"paulhauggis"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"It's all about risk. Many startups have either a non-existent or a non-proven business model. Why would they want to take the risk that they would never get paid?
A good friend of mine ran an SEO agency and had revenue-sharing relationships with a few companies. What ends up happening is that as soon as they start making real money, the company looks at the percentage of money the agency is getting as a liability (why should I be paying them this much??) and either wants to fire them (after the agency did all the work to get them the revenue) or pay them just a flat rate (which is typically much less than what the services are worth or what was being paid before).
So it's a lose-lose for the agency. It's much better just to charge for services."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Why Agencies Can't Do Rev-Share Deals with Startups"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rev-share-agencies-like-getting-married-first-date-melinda-byerley?trk=pulse_spock-articles&trk=hp-feed-article-title-share"}},"_tags":["comment","author_paulhauggis","story_9760559"],"author":"paulhauggis","children":[9761356],"comment_text":"It's all about risk. Many startups have either a non-existent or a non-proven business model. Why would they want to take the risk that they would never get paid?
A good friend of mine ran an SEO agency and had revenue-sharing relationships with a few companies. What ends up happening is that as soon as they start making real money, the company looks at the percentage of money the agency is getting as a liability (why should I be paying them this much??) and either wants to fire them (after the agency did all the work to get them the revenue) or pay them just a flat rate (which is typically much less than what the services are worth or what was being paid before).
So it's a lose-lose for the agency. It's much better just to charge for services.","created_at":"2015-06-22T19:52:30Z","created_at_i":1435002750,"objectID":"9760767","parent_id":9760559,"points":null,"story_id":9760559,"story_title":"Why Agencies Can't Do Rev-Share Deals with Startups","story_url":"https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rev-share-agencies-like-getting-married-first-date-melinda-byerley?trk=pulse_spock-articles&trk=hp-feed-article-title-share","updated_at":"2023-09-07T03:02:05Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Adaptive"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"None of my blogs are about online marketing. Was happy to leave it as a profession, even if I enjoyed it the years I was in it.
First, let me assure you that you do, in fact, have many of the prerequisites for successful marketing, even if some of the skills will have to be learned. The most important skill is clear, consistent communication.
Again, so easy to say but look at how many companies get at least part of that wrong. Some are unclear in the message (could be too much copywriting, poorly designed website or communication materials, etc.). Some, like Microsoft, are chronically inconsistent in message. Are they fun and hip (seinfeld)? Cutting edge? Appropriate for kids (the tedious ads with cute kids printing photos and claiming to be a PC)? Cheapest product out there (laptop hunter)? Millions spent on throwing darts at a map. Pick a strategy, stick with it. If you don't know your communications strategy, it is probably because you aren't entirely sure about your business strategy. Get the biz strategy right and the communication strategy follows.
A couple other thoughts:
1. Consistent communication. Again, probably obvious, but don't pull a Drop Box (love them, btw, and they are learning how to communicate as they go) and fall off the map for a couple months. Choose your channels (blog, twitter) and commit to posting regularly. Doesn't need to be long, should be relevant. Your customers and prospects are interested.
2. There are a lot of buzzwords and jargon in advertising/marketing/pr. A lot of it you can ignore. If you are going to work with an agency or outsourcer and they use buzzwords or jargon, make them explain everything in english. There are some useful concepts (branding--over used, misused but useful; positioning--very useful) that are worth knowing and exploring.
3. A lot of marketing is really and truly about market analysis. Spending a bit of time mapping out the market (even simple exercises like a quadrant analysis) can give you some feel for how customers look at your product in relation to other products in category.
4. Google is like gravity for internet marketing. Consider using ad words. You can cap costs, there are a ton of features for targeting ads, it's very flexible and you can box clever with it. The cost capping means you can experiment with low risk. Awesome.
5. If you aren't tracking it, don't spend money on it.
6. Stay away from banner ads and the like until later in the game. Easy to waste money there.
7. Can you target your audience on specific sites? Do those sites allow sponsorships?
8. New channels. Look into advertising in new places like twitter clients. Only if it's cheap, the cost is controlled, and the duration is capped. Don't get sold into a longer buy than you are comfortable with. Emphasize you want to experiment. This is down the road, but these new channels can be very effective. Again, depends on your audience and if they use those channels. You may brainstorm other ideas.
--------------------
As for books, most of the online marketing books I see flick past are out of date by the time they are published, or are targeting absolutely clueless old schoolers. It's still worth going way, way back in time and picking a copy of \"Positioning\". Good foundation, still relevant.
Blogs... I just culled my feed reader and nuked my marketing folder in its entirety. There's a decent list at:
http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2009/07/sites_where_i_l...
I've read a couple articles on that fellow's site before. He seems not insane and not too full of bs, but i haven't really delved into to that site either.
