One of the toughest challenges for a digital agency, after building an SEO proposition, is how to scale it. Being a human capital driven service, many good SEO agencies are borne out of a small pool of talent that embrace the medium and have the right skill set to capitalise on it. On the face of it then, it sounds rather straightforward to scale – just get more good people in to service the new clients as they flow in.

Are you trying to get too big?

The reason then, why this often doesn’t work as planned, would also appear to be quite logical – many new recruits to such businesses simply don’t reach the same standard as the founders, perhaps because the best people are already part of a successful company already, or they aren’t able to grasp the knowledge needed. There is some truth in this – SEO, being a relatively new industry, isn’t easy to recruit for – people with many years experience are in short supply while there are few educational alternatives for those without it.

Although good recruitment can help to overcome the problem, it usually needs to be backed up by a pretty good training proposition for new staff. Training SEOs can be harder than it sounds too – good SEO doesn’t just require a large amount of knowledge around a variety of subjects, but it also requires that the knowledge is up to date. As such most agency SEO training is done in-house, further draining away the time the talented staff have to spend on clients.

But recruiting and training staff is only half of the problem, and arguably the most solvable. A bigger problem could be successfully achieving scalability itself. In an effort to achieve scalability, economies of scale must be achieved to compensate for the almost inevitable dilution in talent. The few agencies that have grown beyond a few dozen staff have tried a variety of things to achieve this, from content networks & their own indexes of the web, to heavy automation of regular tasks like reporting. While the effectiveness of these particular strategies can of course vary, they all tend to have the side effect of making life for their new staff easier. And herein lies that deeper problem.

These SEO agencies that were good enough to achieve a good reputation and rapidly grow their client base typically didn’t have these luxuries when they started out – more likely, they probably had to make do with small budgets, a shortage of time, and basic resources. Such constraints, as with many creative industries provide an environment perfect for innovation. With severe constraints, it’s not just desirable to innovate – it’s essential. Without the need to innovate, it’s even more challenging to prevent a great proposition becoming stale and mediocre.

Despite this,  I have no doubt that there are many large and growing SEO agencies that provide excellent service to their clients, but I’m also equally convinced that smaller agencies have an often overlooked advantage over their larger peers – the creativity and innovative capacity of their staff can be a bigger asset than any automated system or content network.

For lots of people, writing in general is tough enough, but writing sales copy? Fugetaboutit!

As such I thought I’d share the typical approach which we use when approaching a copywriting project where the end game is to generate a response – e.g.  a sale, an enquiry, an email sign up etc.

Part One – The Copy Brief

Even if you’re not hiring a professional copywriter, taking the time to write a copy brief (even if it is for yourself) will allow you to gain a clear idea of what you’re trying to write, can help with internal buy in and will allow you to approach your writing in a systematic fashion – ultimately, a little spent up front here, can make the whole writing process quicker and easier. Here’s an example of the headings we use for when pulling together a copy brief here:

Company Name

Sector/Nature of the Business

The Job – Set out precisely what it is that you’re attempting to write – e.g. homepage copy for your website, a sales brochure, an email, a letter, a promotional leaflet etc, etc.

Audience – Who is this intended for?  Are there any special considerations in terms of technical knowledge, tone of voice etc?

How will it be consumed? - This is another key consideration – people consume media in different ways – e.g. they’ll typically spend more time reading a letter than a tube advert.

How ‘warm’ are your consumers likely to be? – For example, if someone’s already a customer, they’ll probably be ‘warmer’ to you, than a prospect who you are contacting for the very first time. Think about how this might impact how you construct your copy.

Key Objectives - What do you want people to do? Buy, sign up, enquire?

What are you selling - The products/services you want to sell.

Response Mechanics - How do you want people to respond? Call, email, complete a form?

Why should they respond? - This is key. What is your unique selling proposition? Why should your customers choose you over the competition? What are the benefits to them?

Barriers to entry - Think now about why people might not want to respond/buy/enquire? Note down all of the objections you can think of – you’ll need to tackle these later!

Offers - Detail any special offers which you’re running which you want to promote. Not running any offers? Well you might consider running something – typically it will uplift your response rate.

Tone of voice - This will largely be dictated by your audience, how warm they are and how your copy will be consumed – but it’s worth thinking about nonetheless.

Other mandatories for inclusion - What else must be included – e.g. testimonials, logos, details of awards/qualifications/affiliations/accreditations, telephone numbers, addresses, legal statements, terms and conditions etc.

Whilst this might seem like a pretty labour intensive process, you should now find that you have a much clearer idea of what you need to write, and the key things which you need to tackle. In part two I’ll talk you through how to structure your copy, plus offer some tips on how to make your sales copy more compelling, and ultimately, drive a better response.

