What can the optimizer do that no one else can do?

Rand Fishkin is known not only as one of the founding fathers of Moz.com. His charismatic posts and video performances, coupled with extraordinary memorable appearance, are not only useful for industry professionals, but also very entertaining. Today, with the support of the analytical department of the ALTWeb Group and the SERPClick project team, we are pleased to present the translation of one of his posts, which appeared on the Moz blog in February of this (2014) year. This is a post-answer to the question "Do you need optimizers", after which you may change (or finally deteriorate) the opinion on the work of the optimizer?


Recently, I read an article by George Nielsen on SEJournal called “Why do we need optimizers at all now?”

The post caught my attention, because it is just about what arouses interest not only in me, but also in many of my colleagues in digital marketing. Now it is especially relevant, taking into account the recent changes in Google’s policy in the field of reference ranking, its new addiction to the brand as such, and questions of behavioral factors (in particular, compliance with the user's intention). And since my point of view is different from that of Mr. Nielsen, I decided to share it with you. This is how Nielsen begins his post:
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“Our“ secret technicians ”no longer work, and creative agencies, copywriters and public relations specialists consider us to be some kind of“ hackers ”in the marketing world.”

And this is how he ends it:

“Let the PR agencies continue to send press releases on the Internet and let the advertising agencies continue to create new campaigns to increase the brand's audience. And we need to continue what we do best: to connect with the most interested audience. ”

I agree with the opinion that other representatives of digital marketing often dislike optimizers themselves. Let's be frank, yes, quite a large number of optimizers turned out to be “zacked” by sending spam by mail, littering blog comments, stuffing texts with keywords. But I still can not give up the idea that what is best obtained by optimization specialists is “to establish contact with the most interested audience.” I think that if we consider optimization as finding ways to satisfy user requests in the field of interest to them, then optimizers should be held responsible for this work.

When I think about what set of skills is needed in order to carry out optimization, several possible ways of building this work come to mind. From my own experience I will say that the best optimizers are multitasking and professional marketers. They have a sufficient amount of knowledge about a large number of practices, which is combined with deep knowledge and personal experience in related disciplines, which also directly relate to optimization.

What can the optimizer do that no one else can?

1. Create a strategy to increase search traffic.

Strategy is not just a set of steps. This is a unique approach that must take into account the strengths and weaknesses of the company, as well as find “holes” in the competitive environment that can be filled. In order to succeed, you need experience, you need to know how other companies received or lost traffic from the search, and you also need an intuitive understanding of how behavioral factors, ranking signals and competition manifest themselves in your particular field.



2. Compilation, evaluation and improvement of the semantic core

What search queries lead users to your sales funnel? Which of them need to prioritize and in what order? How can we measure the success of a particular keyword ranking and traffic on it, given that Google no longer presents this information in the standard analytics package? The optimizer can give answers to these difficult questions and as a result get traffic and the result, expressed in the profits from it.

3. Optimization of sales funnels for visitors from search

Optimizers know how to turn people from search into subscribers, and search traffic into a source of income. With the help of correct triggers, grounding pages, you can make tangible edits to the site, which will lead to the fact that the interested audience will come for your product or service.

4. Determine the cause of recession or stagnation in search traffic.

By a sad coincidence, it was during the decline of referral traffic that marketing teams, other teams, and even the owners of the companies themselves turn to optimizers. In many cases, such a recession can be prevented if you have a professional expert or an optimizing consulting firm, but I understand that in fact no one calls a plumber when the faucet does not flow.



Many of the best experts in the field of optimization, which I personally know, spend a huge amount of time solving problems related to the loss of traffic. Sanctions, technical errors, seasonality, change of behavioral factors, changes in the issue - this is a list of only a few factors that affect traffic. Understanding the reason and thinking out a strategy for its elimination can be a very difficult and time-consuming task.

5. Help in managing your reputation in issuing

If there are results of the issue in the issue that an individual or organization would not like to see there, a professional optimizer is perhaps the only specialist who can help here. Managing online reputation is one of the most difficult types of work in a business (and therefore one of the most expensive). However, the damage that information can do on the network can sometimes be much more tangible than any costs.

6. Audit the site (or group of sites) in order to find opportunities to improve search traffic

Sometimes the cause of [bad traffic] can be some kind of nonsense, such as a long page load time or an incorrectly chosen keyword that the header contradicts, or an incorrect XML file with a site map. In some other cases, the cause may be more complex issues, such as poor or non-original content, poor internal linking, or placement of AJAX-content inaccessible to the search robot, which will also lead to a loss of traffic to this content. The optimizer not only solves all the listed tasks, it can also find on the site all the big and small technical shortcomings, solve all the problems in order of importance, and also make the site and its pages as accessible as possible for both people and the search robot.

7. Get links, social cues and increased user activity in response to site content.

Those who were among the first to start using various tactics and promotion channels related to social networks, infographics, embedded widgets and content management were often optimizers. We are persistently looking for a methodology that would allow the message to spread further across the network, to obtain the necessary visibility, which, in turn, gives references, references and affects the ranking [for the better].

Today's digital marketing is a complex environment in which a professional optimizer knows how to correctly use dozens of channels and hundreds of tactics to attract the attention of the audience. Sometimes these tactics stun users and discredit SEO. However, optimization has never been one tactic.

I think if you could put together a few optimizers in one room, we could bring a dozen more difficult marketing tasks that no one else could solve for us. This is exactly what optimizers are really good at. From my own experience, I can say that solving these problems has not become any easier or less important in the past 15 years. Therefore, this area continues to grow fairly quickly, and optimization specialists often take pride in their achievements and strive to defend their professional pride, struggling with the sometimes simplistic and incomplete perception of our work.

PS I recognize that there are a lot of marketers who have in-depth knowledge and skills in the field of optimization, sufficient to solve the tasks, but do not call themselves optimizers. In this post, I still would like to mention them all as “professional optimizers” - wherever I have done it.