It's worth prowling around some of the SEO sites out there. SEO can be a black art but I tend to believe that much SEO hand waving is serious overthinking. I trust Google to do a decent job indexing my site if I build it properly. Make sure your copy is tight, relevant and hits the right words and phrases you want to be found on. Not rocket science. There are lots of other SEO techniques, but those basic tips get you 80% of the way there."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Good tutorials on non-spammy PR/Marketing"}},"_tags":["comment","author_Adaptive","story_720716"],"author":"Adaptive","comment_text":"None of my blogs are about online marketing. Was happy to leave it as a profession, even if I enjoyed it the years I was in it.
First, let me assure you that you do, in fact, have many of the prerequisites for successful marketing, even if some of the skills will have to be learned. The most important skill is clear, consistent communication.
Again, so easy to say but look at how many companies get at least part of that wrong. Some are unclear in the message (could be too much copywriting, poorly designed website or communication materials, etc.). Some, like Microsoft, are chronically inconsistent in message. Are they fun and hip (seinfeld)? Cutting edge? Appropriate for kids (the tedious ads with cute kids printing photos and claiming to be a PC)? Cheapest product out there (laptop hunter)? Millions spent on throwing darts at a map. Pick a strategy, stick with it. If you don't know your communications strategy, it is probably because you aren't entirely sure about your business strategy. Get the biz strategy right and the communication strategy follows.
A couple other thoughts:
1. Consistent communication. Again, probably obvious, but don't pull a Drop Box (love them, btw, and they are learning how to communicate as they go) and fall off the map for a couple months. Choose your channels (blog, twitter) and commit to posting regularly. Doesn't need to be long, should be relevant. Your customers and prospects are interested.
2. There are a lot of buzzwords and jargon in advertising/marketing/pr. A lot of it you can ignore. If you are going to work with an agency or outsourcer and they use buzzwords or jargon, make them explain everything in english. There are some useful concepts (branding--over used, misused but useful; positioning--very useful) that are worth knowing and exploring.
3. A lot of marketing is really and truly about market analysis. Spending a bit of time mapping out the market (even simple exercises like a quadrant analysis) can give you some feel for how customers look at your product in relation to other products in category.
4. Google is like gravity for internet marketing. Consider using ad words. You can cap costs, there are a ton of features for targeting ads, it's very flexible and you can box clever with it. The cost capping means you can experiment with low risk. Awesome.
5. If you aren't tracking it, don't spend money on it.
6. Stay away from banner ads and the like until later in the game. Easy to waste money there.
7. Can you target your audience on specific sites? Do those sites allow sponsorships?
8. New channels. Look into advertising in new places like twitter clients. Only if it's cheap, the cost is controlled, and the duration is capped. Don't get sold into a longer buy than you are comfortable with. Emphasize you want to experiment. This is down the road, but these new channels can be very effective. Again, depends on your audience and if they use those channels. You may brainstorm other ideas.
--------------------
As for books, most of the online marketing books I see flick past are out of date by the time they are published, or are targeting absolutely clueless old schoolers. It's still worth going way, way back in time and picking a copy of \"Positioning\". Good foundation, still relevant.
Blogs... I just culled my feed reader and nuked my marketing folder in its entirety. There's a decent list at:
http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2009/07/sites_where_i_l...
I've read a couple articles on that fellow's site before. He seems not insane and not too full of bs, but i haven't really delved into to that site either.
It's worth prowling around some of the SEO sites out there. SEO can be a black art but I tend to believe that much SEO hand waving is serious overthinking. I trust Google to do a decent job indexing my site if I build it properly. Make sure your copy is tight, relevant and hits the right words and phrases you want to be found on. Not rocket science. There are lots of other SEO techniques, but those basic tips get you 80% of the way there.","created_at":"2009-07-24T06:30:02Z","created_at_i":1248417002,"objectID":"721081","parent_id":721039,"story_id":720716,"story_title":"Ask HN: Good tutorials on non-spammy PR/Marketing","updated_at":"2024-09-19T16:38:37Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"shovel"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"I've never made a cold call but I've had 100% success with email in 2 scenarios:
1. I've just started a digital magazine with curated articles. I emailed 6 contributors (5 of whom had never heard of me) and just asked clearly and politely for permission to reprint their articles. I gave them the option to say yes or no. I used a similar flow for each but they were personal and focused on the reader.
2. I emailed the local Mac dealer to offer some webdev services (email marketing and SEO). Just as a test, really to validate cold email as a customer acquisition tactic. Again, it was all about the recipient. The polar opposite of the generic emails I get from Indian agencies every week.
There's a great I Love Marketing podcast that talks about a play they call "the cats whiskers". It's worth a listen if you plan to do cold emails. It's episode 24.
