On a phone meeting right now with an SEO company that a
client of mine wanted to hire. I'm not super excited to
work with them... I may have mentioned this before, but
since I'm on the phone and I don't have a brick wall to
bang my head against, I figured I'd phlog.
Here's a little story of a client-friend from a year or
so ago. This friend wanted to create a few websites to
sell his services, but didn't know how, so he came to
me. He needed some programming, and some slickness- I
am not a pro at both, if you ask me, but since he is a
friend I worked for free... so the project was a "Go."
We built out a few sites to meet his needs, and then the
non-productive nonsense started. He wanted to A/B test
everything, track everything, test everything, analyze
everything. He was so caught up in the analysis and
supposed perfection of everything, that he forgot that
you actually have to produce something before tracking
it matters at all. He couldn't get past the brain-
scrambling nonsense of "analytics" and into the realm
of actual production.
The client-friend never went live with his sites- which
were actually quite nice- and never got to see real benefit
from all the work we both put in.
Thankfully, the client that I'm on the phone with in this
SEO meeting right now has a solid product, a solid sales
and marketing strategy, and a solid established business.
Their SEO fixation is a little fear-driven (plus, they
respond more than they ought to spam) and market driven.
Mostly, it's a knee-jerk reaction to realities that they
don't necessarily want to face realistically.
So back to this meeting. It's almost entirely about
analytics and statistics. Actually, that's all they've
talked about so far. Sure, it's fascinating, but the
actual value is dubious. That is to say, the value when
not connected with actual production is dubious. Perhaps
if your workflow is such that your production is driven
by stats- and that strategy is effective- then fine.
But so far, nothing they've shared seems to be of any
value to me.
It will be interesting to see, in a few months, if their
outsourced SEO effort will produce any results. I tend
to mistrust companies like the one we're dealing with,
but I can't say that I've ever tried one... so I'm
basically prejudiced beyond reason. But, it's not my
company, and they're not my marketing dollars, and the
experiment is in motion.