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Yep, you read that correctly. Gravytrain are desperately seeking a PPC Ninja to look after our very varied client base. If you look a little like the picture to the left (laser beam eyes are desirable, but not essential) then read on:

Job Title: PPC Exec (with Ninja-like skillz)

Based: Our offices in Hampton Hill, TW12 1ND

Reporting to: SEM Team Manager

Duties & Responsibilities

1. Management of our client’s PPC campaigns.
2. Identify and analyse key metrics and assess the performance of campaigns, providing clients with written monthly reports
3. Day to day client liaison via phone / email / face to face
4. Keep up with industry news and developments
5. Represent the company at industry events / conferences
6. Create new business pitch documentation and attend pitches
7. Contribute to the company blog

Person Specification

Personality

A self-starter you will be driven, positive and focused on delivering high quality results for our clients.

Skills / Experience:

Essential:

1. A minimum of one year hands-on PPC experience gained either client or agency-side
2. Google adwords qualified
3. Excellent written and verbal communication skills
4. Strong analytical skills
5. A genuine passion for the web, online marketing and social media

Desirable:

1. University graduate
2. Be active within the online marketing community

Working Hours

Monday – Friday 9am – 5.30pm.

Salary

To £26k per annum depending on experience

Benefits

Private health care and subsidised gym membership & regular company evenings out

How to apply:

Applicants are invited to send their CV and covering letter via email directly to:

Hannah Smith – SEM Team Manager

hannah@gravytrain.co.uk

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About 12 years ago Google launched their search engine which would change the world of search radically. The basic principle was simple – instead of just relying on the data contained within a given web page, a formula called PageRank was used to determine how important the page was according to other websites. Although the actual algorithm has evolved a great deal since this time, the basic principle of incorporating other data from the web to assess the relative importance of a web page has only, if anything, increased.

Despite this, there are still many who will treat or describe SEO as a purely on-page technical exercise. Essentially they’re saying that high amounts of traffic can be recieved simply by tweaking various tags and attributes and strategically using keywords on one’s website. Whilst this can certainly help, and, in the case of some very niche keywords, raise rankings, this is sort of activity will not enable a website to compete on phrases where large amounts of traffic are available.

This situation partly explains why it’s possibly to get 10 radically different solutions for an SEO strategy with equally radical price differentials – many of the very cheap solutions are only optimising the on-page technical factors, which, according to industry experts are only around 15% of the algoirthm.

The explanation for this is very simple – there’s simply too much competition on the web. To demonstrate my point I’ll show you exactly how much competition there is for a big phrase. Here is a search on Google for the phrase “Car Insurance” :

Yes, that’s right – 35 million web pages seemingly competing on that result . Ok, so you’re probably thinking that most of those pages aren’t relevant at all, and this is where the clever SEO comes in. Not so.

If we use Google commands to search for the same phrase with that phrase in both the title and page URL (a very strong indicator that the web page is actively optimising for that phrase) we see that there are still a staggering 439,000 web pages in Google’s index. It doesn’t matter how advanced your software is, or how technically adept somebody may be, there’s simply no way you can do anything on-page that puts you head and shoulders over half a million results, because there isn’t a logical way for Google to determine which is the most relevant.

It would be rather like trying to pick 10 people to hire from 439,000 applicants based purely on the contents of their CV – they can *say* whatever they want on their CV – but it ain’t necessarily so – you’d definitely want to meet them, collect references and so on before hiring, right?

There is the also argument that on-page is fine if you’re not targeting super competitive phrases, but even for some less competitive terms you’ll need to do a lot more than tweak a few elements on-page.

There are many people who prop up the ‘tweak it and they’ll come’ theory – these include designers of wordpress plugins; £199 website optimisation ‘tools’;  lazy SEOs and those who simply don’t know any better. The sad thing is that it not only does it not work, but it could cost the business owner thousands of pounds of lost sales.

So, if you’re in the market for some SEO consultancy make sure you take a long hard look at those proposals. Ideally the activity proposed should comprise of:

1. Technical & on-page
2. Content creation (NB you may be able to save yourself some pennies if you’re willing (and able) to create the content yourself)
3. Link building

Oh, and bear in mind that great old adage – “pay peanuts… get monkeys”.

Earlier this year, Google announced that they were retiring the old Google Advertising Professionals Programme (GAP) that recognised search marketing individuals/agencies as competent and qualified to manage AdWords PPC campaigns on behalf of other clients. It has been replaced by the Google Certified Partner (GCP) Programme as of July 1, 2010.

To be qualified under GAP as a company/agency previously, you had to meet Google’s eligibility criteria, including qualification requirements for at least 2 individuals in a company. This has been changed to require companies to have at least 1 individual to have attained a pass in one of the advanced level qualifications, in addition to the ‘Fundamentals’ exam, which is similar to the previous GAP qualification.

Following the changes introduced, Gravytrain has recently become qualified as a Google Certified Partner by meeting the new requirements under the GCP Programme. You will find our brand-spanking-new certified status logo below and on our website homepage.

Gravytrain remains committed to providing clients with superior online marketing services and continues to keep up to date with developments in the market to deliver effective results.