Actually, I just thought of a third -
My girlfriend is an artist and had gifted a painting to some friends for their wedding. They hung it prominently in their restaurant and had a few enquiries about it from their customers. They collected a few email addresses.
About a year later, my girlfriend decided to do a limited edition print run and sent 9 emails (just as a test really, to see if there'd be any takers).
Basically said "You saw my painting in Ord Ban. I'm doing a ltd edn print run. Send \u00a3100 to my paypal email if you'd like one". Next morning there was \u00a3700 in paypal which covered printing/shipping and a profit margin. Not 100% cold because the recipients had expressed an interest but there'd been no prior contact at all."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: how do cold calls/emails work for you?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_shovel","story_6662695"],"author":"shovel","children":[6664177],"comment_text":"I've never made a cold call but I've had 100% success with email in 2 scenarios:
1. I've just started a digital magazine with curated articles. I emailed 6 contributors (5 of whom had never heard of me) and just asked clearly and politely for permission to reprint their articles. I gave them the option to say yes or no. I used a similar flow for each but they were personal and focused on the reader.
2. I emailed the local Mac dealer to offer some webdev services (email marketing and SEO). Just as a test, really to validate cold email as a customer acquisition tactic. Again, it was all about the recipient. The polar opposite of the generic emails I get from Indian agencies every week.
There's a great I Love Marketing podcast that talks about a play they call "the cats whiskers". It's worth a listen if you plan to do cold emails. It's episode 24.
Actually, I just thought of a third -
My girlfriend is an artist and had gifted a painting to some friends for their wedding. They hung it prominently in their restaurant and had a few enquiries about it from their customers. They collected a few email addresses.
About a year later, my girlfriend decided to do a limited edition print run and sent 9 emails (just as a test really, to see if there'd be any takers).
Basically said "You saw my painting in Ord Ban. I'm doing a ltd edn print run. Send \u00a3100 to my paypal email if you'd like one". Next morning there was \u00a3700 in paypal which covered printing/shipping and a profit margin. Not 100% cold because the recipients had expressed an interest but there'd been no prior contact at all.","created_at":"2013-11-03T12:15:40Z","created_at_i":1383480940,"objectID":"6662939","parent_id":6662695,"points":null,"story_id":6662695,"story_title":"Ask HN: how do cold calls/emails work for you?","updated_at":"2023-09-06T22:34:39Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"viraptor"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"> However, we're not sure if it's worth the investment.
Regardless of what the agency provides, you really need to make sure you can answer that question. (And good SEO people should be able to show you those results)
On-page optimizations - have you got the before/after metrics?
Keyword analysis - have you got the click rates on the new / old keyword sets?
Content landing pages - do you know the click rates and monitor the contacts/signups coming in that way?
Backlinks - what's the traffic / result?
Maybe $6k brings you a good result? Maybe not? It's not too much if they bring you extra $1M in sales. It's too much if they don't make a difference. But only you can figure it out.
> more clearly than just the vanity metrics we see in Google Analytics?
Google analytics can be used for this. But you need to look at specific funnels, (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9327974?hl=en) submit specific click events to track, (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9322688?hl=en#zi...) etc. There's no magic tool that will make it easy though - you have to tag the pages / monitor what's happening properly. You can do it on your own too, but a good tool for exploration will help."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"Ask HN: Is it worth paying $6k/month for an SEO agency?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_viraptor","story_39638177"],"author":"viraptor","children":[39641494],"comment_text":"> However, we're not sure if it's worth the investment.
Regardless of what the agency provides, you really need to make sure you can answer that question. (And good SEO people should be able to show you those results)
On-page optimizations - have you got the before/after metrics?
Keyword analysis - have you got the click rates on the new / old keyword sets?
Content landing pages - do you know the click rates and monitor the contacts/signups coming in that way?
Backlinks - what's the traffic / result?
Maybe $6k brings you a good result? Maybe not? It's not too much if they bring you extra $1M in sales. It's too much if they don't make a difference. But only you can figure it out.
> more clearly than just the vanity metrics we see in Google Analytics?
Google analytics can be used for this. But you need to look at specific funnels, (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9327974?hl=en) submit specific click events to track, (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9322688?hl=en#zi...) etc. There's no magic tool that will make it easy though - you have to tag the pages / monitor what's happening properly. You can do it on your own too, but a good tool for exploration will help.","created_at":"2024-03-08T07:42:31Z","created_at_i":1709883751,"objectID":"39638782","parent_id":39638177,"story_id":39638177,"story_title":"Ask HN: Is it worth paying $6k/month for an SEO agency?","updated_at":"2024-09-20T16:36:31Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"pembrook"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"I agree with both you and OP.
