Early this year, I received a call from a comedian looking for help with his SEO. He was hoping that we’d do Search Engine Optimization on the phrase “Indian Comedian”, but didn’t think the price I quoted him made sense.
In the interest of proving the value of SEO, I wrote this page on Indian Comedians. And I haven’t thought about it very much since then.
But after writing about Louis CK this week (and Louis CK is certainly not an Indian Comedian), I started thinking about the ways our SEO efforts end up working and looked up what Google thinks of the page I wrote on Indian Comedians. Here’s the answer:
That’s right. My little story about Indian Comedians is the fifteenth best ranked page in the world for the phrase “Indian Comedians”. That guy should have hired us; his SEO ranking has actually dropped since our conversation.
That’s a testimony to the value of Search Engine Optimization, of course. But because I didn’t work very hard at the Indian Comedian thing, it speaks even louder to how long tail marketing works.
Long tail marketing is about getting return on your marketing efforts in small pieces. long tail is a long-term strategy, and in SEO, it works. I told you yesterday about the sudden spike in traffic to a story I wrote a couple of months ago about Facebook Timeline, and in the course of writing that piece I got a chance to talk about a few topics, all of which received measurable and immediate long tail marketing bumps as a result.
That was serendipitous, and I jumped on it—also a factor in long tail marketing. My writings on Louis CK? Ditto. My buddy Julien Smith? Yeah, he’s helped out the cause recently, too … and just wait until you see what he’s going to do for us next week.
I bring this up today not just to promote our SEO Services, of course. In my ongoing research on SEO, this week I tripped across a couple of pieces on the way Google sees Search Engine Optimization. Here, Google’s Matt Cutts is under discussion, being misquoted as saying that SEO doesn’t matter (watch the video you’ll find there; he doesn’t say that at all). I suspect that piece fed this one, though. And it’s a serious matter.
The more time that passes without you getting serious about Search Engine Optimization, the less chance you have of doing it successfully.
Specifically, the matter under discussion is that big companies have resources that small companies need to find innovative ways to combat. SEO and Long Tail Marketing are the answer. As I pointed out in my comment against that article:
As time goes on, the NATURE of how Google works will favor larger businesses. It isn’t that Google is specifically going after that, but that the (basic) formula for high search engine results, SEO techniques aside, is that you have to create content consistently, in volume, over time. And the larger you are, the better chance you have of doing that in a way that Google rewards.
Julien Smith, Louis CK, Facebook’s Timeline, and yes, even Indian Comedians are helping Answer Guy Central fight that war. And our clients could tell you: we’re winning. And that’s business change.
And speaking of the Long Tail and Search Engine Optimization, take a look at this piece on Google’s Secret Sauce. I wrote it over a year ago, and it’s still filling the funnel.
