Most SEO experts are still afraid to publish their success stories, with a few notable exceptions.
Many are simply unable to share their work even when it is successful. How can SEOs stop practicing “ghost optimization”?
Before we dive into this question, let’s look at the reasons for the ongoing secrecy and still prevailing negativity among SEO practitioners.
SEO horror stories, anyone?
One of the most popular SEO hashtags in the industry in recent years has been #seohorrorstories.
Why are SEO experts much more likely to share their horrible mistakes with the industry and their peers than their own success stories?
Is this the general prevailing negativity of society as a whole? Or do we have an internal problem that worsens the situation?
First, recent years have led to an endless, downward spiral of public debate. Diplomacy has given way to trolling.
When even presidents provoke people online for attention, how is everyone else supposed to be civil in everyday conversation?
Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have also exploited fear and anger.
Such “bad news” goes straight to our lizard brain and provokes fearful and angry reactions without consulting the parts of the brain responsible for logical thinking.
No wonder even within the relatively professional SEO industry, the discourse has degenerated into the realm of “OMG! Look at that nonsense! So stupid!”
I’m exaggerating a bit, but that’s the gist of most shares where #seohorrorstories are involved.
These are more than cautionary tales. It’s also a way to ridicule those reckless enough to be caught using outdated SEO tactics.
Perhaps the thought process is that when you can’t shine a light on their actual successes, highlight other people’s mistakes. In this way, they are indirectly seen in a better light by pure comparison.
Of course, this is just guesswork. The motivation behind the many horror stories can vary. In most cases, it won’t just be happy or malicious.
Get the daily newsletter search marketers trust.
‘Look at this random graph, please – the growth is stellar!’
There is also a compromise, anonymized “success stories” – where the claimed success cannot be fully assessed by peers.
Such stories seem to be the middle ground between failure and success stories. So what is the logic behind them, then?
You will find many social media posts shared by random graphs without any URL attached to them.
It’s usually an analytical screenshot that’s clumsily anonymized before publication. Ultimately, the stardom they show lacks any credibility.
I’m usually familiar with those who share such success stories, so I know they won’t lie.
In most cases, they also add as much context as possible without giving away any meaningful detail so you can’t track down the site they’re talking about.
What about industry outsiders and potential customers?
They have no idea who the people sharing the graphs are and how reliable the information is.
What is the purpose of sharing graphs without context?
Please note that #seohorrorstories are often anonymous. In this way, some limited peer review takes place within a very small circle. It’s better than nothing, right?
Are there any SEO hero stories?
Some of you may have noticed. I’ve been looking for SEO hero (as in superhero) stories for two months and have been pretty aggressive about it.
There were far fewer success stories than bad news from the SEO industry. Still, I was amazed that even the prospect of getting extra free publicity didn’t motivate many SEO companies, in-house SEOs, or SEO consultants to divulge their success stories or share their case studies with me.
I started a similar hashtag inspired by #seohorrorstories called #seoherostories to encourage the sharing of such positive examples, but it seemed like I was the only one using it.
Are SEO experts ashamed of their work or afraid to show it?
Given the SEO industry’s bad reputation over the past 25 years, it’s no wonder some people aren’t keen on being SEO practitioners.
Many SEOs still engage in unethical practices, which may be why they are ashamed to show what they do.
Still, others may simply be afraid. I researched the reasons behind this fear and here are the obvious ones.
Manual Google penalties
This is an age-old fear of SEO practitioners dating back to the early days. Sometimes coming out as an SEO practitioner – and mentioning the actual site you’re working on – was suicide for your project.
Even before the somewhat weird term “manual action” was introduced by Google, penalties have been known to hit out of the blue and after too much publicity for the work of SEO practitioners.
This fear is no longer reasonable. And as most people fear, it is quite irrational.
SEOs are not criminals and there is no need to hide in most cases.
‘Secret sauce’ copycats
Another, albeit more likely, scenario is that your competitors may steal your “secret sauce” and copy your SEO techniques.
While this is possible, it is important to realize who your online competitors are. Most SEOs will still say something like “businesses selling the same thing in the same area.”
The reality of Google SERPs or “SERP real estate” is that you are mainly competing against the web giants:
Would a competitor or colleague who happens to have a similar business to yours really hurt you that much by looking at your website’s SEO?
Anyone can also find your secret sauce using a tool like Semrush and easily find out about on-page and off-page SEO. So why hide your success from the general public?
Client-stealing competitors
The other fear related to the competition is that other SEOs may see who you work with and thus contact them and “steal your clients.”
People do this. I have had several clients alert me to such attempts over the years.
I don’t think I lost any clients that way. Why? Is it just because I’m such an expert?
Probably not. I was also a beginner at the time.