That\u2019s why I\u2019ve completely changed my position on who should be using what tech to build sites. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
I now recommend clients three options, based on the type of business:
1) If they\u2019re a local small business (eg. Restaurant, flower shop) or solo creative business like a photographer or videographer, just do Squarespace. Wordpress is way too complex for their needs and they will easily shoot themselves in the foot.
2) If it\u2019s a Saas company, tech startup, design agency, or enterprise, I strongly strongly recommend Webflow for their marketing site even though they think they want JAMstack. When the marketing team starts pulling dev time to redesign parts of the site every week, they immediately will regret the JAMstack decision.
3) if it\u2019s a media/content business, always go Wordpress. Their employees will already be familiar with it, and the collaborative editing and SEO experience cannot be beat for publishing content on a daily basis. Combine this with plugins for newsletters and social integrations and the extra hassle of Wordpress is worth it for them."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"WordPress 18"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://ma.tt/2021/05/wordpress-18/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_pembrook","story_27311198"],"author":"pembrook","children":[27313814,27314290,27317463,27318228],"comment_text":"I agree with both you and OP.
That\u2019s why I\u2019ve completely changed my position on who should be using what tech to build sites. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
I now recommend clients three options, based on the type of business:
1) If they\u2019re a local small business (eg. Restaurant, flower shop) or solo creative business like a photographer or videographer, just do Squarespace. Wordpress is way too complex for their needs and they will easily shoot themselves in the foot.
2) If it\u2019s a Saas company, tech startup, design agency, or enterprise, I strongly strongly recommend Webflow for their marketing site even though they think they want JAMstack. When the marketing team starts pulling dev time to redesign parts of the site every week, they immediately will regret the JAMstack decision.
3) if it\u2019s a media/content business, always go Wordpress. Their employees will already be familiar with it, and the collaborative editing and SEO experience cannot be beat for publishing content on a daily basis. Combine this with plugins for newsletters and social integrations and the extra hassle of Wordpress is worth it for them.","created_at":"2021-05-28T10:36:57Z","created_at_i":1622198217,"objectID":"27313761","parent_id":27313631,"story_id":27311198,"story_title":"WordPress 18","story_url":"https://ma.tt/2021/05/wordpress-18/","updated_at":"2024-09-20T08:39:46Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"curryst"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"Not an Australian, but I don't find it entirely silly. Google delisting Australian news would be the inevitable outcome. It's worth almost nothing to them.
They're evening out the playing field. Google can shrug off Australian news, but they're going to have to think carefully about whether they're willing to turn off Search for a first world country.
One loophole I'm very curious about is Google creating their own news organization. Not even a news organization, really just a news licenser and republisher. They have access to everyone's Google searches. I would imagine they're capable of creating a piece of software that calculates how much they're paying to news organizations for what keyword searches, then automatically purchasing an article about that from another publisher that scores better for those keywords (putting them above the other publishers in the searches) and publishing it. Bonus points if they don't even pay for it, they have a human write an article summarizing the other articles, and run it through their scoring pipeline so the writer can tweak it until their SEO score is better than the other articles.
Then Australian news will really be screwed. Little money from Google, and even fewer clicks than they got before.
The one thing I do think was silly is making it adversarial. If you want news agencies to make more money, making Google pay to send them traffic is a bad way to go about that. They should have done something like introducing a tax on Google, and then refunding part of the tax when Google sends people to an Australian news site instead of a foreign one."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Could Google Really Leave Australia?"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55766429"}},"_tags":["comment","author_curryst","story_25873001"],"author":"curryst","children":[25880294,25880408],"comment_text":"Not an Australian, but I don't find it entirely silly. Google delisting Australian news would be the inevitable outcome. It's worth almost nothing to them.
They're evening out the playing field. Google can shrug off Australian news, but they're going to have to think carefully about whether they're willing to turn off Search for a first world country.
One loophole I'm very curious about is Google creating their own news organization. Not even a news organization, really just a news licenser and republisher. They have access to everyone's Google searches. I would imagine they're capable of creating a piece of software that calculates how much they're paying to news organizations for what keyword searches, then automatically purchasing an article about that from another publisher that scores better for those keywords (putting them above the other publishers in the searches) and publishing it. Bonus points if they don't even pay for it, they have a human write an article summarizing the other articles, and run it through their scoring pipeline so the writer can tweak it until their SEO score is better than the other articles.
Then Australian news will really be screwed. Little money from Google, and even fewer clicks than they got before.
The one thing I do think was silly is making it adversarial. If you want news agencies to make more money, making Google pay to send them traffic is a bad way to go about that. They should have done something like introducing a tax on Google, and then refunding part of the tax when Google sends people to an Australian news site instead of a foreign one.","created_at":"2021-01-23T03:04:23Z","created_at_i":1611371063,"objectID":"25879190","parent_id":25876349,"story_id":25873001,"story_title":"Could Google Really Leave Australia?","story_url":"https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55766429","updated_at":"2024-09-20T07:51:15Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"cookiecaper"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"I don't run a web agency and make 0 dollars from selling SEO.
