Subtitled: The SEO Hiring Oh-Oh!

It’s amazing when we see employers running job placement ads for SEO Specialists with 1-3 years of experience. We’re basically talking about companies that are willing to hire someone with very little experience or knowledge in terms of how to correctly implement and measure a search marketing solution.

Why Hire Someone Less Experienced?
So, why would an employer want to hire an SEO Specialist with only 1-3 years of  experience? Well, the likely answer is that they’re probably trying to save money. The reality though, is that hiring like this is likely going to cost that company more than just the savings that they think they’ll have. Little do they know, that they’ll see costs adding up due to lower productivity, additional expense for training, and most importantly, lost revenues due to the lack of knowledge of how to best implement, optimize and measure a search marketing effort.

Typical Skills for SEO Specialists with 1-3 Years of Experience
Here’s a list of skills that you’ll likely get for someone with 1-3 years of experience:

1. Knowledge that SEO is an extremely important facet of online marketing.
2. Knowledge that specific keywords have more of an impact in terms of search engine rankings.
3. Awareness that keywords placed in specific locations on a web page may have a positive impact on the overall ranking of the web page.
4. Inability to uncover new market opportunities through search marketing.
5. Lack of knowledge for how to identify keywords that are producing 80-90% of your online sales or leads.

Typical Skills for Someone with More than 3 Years of SEO Experience
Here’s what you’ll most likely get from someone with more than 3 years of SEO experience:

1. An experienced SEO Specialist who knows how to identify business goals and achieve bottom line results.
2. Someone who can quickly assess search marketing efforts and make solid recommendations and changes that will reach online marketing goals.
3. Knowledge of performance metrics with the ability to calculate a variety of conversions and return on investment measures.
4. Ability to uncover new markets and opportunities based on search traffic behavior.
5. Knowledge of the difference of marketing B2B compared to B2C.
6. Ability to identify and take advantage of search marketing opportunities created by inattentive competitors.

It’s easy to outline the differences, but what we’ve done is to take this one step further. We’re actually going to identify those areas that will produce a negative impact to your bottom line if you decide to hire a less experienced SEO Specialist. The numbers are somewhat arbitrary, but the impact is obvious.

You can see from the example above that the less experienced SEO Specialist will actually end up costing the company more as a result of lower productivity and lost online sales. Although these numbers appear arbitrary, they serve to illustrate that there is an impact to the bottom line which needs to be considered when it comes to hiring a less experienced SEO Specialist.

Obviously the choice is up to those companies that wish to save money. The reality is that you just can’t depend on someone with 1-3 years of experience to come walking through the door with an adequate understanding of SEO. Knowledge like this isn’t something taught in a classroom. Proper knowledge of SEO only comes from real world experience, and the more years of experience, the more likely you’ll find a SEO Specialist that you can depend on.

Most hand-held mobile device users realize how hard it is to search the internet. It’s slow and difficult depending on how many characters you need to use to find what you’re looking for. Yesterday, Google announced a search feature for U.S. mobile device users that will make searches with Google much easier on Android powered devices or iPhones.

With this feature, once you start typing a search term on your mobile device, Google will provide a list of search suggestions that match your entry. Most importantly, these search suggestions will be based on your location. This feature will reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to submit a search to get relevant search results. What they are basically doing is providing optimized search suggestions using your location.

For search marketers that rely on search traffic this is actually a very interesting announcement for a couple of reasons. For one, Google is basically adopting and implementing a business rule that assumes that Google searches on a Android powered device or iPhone should be more focused toward local listings.

Secondly, the impact to search rankings is an unknown at this point if your business is dependent on nationwide search traffic. The question is, how will these search suggestions impact search traffic to your web site? Obviously localized search suggestions will take precedence, but will your listing drop down in the rankings if you are not a local business or organization. 

Using the example in the Google Mobile Blog post about this feature, let’s say that you are a museum in Boston, but the search takes place in San Francisco. If the Google search suggestion feature is emphasizing local search phrases for museums in San Francisco, will it still be easy to find your museum if you’re located in Boston?

It may turn out that localized mobile search has no major impact to national search listings, but it’s still too early to tell. This is obviously something that should be monitored and considered when discussing search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for your company or organization in the near term.

Without much fanfare, on December 4th 2009 Google announced an update to Google Personalized Search. Although this didn’t attract much attention in the business world, it’s an important update that web site owners should be aware of. It’s a further indication of the direction that Google is moving in terms of their online search tools.

What is Personalized Search?
Google Personalized Search was first launched in 2005 (announcement). With Personalized Search, Google search results are more personalized to your specific interests, based on your prior search history. In effect, web sites that you had visited in the past, through a Google search, will show up higher in the rankings for a related search.

Prior to the latest update, personalized search was only available to those that were signed into their Google account. With the most recent update though, everyone’s Google search results will be personalized by default, although you can opt-out of this feature.

How Does Personalized Search Work?
Lets say that you’ve used Google Search in the past to find recipes for dinner. You’ve been able to find some great recipes on much lower ranked web sites, but now you can’t remember what they were. You do a Google Search, and lo and behold, the web sites that you had previously found now show up toward the top of the search results page. In essence, the search results page has been personalized based on your search history and location.

Each and every time that you do an online search with Google, your search keywords and the links that you clicked on are saved as your search history. Future searches on Google will refer to your search history so that your search results are more personalized to your interests.

How Does This Impact Web Site Owners?
Although Personalized Search is great for online users, this is not always the case for web site owners. The reason for this is that web sites are now ranked differently per each person. For example, your web site may show up at #1 for one person, but at #11 for a different person. The search listings will now be dependent on search history, location and more for ALL Google searches.

There’s not a great deal known in terms of what impact the Personalized Search update will have. Some of the early testing done does not show much difference yet. But the cookie that stores search history can keep up to 180 days of data, and so it may take more time to find out what the impact of this will be.

What Should Be Done Next?
In the meantime, there are some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) steps you can take to ensure that your web site is optimized as much as possible. These are a few of the best practices that you can do at this point in time. These are:

1. Ensure that your web site is using page titles that identify the overall topic or content of each web page. Use as few words as possible, but make sure that they are relevant to each web page.
2. Make sure that you are using the description meta tag. The meta description tag does not have an impact on your page ranking, but it does make a difference in terms of getting people to click on your listing in the search engine results page. Basically you want people to click on your listing because it will tell Google that your listing is more relevant than the others for that search term. This description should contain a description of features and benefits relevant to the page content.
3. If you rely on local business, make sure that your web page includes information about your location. This can be something as simple as a brief mention of “Serving the city of…” in the page footer.
4. If you don’t have a Social Media Marketing strategy in place, now would be a great time to get started. Make sure that your have at least a Facebook page for your company. Most importantly though, start creating a strategy to tap into the social networking world.

In addition to the steps above, you’ll want to have an SEO expert review your web site to make sure that your web site architecture, site maps, and other SEO related elements are in place and working correctly.

If you are a web site owner, keep a close eye on future changes to Google Personalized Search. This feature will likely change more often in the future and you’ll want to make sure that your web site is optimized and ranking as high as possible. You don’t want your web site to get lost in the Google Personalized Search results page shuffle.