It is such a cunning practice that businessmen are not fond of offers made in that manner. If they are, you may be lucky to get rid of them.
Toxic clients often hurt you more than they help you financially. I had to learn that lesson the hard way over the years, trying to please everyone.
I think the common “reasons” above for not sharing SEO work are often irrational fears and traditions – just excuses.
A reasonable explanation for why someone doesn’t want to share the actual website address or their “star growth” chart is that it’s still a work in progress.
Many other parts of the project were far from ready for prime time, and it was not wise to share them too soon. I’ve only heard that rationale once, even when I asked many times.
NDA: The dreaded acronym
A common explanation for not publishing actual results or disclosing website addresses and client names is the typical non-disclosure agreement (NDA). It might as well be called a “gag order” as most SEO experts are required to keep quiet about their work.
Some popular search marketers, including John Doherty and Brendan Hufford, emphasized this point on LinkedIn.
For those in creative industries, it would be virtually impossible not to share their work or have to do it anonymously.
Imagine the following scenario if designers, architects and programmers were involved.
So why do we have to sign so many NDAs that prohibit us from showing our actual work, or even sometimes telling friends and families about it?
What’s with the high level of confidentiality? Are we secret agents?
Clients requiring SEOs not to talk about their projects may be due to one of the following reasons:
The usual logic is, of course, about “trade secrets”. But as mentioned above, many tools allow you to analyze the supposed secrets.
The bright side: 3 inspiring case studies that welcome peer review
Having talked so much about the problems surrounding the (lack of) success stories in the SEO industry, let’s focus on some actual case studies that inspired me this year.
Hopefully these SEO hero stories encourage you enough to follow in their footsteps.
Example 1: Missguided
Dogs and owners often become very similar, even by appearance. I am one and can tell you that it often happens “accidentally”.
But there’s an artistic photo series that takes it to the extreme, where dog owners and their pets dress up and get their hair done in the same style.
British SEO agency Rise at Seven made this the idea behind a very successful campaign:
As CEO Carrie Rose reports in her case study, the results have been more than impressive:
“865% increase in traffic to this part of the site year over year, 134,757 page views to be exact.”
She goes into detail to explain how it worked and what happened to make it such a success, so be sure to read the full case study.
Example 2: LiberEat
Olga Andrienko, known for her leadership role at Semrush, showcased the success story of LiberEat, made possible by Mich McClure and the team behind Hoojy.
“1000% organic traffic growth in 3 months”.
While this may sound too good to be true, especially given the approximate numbers, she goes to great lengths to highlight what happened, why and how in her extensive Twitter thread.
If that’s still not enough, check out the full-fledged case study with lots of screenshots, keyword examples and figures at Semrush.
Example 3: Unbeatable Blinds
The folks at Boom Online have a lot of case studies, but their campaign for Unbeatable Blinds made me feel good. It could be the artistic quality of the images they have shared as part of the campaign.
Although they didn’t divulge the numbers, the links they attracted speak volumes:
“The content was covered by a number of high-profile publications such as Design Taxi, Bored Panda, Line Today and The York Press among others.”
Given such attention from both popular blogs and local press, I’m sure the traffic and other metrics will follow suit.
How to get clients who are proud to work with you
As a writer, I do not offer ghostwriting services.
Ghostwriters tend to become invisible. Someone else gets credit for their work.
No one knows what they’ve done, so they can’t prove their expertise.
It’s pretty simple when it comes to writing.
Prospective clients usually tell you in advance that they are looking for a ghostwriter. You can simply ignore such offers unless your financial situation prohibits you from doing so.
With SEO services, it is much more difficult. No one will tell you they are looking for a “ghost optimizer”.
Often, after many discussions, and just short of signing a contract, you will receive a cryptic NDA full of legal information intended to hide its true scope.
In other cases, you get an NDA, or they don’t talk to you at all. Either way, you risk losing a lot of time and money and not getting the customer.
Some NDAs are intended to protect trade secrets. Nevertheless, most of them usually give extensive powers to the client to prohibit you from disclosing much of anything.
No wonder people working in SEO and related industries (think marketing or advertising) simply shut up in general so as not to break their contracts.
You never really know what’s going too far, so you play it safe by keeping quiet.
So what can you do to identify customers who are undermining your status as an industry expert?
You can prepare in advance, be clear during the initial conversations and be firm when you start work. Below are four specific tips.
Work on your own projects first
Always work on your projects first, or at least keep them in the background.
When you have independent sources of income and ways to gain status outside of client work, you can be confident when you choose to engage with others.
Having to work for third parties out of necessity is never a good place to be.
Whenever possible, work for others because you love the challenge and variety, not because you need the money. Ideally, clients seek you out because they love your personal projects.
Build your authority in the industry and beyond
Visibility is not limited to client work. Many practitioners attend conferences, fairs or meetings to meet and teach others what they know.