This is not true. Google has been gamed for well over a decade.
On a past enterprise, I believed the lie "write good content and it will magically rank" and paid a content writer for about 9 months. She posted lengthy original content about 3 times per week, all highly relevant to the search terms we cared about. I did the same about once a week.
A competitor with a private blog network and professional spam apparatus started outranking us just with "link building", i.e., posting links on the PBN they controlled, within 1 month of launching (we had about 15 months of content at this point). They had no content on their site at all, just a landing page that included a few of the keywords they were using in their link building. There was no blog, there was no "well-written, honest content for humans".
Google had no qualms ranking them based on the link text despite their lack of supporting content. This competitor brutally beat us in organic search traffic until both businesses were shut down due to legal threats from a F500 cowering behind the CFAA.
Our blog is still online. There is no significant search traffic to speak of. While the content may have aged some, it's still the best resource for a lot of the things we posted about. It's buried pretty deep on Google's search.
Transparent spam and plagiarized content are easy for Google to detect, but private blog networks are a major component of modern SEO, as are several other non-organic schemes that Google has no simple algorithmic method to detect (barring slip-ups that make it obvious, though even in those cases, Google seems reluctant to punish domestic PBNs). I know of entire offices staffed with "link builders" whose entire job is to figure out how to get backlinks, and to be fair, "write really good original content" is somewhere on their list, but it's not very close to the top.
Just a counterpoint. "SEO" is still a thing. Google is a high-value target and it's worth a lot of money to game them. It is quite naive to believe that they're impervious to it. You can rank OK with "honest, well-written content for humans" as long as no professionals are competing with you."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_cookiecaper","story_16858053"],"author":"cookiecaper","children":[16860290,16861372,16861510,16861531],"comment_text":"I don't run a web agency and make 0 dollars from selling SEO.
This is not true. Google has been gamed for well over a decade.
On a past enterprise, I believed the lie "write good content and it will magically rank" and paid a content writer for about 9 months. She posted lengthy original content about 3 times per week, all highly relevant to the search terms we cared about. I did the same about once a week.
A competitor with a private blog network and professional spam apparatus started outranking us just with "link building", i.e., posting links on the PBN they controlled, within 1 month of launching (we had about 15 months of content at this point). They had no content on their site at all, just a landing page that included a few of the keywords they were using in their link building. There was no blog, there was no "well-written, honest content for humans".
Google had no qualms ranking them based on the link text despite their lack of supporting content. This competitor brutally beat us in organic search traffic until both businesses were shut down due to legal threats from a F500 cowering behind the CFAA.
Our blog is still online. There is no significant search traffic to speak of. While the content may have aged some, it's still the best resource for a lot of the things we posted about. It's buried pretty deep on Google's search.
Transparent spam and plagiarized content are easy for Google to detect, but private blog networks are a major component of modern SEO, as are several other non-organic schemes that Google has no simple algorithmic method to detect (barring slip-ups that make it obvious, though even in those cases, Google seems reluctant to punish domestic PBNs). I know of entire offices staffed with "link builders" whose entire job is to figure out how to get backlinks, and to be fair, "write really good original content" is somewhere on their list, but it's not very close to the top.
Just a counterpoint. "SEO" is still a thing. Google is a high-value target and it's worth a lot of money to game them. It is quite naive to believe that they're impervious to it. You can rank OK with "honest, well-written content for humans" as long as no professionals are competing with you.","created_at":"2018-04-17T16:52:58Z","created_at_i":1523983978,"objectID":"16860057","parent_id":16859715,"story_id":16858053,"story_title":"Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?","updated_at":"2024-09-20T02:21:55Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"spacetimeuser5"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo","agency","it"],"value":"While trying to buy some time to build my portfolio, I've got a (probably temporary) job as a bureau coordinator for a small translation agency. They want to grow their client base and want me to create a website for them. I am already managing their social media and Google business profile and as I had a litle experience in building a Wordpress site I plan to use "drag and drop" website creation tools provided by hostinger (Wordpress or developed by hosting provider), which include SEO (internal).
The competition in our city is pretty high, though much less in smaller towns. I generally have no experience in SEO, just know the basics and watched a bunch of random webinars and videos on the topic (also purchased some cheap Wordpress plugin to rank on google and never used it).
Recently I've got a call from a local ad agency, offering to create a full-pledged website with SEO, security etc and ensuring it to rank on the 1st page of Google search results in 2-3 weeks upon launch. They provided examples of websites ranking on google they created for other local businesses and generally have good rating. They say they also ensure backlinks for external SEO.
My agency is already using a local marketing provider with a monthly billing, which distributes the information across its publishers, which seem to help a lot.
