SEO: a client blogger perspective

- How else can one, without resorting to highly mediated analysis, obtain a concrete assessment of the quality of the work of the advertiser?
- So far, the SEO market is clearly not the market that faces the customer, so there is hardly anyone willing to develop such a technique - and without that it lives well.
(from discussion on forum.searchengines.ru )
Some time ago we decided to disturb the SEO-optimizers community a bit (for those who do not know, these people are professionally engaged in website promotion ).
We asked them a simple natural question: who can take up website promotion and how much it will take, if the criterion for evaluating the effectiveness of its work is not an increase in every TCI or visitors per day, but an increase in the number of targeted visitors . And they offered their own criteria for determining whether the target visitor or not.
We wrote on the main forum where SEO-optimizers discuss their problems far from ordinary mortal owners of small sites.

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Sometimes we have to make websites (let's say, for the sake of pleasure : yes, we code for food ), despite the fact that we work in a completely different business. There is an idea to put the production of sites on the stream - despite the fact that there is a significant pool of customers. From experience it is known that the customer will certainly ask:
- Can you promote my site ? It doesn't matter whether they themselves or through third parties, but can you? I am willing to pay the money .
This has to be answered with the most common phrases. After all, it is no secret that many firms engaged in promotion are playing a game ... well, let's say, not quite honestly.
We are well aware that the customer, in fact, does not care what his site will have Google PageRank, what place it will occupy in search engine selections, etc. Because it is not an end in itself . The goal is the ability of the site to promote products / services (or, in our case, the ability to convey the content of the blog to people interested in its subject matter).
Also, we are well aware that this ability, by and large, is not calculated only on the basis of the number of users involved: a lot of the most common, “non-Internet” factors, such as price, product properties, and even feed, affect a visitor to the site. material.
The success factor for site promotion for the customer will be the following value - the number of visitors per day with a session session of at least as many minutes . In this case, the firm-distributor must ensure that this quantity will not be below the nth level for a certain time (for example, a year).
That is, if a person came to the site and at least looked through it, “clicked”, it would mean the target visitor. And the fact that he has not bought anything will only indicate that the offer is unacceptable to the user (for example, there are more profitable or more beautifully presented), but not that the user is inappropriate.
Potential customers of such a company-advertiser can be people like us, blogger- grafomany, amusing their vanity in their spare time. And we, for example, would be damn nice if our posts did not “lay down on the table”, but were read by a large number of people.
We have barely enough time to write posts from time to time (but fairly regularly) - and certainly there’s not enough to do serious promotion and SEO optimization there. However, we are ready to pay a certain amount of money to ensure that we are provided with a constant stream of readers (and not just visitors who will drop in and leave immediately without looking at least a couple of pages).
That is, people like us want someone to call an organization, which (of course, speculative and discussed):

• for an average average income acceptable to a private person , it will provide, say, a thousand blog visitors per day (the amount and everything else is discussed) for, say, a year,
• who make at least one internal transition ,
• despite the fact that it will be completed no earlier than, say, 5 minutes after the opening of our site .

At the same time, we pledge to post , say, at least three or four articles per month, and the posts will not be in the style of “today I have a bad mood - I will go to drink tea with bergamot”, and these will be complete articles (or cycles of articles) revealing a certain topic (s).
We would not like other obligations to this organization, since a blog is, one might say, entertainment. And restrictions in entertainment make entertainment meaningless.
We offered this parameter to assess precisely from the point of view of a small customer, and not an SEO specialist. It may be worthwhile to suggest some other, more adequate parameter - but which one ?
We would also not like the promotion to be carried out by “bad” methods like search spam , since our site requires long-term “prosperity” and doesn’t want to get into the black lists and become a spammer at the end of the contract with the advertiser.
The small shops for which we made websites are similar to us in that they also do not want, or rather, are not able to focus their work on promotion , to delve into the values ​​and terms, etc. They want to give money and forget about promotion . Instead, they want the benefits described above.
In the amount of profit, the merit of site promotion may not be so great (although there are exceptions). And I want to evaluate the effectiveness clearly. That is to fully share the responsibility for this very profit between:

• a spinner;
• webmaster;
• marketer;
• price and quality of goods.

And here is an indicator of the presence of visitors who really need the information posted on the site , and it is precisely the responsibility of the advertiser from the rest of the chain.
So, questions for reflection:

• Is it possible at present to meet such needs - or is it an empty illusion?
• How much can a blog promotion, similar to our style , theme and quality of content, cost?
• What organizations would be willing to take on such promotion?
• what methods would they produce such promotion?

That is, we want to understand whether it is worth getting involved in promotion . We are not going to make a profit from our blog. Therefore, I do not want to invest in significant amounts in the blog. (Weekly income from SAPE in the amount of $ 12 per week, which is used to pay for hosting, traffic, etc., is not taken into account.)
A small site (for example, a coffee house site) is also small in content, small in attendance, and it does not need any exorbitant values, as well as sharp peaks in the graphs. You just need to regularly go to him people - that's all. The owner of the coffee house is well aware that a serious promotion needs nemerenno money, but to invest 200-400 dollars a year in a year and see that it is possible to go to his website regularly, but regularly, he is ready.
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And we began to respond. The entire forum thread is here , we only give an analysis of the answers of SEO optimizers.

• An organization that could complete the task was difficult for the community to name.
• We were told that 3-4 articles per month is very small for a thousand visits (although it seemed to us that a small number of carefully written subject articles are much better than ten meaningless posts per day).
• The proposed method of evaluating the effectiveness of the campaign caused sincere surprise. The arguments were different: someone said that the user has nothing to do on the site for 5 minutes. Others expressed doubts about the technical ability to accurately track the time spent on the site: a normal user will load the page and read it offline for hours.

One more answer is given almost entirely:
SEO (Search Engines Optimization) for blog promotion is not very effective. That is, of course, it can also be used, especially if the blog is thematic, but as a second method.
For blogs, SMO (Social Media Optimization) is much more suitable. To achieve 1000 visits per day, you should obviously have more content than a few articles per day, and these articles should be interesting.
If you have a budget of 200-400 dollars a year, then I am afraid you will not attract anyone with such money. Try to do something yourself. Community on this topic community.livejournal.com/smo_ru . There sheller, I ( count ) and other members of the community will give you advice and recommendations on how to promote a specific blog.
If you are really constantly engaged in the project, then it takes a lot of time, and nobody will do it for $ 200 a year.
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In general, from the responses of users, we concluded that our aspirations are empty illusions.
True, if you are a techie, then there is a good way out for you - posts on Habrahabr . Target audience and lively discussions are provided to you.
As an experiment , an account was registered there and posts were published ( here and here ) on near-IT topics. The expectations were completely justified. It is a pity that on this service posts on free topics are inappropriate (and I don’t feel like descending to the level of bergamot mail blogs , with all due respect to their individual authors).
As another experiment, we used SAPE to promote one of the posts . The results are more controversial, but this post is sought very, very well.
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We made the following conclusion for ourselves: graphomaniac bloggers and owners of small sites will have to either donate money that is incommensurable with the result for promotion, or wait until the muddy water of the SEO-market doesn’t brighten (see illustration).