LizWelsh.com

SEO Case Study — Madison, WI

LizWelsh.com takes Quigley Decks & Fence from no presence in Google to the very first page, very first result (in under one month).

In late December I was contacted by an Irish home improvement contractor based in Madison, Wisconsin, and serving greater southern Wisconsin. He had a website, but it was MIA in the search engines. His website was virtually invisible to potential customers searching for home improvement contractors in southern Wisconsin, a fence builder, or a deck builder, etc., on Google. In my research, I scrolled through to page 11 on Google searching for his site, to no avail.

The day after Christmas we met downtown at Espresso Royale. Over coffee I explained how I would research pertinent keywords for his industry and optimize every page of his website so that it would have a much better chance of showing up prominently in search engines.

One handshake later, I got to work on his site. I completed my work — which included an overhaul of his website copy as well as writing new title tags, meta description, and meta keywords (as well as some minor graphics work and analytics implementation) — on January 14.

Just shy of one month later, you couldn’t ask for better results. What’s more, the vast majority of competing sites that Quigley Decks & Fence shares the first page of Google with are directories of businesses. This is a huge edge over his competition.

A few example searches:

decks and fences southern wisconsin
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 1

home improvement contractor southern wisconsin
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 2

home improvement contractor cottage grove wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 3

home improvement contractor lake mills wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 5

home improvement contractor madison wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 8

home improvement contractor fitchburg wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 9

home improvement contractor middleton:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 9

Febreze Tactics

Other kids had lemonade stands. My “twin cousin” and I — at 8 years old both budding ambitious (not to mention shady) businesspeople — opened a laundry stand on the sidewalk in his upscale Los Alimitos neighborhood one summer. We thought we were very shrewd because we collected trusting neighbors’ laundry, and rather than wash it, we simply spritzed it with Febreze (or whatever the the ’80’s version of Febreze was). In no time at all, laundry was finished, folded, and returned to glowing customers who raved about how fresh their laundry smelled. We laughed all the way to our piggy banks.

The next morning none of our customers returned. Looking back, I believe that they probably realized the impossibility of laundry being washed and dried in 20 minutes and were simply indulging us for a day. But nevertheless we realized that our business model (cheating) had short-lived success. What would we do next? It wasn’t likely we’d be able to be as beguiling with a lemonade stand. Perhaps we could secretly make Crystal Light and sell it as bona fide lemonade, but of course that would be just as much work, so what was the point?

That was the beginning and the end of my unethical business practices. Unfortunately, in the SEO world, like anywhere else, there are still some 8-year-old laundry stand kids masquerading as professionals, practicing “Febreze” techniques and guaranteeing first-page results. Their tactics sometimes work–until Google catches on and blacklists the websites that have implemented their changes. These SEO’ers take shortcuts like placing unrelated keywords (like Paris Hilton) in their meta tags, alt text, or CSS layers. They stack keywords (like cheese cheese cheese cheese wisconsin cheese wisconsin cheese wisconsin cheese) to fake out search engines. They sardine-stuff sentences (sentences at their loosest definition) in alt text, or hide keywords in the content of the page–keywords so tiny and faint that you’d need your 5.75 power reading glasses to make them out. The list goes on and on: bait-and-switch spam, redirects, doorway pages, cloaking, cybersquatting, and more.

Fixing the devastating effects the above practices can have is time-consuming and expensive. Once a customer’s website disappears from the search engines for having been caught cheating, it’s unlikely these charlatan SEO’ers are going to get a lot of customer loyalty. So it’s on to the next block, to prey on some other unassuming website owner. But once word gets around, the game is up.

Of course, there’s always selling lemonade.

Cowboy boots and bubble tea? A Google AdWords game.

It began as most friendships do: all seafood, clogs, and ice parties. A few days later, naturally, we were drinking bubble tea under ice cube lights. Before long we were talking of cowboy boots and learning how to make gelato. Naturally, as friendships go, we spent endless hours talking of mini & toy labradoodles, liposuction photos, and guitar lesson scams.

It was like we had known each other all our lives, and could talk about anything, from lighthouses to ski resorts to Superman Tees (2 for $30).

Was it a bad sign when the subject of annoying ringtones came up? Wedding planning? Thinning brows? Ted Koppel? I’ll be awaiting my gmail inbox destiny.

It’s a fun exercise to notice what Google AdSense advertisers make of your conversations by way of their keyword-targeted advertising in gmail. From what I’ve seen, advertisers have a great deal to learn about more focused targeting when advertising via AdWords. The only ads that have applied throughout the course of my many email exchanges with this friend are ski resort ads and the tactful dearth of ads when our conversations turned to subjects dealing with, ahem, “making out” and “stalking.” For these conversations, the right-hand column of gmail was conspicuously, and thankfully, blank.

What I’m getting at is proof that while pay-per-click advertising is accessible, it can be deceptively straightforward. Companies would do well not to take matters into their own hands and waste their money with keywords or ad groups that display their ads to an audience that has no interest in their product. There is a huge difference in ad campaigns targeting searchers and targeting content areas, such as gmail or other websites containing content related to the terms in your ad. It’s not a one-ad-fits-all model. But the majority of companies still haven’t learned this. Professionals who have experience researching keywords and market trends, developing highly targeted keyword lists, and discerning between various display methods (content, search, email) and knowing how to go after each audience, are going to save companies time and money in the long run.