Should my small agency buy into this offer? Apart from SEO, they also offer to create cookie policy and ensure security, which also were not part of my focus.
There's one thing that seems strange with SEO (at least on an abstract level). This ad agency puts a footnote at the bottom of every site they created with the link to their site, telling who has created the website. So I may suppose, if they create an SEO ranking website and our competitors will see it ranking on the first page of Google, they will see this footnote and may also want this ad agency to create such ranking website (which may be unlikely, but still a possibility). So when 10 websites operating in the same niche will rank on Google with the help of this ad agency, then there will be no place for my small agency to rank on the first page (or maybe they will rank for different keywords?)."},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth"],"value":"Ask HN: Is SEO worth to buy from an ad agency?"}},"_tags":["story","author_spacetimeuser5","story_38243244","ask_hn"],"author":"spacetimeuser5","children":[38244580,38306274],"created_at":"2023-11-12T19:18:52Z","created_at_i":1699816732,"num_comments":2,"objectID":"38243244","points":2,"story_id":38243244,"story_text":"While trying to buy some time to build my portfolio, I've got a (probably temporary) job as a bureau coordinator for a small translation agency. They want to grow their client base and want me to create a website for them. I am already managing their social media and Google business profile and as I had a litle experience in building a Wordpress site I plan to use "drag and drop" website creation tools provided by hostinger (Wordpress or developed by hosting provider), which include SEO (internal).
The competition in our city is pretty high, though much less in smaller towns. I generally have no experience in SEO, just know the basics and watched a bunch of random webinars and videos on the topic (also purchased some cheap Wordpress plugin to rank on google and never used it).
Recently I've got a call from a local ad agency, offering to create a full-pledged website with SEO, security etc and ensuring it to rank on the 1st page of Google search results in 2-3 weeks upon launch. They provided examples of websites ranking on google they created for other local businesses and generally have good rating. They say they also ensure backlinks for external SEO.
My agency is already using a local marketing provider with a monthly billing, which distributes the information across its publishers, which seem to help a lot.
Should my small agency buy into this offer? Apart from SEO, they also offer to create cookie policy and ensure security, which also were not part of my focus.
There's one thing that seems strange with SEO (at least on an abstract level). This ad agency puts a footnote at the bottom of every site they created with the link to their site, telling who has created the website. So I may suppose, if they create an SEO ranking website and our competitors will see it ranking on the first page of Google, they will see this footnote and may also want this ad agency to create such ranking website (which may be unlikely, but still a possibility). So when 10 websites operating in the same niche will rank on Google with the help of this ad agency, then there will be no place for my small agency to rank on the first page (or maybe they will rank for different keywords?).","title":"Ask HN: Is SEO worth to buy from an ad agency?","updated_at":"2024-09-20T15:37:38Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"wanda"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"
"anyone can do anything if they have \n the time to learn and the desire to do it."\nHell, all the information required (these days) is provided freely by Google itself. You can literally download an app which teaches you how to market your business on the web. You say you need the desire to learn SEO. Well, I think any CEO would find a desire to flip through Google Primer and some web pages about mobile-friendliness and content-quality if I told them it would save them thousands of dollars a month.
"either you've had a bad experience\n or you're just misinformed."\nI have sat in on meetings with "SEO experts" and "PPC specialists" with the exact purpose of calling them out on their bullshit, which I did on several occasions, because they were charging the company thousands/tens of thousands to do something that an intern could do, after perhaps a day or two's worth of training, and for less money. And an intern is a much better investment in the long term.
Sure, there are some honest SEO guys out there, but my point is that the honest SEO guys are not worth paying to do what your business should have or should be doing already \u2014 a good website and producing marketing ammunition, respectively.
SEO is something that should be an automated service by now."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"SEO Company CEO Contracts Murderers to Kill Competition, Client Exposes All"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://medium.com/@theplasticsurgeon/david-phillips-nkp-murderer-hn-66f19d89a341"}},"_tags":["comment","author_wanda","story_15338136"],"author":"wanda","comment_text":"
"anyone can do anything if they have \n the time to learn and the desire to do it."\nHell, all the information required (these days) is provided freely by Google itself. You can literally download an app which teaches you how to market your business on the web. You say you need the desire to learn SEO. Well, I think any CEO would find a desire to flip through Google Primer and some web pages about mobile-friendliness and content-quality if I told them it would save them thousands of dollars a month.
"either you've had a bad experience\n or you're just misinformed."\nI have sat in on meetings with "SEO experts" and "PPC specialists" with the exact purpose of calling them out on their bullshit, which I did on several occasions, because they were charging the company thousands/tens of thousands to do something that an intern could do, after perhaps a day or two's worth of training, and for less money. And an intern is a much better investment in the long term.
