Writing valuable informative content can be a pain in the rear, and so can convincing a business owner that the reason the companies site is not ranking well in Google for important keywords is simply because of, lack of content.

Previously I got a 6 month contract for a particular client who wanted to establish their companies presence online via paid and organic marketing. After plugging away tirelessly for about 3-4 months, the sites descriptive product pages were getting top 3 SERP’s on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This generated a good amount of traffic, and also a great amount of revenue for the company, I know because I got the praises.

For two very high search volume/ high conversion rate keyword phrases the site had page 1 SERPS on Yahoo and MSN, BUT for these same keywords, the site was fluctuating from page 7 to 10 on Google.

Four pages away from the top 30 results showed how much Google values content, but the client would hear none of this particular because the client had no marketing materials with content that could be integrated to the website. Instead of adding new content supporting the keyword phrases, the client who was driven by sales thought it was best to tweak the sites navigation, and also change the sites landing pages (initially, when I first started, this strategy worked).

It is said you can never go wrong if you listen to the boss, but as much as I tried to dissuade the client that these were not the best steps at this point in the process, and that implementing these steps would now hurt both PPC and Organic campaigns, the client pushed forth.

Tweaking the site led to more tweaking, and more tweaking, and a lot of lost time and no new content, and the contract was almost expired. Nothing but tweaking was accomplished for about a month, with no positive measurable results. Changing landing pages led to virtually hiding pages that were well indexed by Google, turned out to be very counterproductive, even affecting the PPC campaign to the point that out bidding competitors was pointless because the new pages had low click through rates and were showing up 3rd, even 4th in the sponsored results.

The clients intervention, ruined what would have been a good business relationship. This went from a simple problem, to a disaster.

Observing step four of the original post is a great way to avoid this sort of disaster waiting to happen. In fact, it is one of the first things I ask about now. Does the client have catalogs, brochures, newsletters, or any type of literature that can easily be implemented into the company website? If they don’t, run fast, run very fast, because if the company really cares about the life time value of a customer, they would have these marketing tools available!

Take care

Manish Pandey