Some collect knowledge and keep it to themselves so that no one can “steal their ideas”. This is a short-term approach.
Ideas can be discovered by more than one person at any given time. But whoever publishes it first or makes it more widespread is usually credited with the “invention”.
It is crucial to become an authority within your industry, and outside the narrow field in which you specialize.
When I started with SEO, I made sure to keep branching out into broader but more popular areas like web development, marketing, and blogging.
SEO is often seen as just “technical SEO” and a small subset of actual search engine optimization, in my opinion. The number of people who are interested in what you are talking about is very small.
By sharing your knowledge, you enable those who are not familiar with your work to understand what you do.
Introverts can share and teach online. You don’t have to show up in person, shake hands and pat yourself on the back.
You can also network online with like-minded people. LinkedIn is the best option here.
Charge more for ‘ghost optimization’
A simple but powerful way to make a point is to charge more money for something more difficult or valuable.
Usually, ghostwriters are underpaid young writers who don’t have a name yet, so they are forced to write in the shadow of the bigger names. But once you’ve built a name for yourself, you have to be proud enough to charge accordingly.
Almost no one will think you are valuable as long as you take too little or are too shy.
The few in the know will be happy to exploit your expertise for low fees and keep quiet about your true worth in most cases.
Similarly, you need to make it clear that you will charge more for ghost services from the start.
Since “ghost optimization” is much more complex and riskier than just writing, it is even more important to charge the real value.
There are far fewer high-quality SEO practitioners out there, so don’t be afraid to get what you deserve.
Flatly refuse to do the dirty work
After working with a client for a while, some drop their masks or become more daring.
Others may become frustrated with the slow pace of SEO progress and demand that you do what your competitors are doing.
Risky tactics can get your domain banned or penalized, but in the short term, the results can look impressive.
Now you have to keep your integrity. How?
Flatly refuses to get his hands dirty and use questionable means for SEO.
The client feels safe because of the NDA, so they think they can get away with it. But SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Just because you don’t tell anyone you have to spam doesn’t mean it’s invisible.
As mentioned above, publicly available tools give you an X-ray of any website’s SEO.
Google also has human quality ratings and increasingly sophisticated algorithms to find the bad apples.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily those of Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
Tadeusz Szewczyk, also known as Tad Chef, is a professional blogger and SEO since 2004. Although based in Berlin, Germany, he has been covering blogs, social media and search for a global audience since 2006. In 2007, he launched his own blog – SEO 2.0 – and also published on a number of other marketing blogs since then. In recent years, he also wrote for the social media accounts of many clients. You can connect with Tad on LinkedIn and Twitter or visit his website and read his blog on social SEO.
The “golden rule” of SEO is: Understand your customers’ needs and create an SEO experience that satisfies those needs – from the search results listing, to the first impression the visitor gets when they land on the page, to the visitor’s ability to quickly and easily find the content she is looking for.
What are the 4 types of SEO?
Having cleared up the approaches to search engine optimization, we can now go over what the different types of SEO are.
- On-site SEO (on-site SEO) …
- Off-site SEO (off-site SEO) …
- Technical SEO. …
- Local SEO.
What are the main types of SEO? The three types of SEO are: On-page SEO – Everything on your website – Blogs, product copy, web copy. Off-page SEO – Anything that happens outside of your website that helps with your SEO strategy – backlinks. Technical SEO â anything done technically to improve search ranking â site indexing to help crawlers.
What are the 3 pillars of SEO?
The three pillars of SEO: Authority, relevance and experience.
What is the three pillars of SEO?
Instead, SEO is supported by three different pillars: discovery, relevance and authority. Make sure your website has these three forward-thinking SEO concepts in mind, and you’ll have a content marketing strategy that will increase your ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
What are the core principles of SEO?
Original, relevant and unique content on each page is a pillar of good SEO. Content length, structure and use of relevant keywords help search engines understand what your website should rank for. It is particularly important to pay attention to these areas regarding the content above the visible part of the website.
Why is SEO important for schools?
Why do schools need SEO? If your school invests in SEO, it will help your website appear in front of engaged and interested applicants immediately. SEO gives you the best opportunity to provide interested searchers with the information they are looking for at the moment they are looking for it.
Why is it important to learn SEO? SEO consists of several elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important. In short, SEO is essential because it makes your website more visible, which means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers.
Why is content SEO important?
Quality content helps you generate backlinks – One of the best SEO strategies is to get quality backlinks from high authority websites. For Google, high quality backlinks indicate credibility and trust. The more quality backlinks you have, the higher you are likely to rank on Google.
How important is SEO to content marketing?
It’s good for SEO Because your users aren’t the only ones reading your content, Google and other search engines also read your text to decide when your pages should appear in search results.