Sure, there are some honest SEO guys out there, but my point is that the honest SEO guys are not worth paying to do what your business should have or should be doing already \u2014 a good website and producing marketing ammunition, respectively.
SEO is something that should be an automated service by now.","created_at":"2017-09-27T07:40:19Z","created_at_i":1506498019,"objectID":"15345638","parent_id":15341372,"story_id":15338136,"story_title":"SEO Company CEO Contracts Murderers to Kill Competition, Client Exposes All","story_url":"https://medium.com/@theplasticsurgeon/david-phillips-nkp-murderer-hn-66f19d89a341","updated_at":"2024-09-20T01:25:27Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"puranjay"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"Exactly what I tell my startup friends. I know people who run design consulting firms and pull in $300-500k/year in profits. Some run SEO/SEM marketing agencies and do similar figures. They give themselves generous salaries and own nearly 80-90% of their businesses which, on paper, are worth $4-5M.
That's definitely very, very well-off, if not F-U rich. And it's very "safe", unless your $1M in revenue hinges entirely on one or two clients"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"How to get rich in tech"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://startupljackson.com/post/135800367395/how-to-get-rich-in-tech-guaranteed"}},"_tags":["comment","author_puranjay","story_10787283"],"author":"puranjay","children":[10788457,10789079],"comment_text":"Exactly what I tell my startup friends. I know people who run design consulting firms and pull in $300-500k/year in profits. Some run SEO/SEM marketing agencies and do similar figures. They give themselves generous salaries and own nearly 80-90% of their businesses which, on paper, are worth $4-5M.
That's definitely very, very well-off, if not F-U rich. And it's very "safe", unless your $1M in revenue hinges entirely on one or two clients","created_at":"2015-12-24T09:47:10Z","created_at_i":1450950430,"objectID":"10787684","parent_id":10787615,"story_id":10787283,"story_title":"How to get rich in tech","story_url":"http://startupljackson.com/post/135800367395/how-to-get-rich-in-tech-guaranteed","updated_at":"2024-09-19T22:40:00Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"RMWildly"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"I've tried to create resources like this in the past for internal use in agencies and also mentoring clients and I think the thing that makes it really tough is that for any of this kind of information to be actionable the would-be SEO needs to get a grip on the creative and strategic elements. For example - I always found it tough communicating to colleagues/clients that it's one thing seeing a particular keyword on Semrush/Ahrefs that they'd like to after - it's another having enough experience to work out if it's something that's worth their effort based on things like their domain authority/core web vitals - and then again knowing what to do to go after it in RE search intent and how to out-compete the existing results.
Then there's the extra tricky bit that the kind of people reading these types of articles are often going to be small business owners/entrepreneurs who aren't necessarily going to want to put the time and effort into the above.
I don't mean this is a criticism of the original article to be clear. It's my own experience of trying to create resources like this that readers would be able to pick up and use to drive traffic (and ultimately make money). This article goes after more of a glossary-style approach, which is still going to provide value - knowing the lingo is really important for the kind of people who will want this kind of resource, if nothing else to help them understand what they're talking about if it comes to dealing with external stakeholders or agencies etc without getting ripped off. It's an inherently difficult topic to be comprehensive about in a blog post - if it wasn't, there probably wouldn't be so many people making good money as full-time SEOs."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"Getting started with SEO: A guide for creators"},"story_url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["seo"],"value":"https://wobaka.com/blog/getting-started-with-seo-a-guide-for-creators/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_RMWildly","story_35243868"],"author":"RMWildly","comment_text":"I've tried to create resources like this in the past for internal use in agencies and also mentoring clients and I think the thing that makes it really tough is that for any of this kind of information to be actionable the would-be SEO needs to get a grip on the creative and strategic elements. For example - I always found it tough communicating to colleagues/clients that it's one thing seeing a particular keyword on Semrush/Ahrefs that they'd like to after - it's another having enough experience to work out if it's something that's worth their effort based on things like their domain authority/core web vitals - and then again knowing what to do to go after it in RE search intent and how to out-compete the existing results.
Then there's the extra tricky bit that the kind of people reading these types of articles are often going to be small business owners/entrepreneurs who aren't necessarily going to want to put the time and effort into the above.
