I suppose it was inevitable. We were busy, we’d just acquired a couple of new clients and had been working hard to make sure that we covered off the set up correctly and we decided to rearrange to office as well. With all that was going on we completely missed the fact that we turned four.
When Aqueous first started we had big ambitions and plans to match but we soon discovered that even the bast laid plans need to change. And given that the industry we were working in was in a period of turmoil then we spent all day every day helping customers keep their bushinesses buoyant in a difficult digital environment.
Within weeks of us starting up Google started its changes, expanding on Google Suggest to launch Google Instant which started displaying search results as a query was being typed. SEO’s the world over nearly spontaneously combusted, only to realise that the impact was ultimately fairly small. What none of us knew at that time was the scale of changes about to hit the industry.
Over the past four years I’ve written tens of thousands of words about all that happened but with Panda dominating 2011 and Penguin dominating 2012 all our plans to expand got shelved in favour of helping existing customers stay afloat. And it worked; without exception they are all still here today.
The good news is that having seen these customers thought the ‘thin’ times they are sticking with us in the ‘thick’ times. Google updates are fewer and farther apart these days (although a new Panda update is due any day now) and the things that are important to getting a website to rank have refocused on what they once were; great content and good promotion. And we are growing again with more customers joining in the last two months.
So whilst we missed our birthday we’re not bothered that much. The warm feeling that we get from helping someone succeed online beats the warm feeling from cake every time.
