Chasing Google

Here is an email that arrived in my inbox recently, asking about hiring Search Engine Optimization firms, and my slightly longer than pithy answer:

Hello, I’ve been following the advice in your web redesign 2.0 book for several years now and absolutely love your stuff. But I need an opinion for a client and I don’t know who to turn to. I was hoping you could help me. She has asked me about using a company at ——–. Are these companies worth spending the money for to optimize her site? They seem very expensive. Any advice would be much appreciated. I consider you the ‘Goddess’ of web designs. Thanks in advance, Jo

Hi Jo,

Well, I am flattered and tickled. I spent the day with a sick kid. Being a goddess of anything other than pink eye is smile-worthy, but of web design? That makes it so much worth while.

As for your question, the person truly to ask would be Stephan Spencer. He is the god of search engine stuff in my book. But on the whole I can offer the following advice:

It depends.

I wish I could come out like gangbusters in the affirmative and say YES, GO FOR IT, but the truth is that you will spend a lot of time regardless chasing Google. So it really depends upon a lot of things — your budget, competition, and product. Doesn’t that kind of wrinkle everything?

I have a client who spent thousands on a SEO firm last year only to get absolutely zero advice on how to tap into web 2.0. She got a lot of old school lexicon and tagging advice though — very valid, but not the whole picture, and not very timely. So, worth the money? I don’t know. She is still chasing Google just as much. Her ranking has improved for some searches but not for others. She gets frustrated.

I always feel that a strategy is definitely better than stabbing in the dark. And without an expert (often in the form of one of those expensive SEO firms) validating a plan, or at the very least an expert consultant, then we would certainly be stabbing. And money is too tight these days to stab, for anyone.

Nevertheless, when you need to do something right, I always recommend recognizing when one is out of one’s area of expertise and bringing in a heavy hitter. For instance, I would never dream of doing my own taxes, or caulking my own tub. Clients who hire Waxcreative have for the most part acknowledged that they are experts in what they do, but not in web design. They ask us to sweat out the structure and details. So with SEO, I recommend expert advice. We have an expert we look to on a very regular basis. She “lives” in my iChat buddy list, no less. She has us experimenting with web 2.0 strategies along in the flickr, facebook and hubpages routes, but how successful we will be only time will tell. The plans seem to fit well with our clientele.

I just can’t tell you if the big expensive firm is the right one for your client, because… Well… It depends.

Best regards,
Emily