I don't mean this is a criticism of the original article to be clear. It's my own experience of trying to create resources like this that readers would be able to pick up and use to drive traffic (and ultimately make money). This article goes after more of a glossary-style approach, which is still going to provide value - knowing the lingo is really important for the kind of people who will want this kind of resource, if nothing else to help them understand what they're talking about if it comes to dealing with external stakeholders or agencies etc without getting ripped off. It's an inherently difficult topic to be comprehensive about in a blog post - if it wasn't, there probably wouldn't be so many people making good money as full-time SEOs.","created_at":"2023-03-21T10:01:32Z","created_at_i":1679392892,"objectID":"35244302","parent_id":35243868,"story_id":35243868,"story_title":"Getting started with SEO: A guide for creators","story_url":"https://wobaka.com/blog/getting-started-with-seo-a-guide-for-creators/","updated_at":"2024-09-20T13:37:47Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"dcist"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"A lot of SEO and digital marketing agencies use SEMrush because it's an easy way to track keyword rankings for your clients and their competitors. SEMrush also generates reports for keyword rankings that are helpful to provide clients. I haven't used it in a few years but I found SEMrush to be a good tool and worth the cost if you have clients."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"SEMrush S-1"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1831840/000162828021003658/semrushforms-1.htm"}},"_tags":["comment","author_dcist","story_26318586"],"author":"dcist","comment_text":"A lot of SEO and digital marketing agencies use SEMrush because it's an easy way to track keyword rankings for your clients and their competitors. SEMrush also generates reports for keyword rankings that are helpful to provide clients. I haven't used it in a few years but I found SEMrush to be a good tool and worth the cost if you have clients.","created_at":"2021-03-02T22:44:25Z","created_at_i":1614725065,"objectID":"26322162","parent_id":26319390,"story_id":26318586,"story_title":"SEMrush S-1","story_url":"https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1831840/000162828021003658/semrushforms-1.htm","updated_at":"2024-09-20T08:01:26Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"hamburga"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["seo","agency","worth","it"],"value":"I'm a fan of Vitalik and his blog. He's the kind of next-level thinker who will accidentally re-discover or invent some key finding in economics on the pages of his blog.[1] I got to meet him and run a site that hosted some of his blog posts with Glen Weyl a few years ago. I was a frontend amateur, and the SEO for the site was totally crap, making it impossible to Google for the posts, but he was kind and forgiving with his feedback in person.
My two cents on the post: First of all, in my mind, the Andreessen "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" is such self-serving half-baked neoreactionary junk, that the only appropriate response is just to ignore it altogether. It seems not even worth commenting on. Or at least, if you're going to comment on it, you should just summarily dismiss it, like "yeah, of course VCs are excited about accelerating techno-capitalism because it serves their material interests, and let's not take their philosophical self-justification seriously."
Regarding the substance of the post:
> If we want a future that is both superintelligent and "human", one where human beings are not just pets, but actually retain meaningful agency over the world, then it feels like something like this is the most natural option.
This is on the one hand, totally common sense, and on the other hand, something that (I'd argue) is directly in conflict with the material interests of companies that create and use generative AI. They absolutely want you to outsource your thinking to the machines, to give up your agency. What will the organized forces of resistance to this look like?
[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/vitalik-buterin/"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"My techno-optimism"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html"}},"_tags":["comment","author_hamburga","story_38444929"],"author":"hamburga","children":[38448991],"comment_text":"I'm a fan of Vitalik and his blog. He's the kind of next-level thinker who will accidentally re-discover or invent some key finding in economics on the pages of his blog.[1] I got to meet him and run a site that hosted some of his blog posts with Glen Weyl a few years ago. I was a frontend amateur, and the SEO for the site was totally crap, making it impossible to Google for the posts, but he was kind and forgiving with his feedback in person.
My two cents on the post: First of all, in my mind, the Andreessen "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" is such self-serving half-baked neoreactionary junk, that the only appropriate response is just to ignore it altogether. It seems not even worth commenting on. Or at least, if you're going to comment on it, you should just summarily dismiss it, like "yeah, of course VCs are excited about accelerating techno-capitalism because it serves their material interests, and let's not take their philosophical self-justification seriously."
Regarding the substance of the post:
> If we want a future that is both superintelligent and "human", one where human beings are not just pets, but actually retain meaningful agency over the world, then it feels like something like this is the most natural option.
This is on the one hand, totally common sense, and on the other hand, something that (I'd argue) is directly in conflict with the material interests of companies that create and use generative AI. They absolutely want you to outsource your thinking to the machines, to give up your agency. What will the organized forces of resistance to this look like?
[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/vitalik-buterin/","created_at":"2023-11-28T17:41:13Z","created_at_i":1701193273,"objectID":"38448449","parent_id":38444929,"story_id":38444929,"story_title":"My techno-optimism","story_url":"https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html","updated_at":"2025-08-14T22:51:35Z"}],"hitsPerPage":20,"nbHits":35,"nbPages":2,"page":0,"params":"query=SEO+agency+worth+it&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":42,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"queue":3,"roundTrip":19},"afterFetch":{"format":{"highlighting":2,"total":2},"merge":{"mergeLoop":{"prepareNextHit":9,"total":9},"total":10},"total":10},"fetch":{"query":6,"scanning":24,"total":31},"total":42},"query":"SEO agency worth it","serverTimeMS":48}