Do you make the search engines rock, rock?
There a lot of shitty SEO’s out there. The best way we can overcome the Snake Oil Salesmen image that has been created by everyone and their inept mother offering “SEO” services is to promote our positive impacts.
I feel that most of the search guys and gals I know and have worked with are exceptionally intelligent and honest entrepreneurs. We almost always leave a project waaaaay better than we found it.
So, on the heels of the Defensible Traffic meme, I want to create something around the notion of being Searchalicious. In the comments, I want you to talk about the project you are most proud of. The one where you might not have made the most money, but the one where your knowledge of search left a profound impact on somebody. I know even you greedy, Scorched Earth blackhatters have occasionally helped somebody get their Darfur Orphanage online.
It’s a free link and makes you look pretty, so do it. Do it!
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edit: thanks to Todd for reminding me to post my own Searchaliciousness. Sorry, I was in a hurry to publish before the Spurs game.
As usual, I tripped into my most benevolent work by originally trying to use it as business development. You see, my first instinct has always been to make cash first, apologize second, and treat myself right with the spoils of war third.
I started doing pro bono work around San Antonio under the auspices of loss leading my time for some hometown branding. In a city with 1.5 million people that are about 20 years behind the Internet, I figured there’d be no shortage of “helping”. And there wasn’t.
While I did generate some good business off of it, I found some really good neighbors and friends in that experience, too. Many of them now have substantially larger businesses from our efforts and it’s great to see these new friends with a stronger foundation in their chasing of the American Dream.
I also called Jason Calacanis a douchebag. It needed to be said.
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How have YOU been Searchalicious?
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One of my favorite search stories was getting the first company I worked for ranking for some network cabling related phrases - and getting all kinds of national leads to a small IT company in Michigan.
The other best part of that one was talking the owner out of spending $1k a month on yellow page ads for a few measely crappy leads per month, and moving it to PPC for targeted phrases and getting a dozen or so much BETTER leads for the same price.
The fact that the company still retains a lot of nice rankings years later is very cool as well.
I really enjoyed helping some mom and pop companies do well, and watching it make their business become a lot more successful strictly from SEO.
My first website that I tried to SEO was for a family friend who had a small recording studio on the Lower East Side. I got him ranking at #1 for just about any recording studio term you could think of (he was above Abbey Road, Hit Factory, etc).
It got to the point where we had to take the phone number off of the website and even the address due to the amount of people calling and even stopping by. See - it was just the one guy and he really didn’t like to work all that much (he was a musician/rock star at heart) or want to expand but I have never seen someone more impressed with the power of search engines as he was. It helped him grow his business immensely (to say the least) and later sell the studio for some nice coin.
In turn I got LOTS of business from record labels and clients (before I actually had a business)….
Funny, that, Chris - when I first started up I set up a deal with a new printing start-up - I would do link development to rank his site, and he would generate referrals by showing results to people he knew. The sandbox had just been applied and in those days it was a 3 month delay. So I told him the exact week his rankings would hit.
A few weeks after that date I contacted him. Sure, the rankings had hit, and he was so deluged with leadthat he couldn’t be bothered with the work, had jacked it all in, and taken up as a travelling karoake player instead.
I only got a couple of small leads from him, but they are still with me now. I also ended up with his website. So I guess in some way it worked out.
I helped a friend dominate for an import automotive industry and he proceeded to make bags of cash, and a huge name for himself, and then decided on vacationing to colombia and then peru and eventually became a huge cokehead. Great contribution .
A friend of mine started a high-end, women’s clothing site and I helped her with all the dev & seo for the site. It was only a couple months before she started ranking top 5 for pretty much all the clothing label keywords. She was getting so much business by that time that she couldn’t afford to buy enough inventory to keep up with demand. Needless to say she was quite impressed with search.
This was one of the first really big successes I had with search that I could claim 100% credit for, so I’ll always remember it. I also did everything for her for free so that felt good too, although it would’ve felt better (for my wallet) if I worked out some kind of commission deal with her.
At my first gig I got a lot of notoriety for bringing in tons more business for the company. One day a guy in tech. support approached me about helping him with his personal website. He offered to buy me lunch. I came armed with my basic set of instructions (titles, H1 tags, links, etc.)
It turned out he was looking for help putting up a memorial site about losing his infant daughter to disease. It really got to me, so I helped him promote it (as opposed to just giving him instructions).
He was really grateful to see the memory of his daughter out in the public eye. It made me feel good that I could do something that helped ease someone’s pain.
Searchalicious.
One of my favorite searchalicious stories is my 2000-2001 dominance of the word “crack”. I developed a website for a joke rap band named Crack Money Records, and for a long time when people searched for crack online, they usually found a bunch of crappy white boy rappers trying to pretend they are trying to pretend to be thugs.
Also, after growing up a bit…. funding a few billion dollars in loan volume was pretty searchalicious too I guess