Is SEO really important for a content writer?
Both SEO and content writing are equally important and necessary to generate traffic. Original and enticing content will bring users to your website, while SEO tactics will allow it to rank on search engines.
Should SEO be in schools?
If your school wants to increase enrollment numbers or attract highly qualified faculty, search engine optimization will be essential in your marketing strategy.
What is SEO in school?
What does SEO for schools really mean? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of doing the right things on (and off) your school’s website so that the search engines decide that you are the best match for what a person is searching for.
Is SEO important in 2022?
Investing in search engine optimization (SEO) for your brand in 2022 is more than a necessity – it’s a priority. SEO increases your chances of ranking on the first page of search engine results and optimizes your website’s visibility.
What is the bad practice of SEO?
Irrelevant Keywords If your keywords are not related to your actual business, you will likely get higher bounce rates and this can backfire when it comes to your SEO ranking. You’re aiming to build authority, so anything you can do to really attract and retain customers should essentially be rewarded via a higher ranking.
What is a bad SEO practice? What is bad SEO? Practices that are unethical, outdated, or outside the bounds of Google’s webmaster guidelines are considered BAD, hence the term “bad SEO”. While SEO is all about optimizing your website for search engines, poor SEO can generate the opposite results.
Why search engine optimization is bad?
Outdated and unethical practices, as well as those that go against webmaster guidelines, are considered “bad” SEO. Using them can lead to being penalized by Google and other search engines, resulting in loss of search traffic and, more importantly, loss of revenue.
Is Search Engine Optimization a waste?
In a nutshell, the answer is no, but it’s also very dependent on your budget and goals as a company, which is a topic we’ll cover in a future post centered around finding the best SEO company vs. the cheapest.
Why people are afraid of SEO?
The fear that SEO is too complicated, technical, gimmicky and involves possible penalties are common misconceptions people new to SEO have. Once you’ve learned more about SEO yourself, you’ll be more comfortable and confident implementing your own strategy or working closely with an agency.
Which of the following is a bad practice when creating a keyword list?
Keyword Stuffing Google knows this too – and that’s why it penalizes those who try to stuff too many keywords into a piece of content. Keyword stuffing is exactly what it sounds like: adding tons of keywords to a piece of content in the interest of getting more page views and increasing Google rankings.
Is keyword stuffing unethical?
Keyword stuffing is considered an unethical SEO (search engine optimization) technique at best and an attack technique at worst. The practice is often used to drive traffic to fraudulent or malicious websites. Keyword stuffing in content is known as spamdexing.
What are good practices for selecting and placing keywords?
The best practice is to use keywords in at least a couple of subheadings. One of the most important places to optimize your SEO keyword usage is in your content. That’s because content is one of the best SEO ranking factors. But it’s important to get it right; bad keyword usage can actually hurt your search ranking.
What’s better than SEO?
With SEO, it can take months or even years for your business to start ranking on the first page of search engines. And this is why SEM is better for testing than SEO… Because you can instantly turn SEM paid ads on and off, it’s a great strategy for testing.
Is SEO still relevant in 2022? The fact that SEO works just fine even in 2022 as a method of delivering improved commercial results for business websites and their owners, combined with the need for continuous research into what works, makes it still relevant as a digital marketing method, but even more so as a valuable service and a rewarding…
What is replacing SEO?
Answer Engine optimization to replace search engine optimization.
How is SEO changing in 2022?
By 2022, expect SEO rankings to be more competitive in providing high-quality content that is useful to internet users. Content that only tries to fish for audiences by linking to unnecessary sources will not be effective as it is today.
Is SEO outdated?
SEO is still alive and well. It is as relevant today as it has ever been. If anything, it may even be more important. Today, 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search.
Is SEO or SEM better?
SEM has immediate results, while SEO takes time to ramp up. You also have the freedom to turn them on or off and adjust audiences if data shows that there is less traffic during a certain period of time. With SEO, it can take months or even years for your business to start ranking on the first page of search engines.
Is SEO or SEM more expensive?
The most obvious is that SEO is less expensive than SEM. Using SEM is also a faster way to achieve results than SEO, which can take months or even years to pay off. However, SEO usually has a higher return on investment (ROI) than SEM because it generates organic traffic that you don’t have to pay for.
Which is bigger SEO or SEM?
SEO is where you focus 100% on ranking in the organic results. SEM is when you use both SEO and PPC to get traffic from search engines. So yes, SEM is a broad term that includes SEO and PPC. Which means that SEO falls “under” the umbrella category of SEM.
On-page SEO, sometimes called on-site SEO, is the process of fine-tuning a page’s content, tags, and internal links to improve search visibility and increase traffic. In other words, it is a means of optimizing your website to help search engines understand your website better.