When the team were preparing their monthly reports recently, we were taken back by just how many of our customers are occupying top slots for the keywords that they are going after. Some of them have been top for such a long time, that it seems commonplace and others have just achieved that coveted number one slot after months of hard work on our part.
Seeing success after success as we reviewed the reports struck us that we simply hadn’t done much shouting about this to our customers or the wider world.
There are a number of different reasons for this:
The first and probably most obvious answer is that we simply don’t have time to crow about our successes, as we are busy getting on with the job. Customers pay us to optimise their sites and it’s not something you can do for five minutes and then forget about it. Our team are on customer sites day in day out looking for ways to improve the user experience, improve the page quality and ultimately improve the search engine rankings.
The second reason is that success is not an end point; it’s integrated into the journey. Talking to the team, the overarching view was that getting to number one is just a milestone and that the real success is staying there on an ongoing and consistent basis.
Not only that, but when they do achieve a consistent ranking for a particular keyword the attitude is one of ‘onto the next one’. Never satisfied with getting there the team are always looking for how to get all, not just some of the keywords ranking well.
The final reason is far more down to earth, namely that we never discuss our customers with anyone. We do know of a number of firms in our field who are forever shouting about which customers they have and how well they are doing, but our experience is that often when we check the customer in question is no longer with that firm. Not only that, the much-celebrated customer keyword positions have disappeared, usually shortly before the customer does as well.
Of course, it could well be us; we could be wrong. Perhaps it should be part of our own marketing to shout loudly about our successes whenever they occur, but that’s not built into our DNA. Our approach is far quieter, based more on the long term and built on getting success month in month out. Quietly successful is a better description of our ethos.
So if you care about getting to number one then by all means try the firms that shout the loudest, but don’t forget those of us who quietly get on and do the job well, week in week out. It’s likely that we are the ones who have the key ingredient your website is missing.
