Outsource SEO in 2013 [VIDEO]

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hello and welcome to our video today on how to outsource seo in 2013. I'm Chad Hill and I have Adam Stetzer here with me today.

Hey, good afternoon, Chad. We're talking to our viewers today who might want to outsource SEO in 2013 and they're wondering are things different? Are things changing? And of course they have, but we like to say sometimes the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It's a confusing topic. Google released a major algorithmic update just a few weeks ago. That's been all the chatter on the SEO rags-- talking about Penguin. Of course we've talked about Panda before. So I want to address this topic today and try to give our viewers some guidance.

If you're looking to outsource SEO, it can be confusing. What tactics are OK, what aren't, what does Google say you can do? How can we help out folks today and give them some guidelines?

Yeah, that's an excellent question and internally we've been-- we've coined the phrase Real SEO-- R-E-A-L SEO-- in order to help our team understand how seo outsource in general has changed given these recent updates and just where the industry's going. So let's break that down and talk about why these individual parts are important.

So the first thing that you always want to start with is research. And in doing research you want to identify the keywords that your audience is using and then try to figure out how you can best develop themes and content that actually answer the questions that your prospective audience is asking.

So at a minimum, this means good keyword research on the front-end of any SEO project. If you're really trying to figure things out the best thing to do is to run PPC with a real budget and actually try to figure out-- bringing people to their website, watch the behavior, see who converts, see what they're looking for. But that's often cost prohibitive so at a minimum when you're looking to outsource SEO, you want to make sure that keyword research is baked in up front. There's an analytical process to make sure you're not shooting in the dark.

Yeah absolutely. Now once you have that theme and the keywords that you're going to be talking about in your SEO and your online marketing, you now need to develop truly great content. So we talk about creating end user value. And in creating end user value you want to make sure that the information that you're creating, again answers the question the audience has, but does it in a way that's compelling and actually interesting to your end users.

So how that may differ from years passed is that in addition to your traditional written article that discusses a keyword or answers a topic, a question one has, you want to add in other things like infographics and videos. This video we're doing today is a good example. Or you can get into things like press releases again. Something that's been around for a while. But press releases, especially given some of the updates that Penguin has around making sure you're building your brand, you want to make sure that press releases are a great way to do that. So these are things you want to do to really create true end user value when you seo outsource in 2013.

Right and that's important as you interview companies you might be thinking of partnering with. Since they're doing things at scale I think one of the big dangers is they tend to commoditize the content creation process. And you want to pick a partner that doesn't do that because generally the quality of the content will go down.

So a couple standards to think about when you're interviewing partners is would I share this content myself? Would I tweet it myself? Is this something I'd want in an RSS feed that I might follow? Would I read this and learn something? If it doesn't pass those tests, it's a pretty good indication that it isn't the killer awesome content that Chad was just referencing which is exactly what you want your outsource seo partner to be creating for you.

Right, now once you have that awesome content, one of the things you want to make sure is that you actually tune that content for both the audience who's going to be reading it as well as making sure that it's going to be viewable and digestible by the search engines. So we call that content tuning.

And again for the audience, you want to make sure you're using well researched information, you want to have bullet points in your articles, heading titles, nice spacing, include graphics. And then for the search engines, you want to make sure that you have a title tag and a description tag and all the things that I think people usually start with, getting sort of caught up in what are the underlying tags here the search engines going to be looking for. What we're saying is actually that's kind of pretty far down the path as you're doing what we call again Real outsource SEO.

Yeah, that's a great point. A lot of people think of the tuning as the entirety of outsource SEO and I think that's born out of the old days when SEO outsource really meant fixing title tags on your website. But today outsourcing SEO means outsourcing a bit of your marketing real outsource SEO is real marketing as we've been articulating. So this part of tuning is part of a checklist. It needs to be done. Ask about it but I think our advice here is don't obsess over this part because it's actually relatively minor in the greater scheme of creating excellent content for outsource SEO marketing.

True because really as we get to this last point, this is what's most important. You need to figure out how you're going to then launch that content. And again we've adopted this methodology, this Real SEO methodology, which is research, end user value, analyze, and launch.

So in terms of launching it, you want to be looking for the best place to take that interesting information, that compelling information that you've created and put it so that again, it finds an audience but also can earn you links back to your website. So sometimes it makes sense to put that on your website-- so doing onsite blogging to keep your information fresh on your website.

But you definitely need to make sure that more often than not, you're looking for ways to find other places who could help syndicate your information which again is going to find an audience there as well as earn a link back to your website which helps improve your chances of ranking on search engines.

And this last step is critical. I mean everybody wants to come up with that great idea that would just sort of launch itself, right? Oh, think of something that will just go viral and wow, poof, it all just happens. But I guarantee that even the things that we see that you could say, wow, that was really viral, there was an excellent marketing and outsource SEO team, internet marketing team behind that that primed the pump and really set up the conditions for those things to spread.

The reality is there's so much competition but nothing spreads by itself. It needs marketing behind it. And again when you're interviewing firms that you might want to outsource SEO to in 2013 in particular with the level of competition we're seeing, the number of domains, you want to be asking these questions to see just how good they'll be at syndicating your stuff.