April 18, 2008

Why confidentiality is important in SEO

by Brian Turner

One of the amazing claims you’ll read in some communities is that if SEO company is reputable, then they should be able to provide examples of client work.

I couldn’t disagree more strongly – any company providing such information is breaching the interests of client confidentiality, and doing so only in the interests of their sales team.

Some argue that if a SEO company is performing “whitehat” work then the information does not compromise client interests.

However, these days SEO has gone mainstream enough that the majority of competitors in any significant vertical have already applied basic search friendly methods to some degree.

In which case, the only thing keeping them ranking top is their competitive edge – which usually means good link development working synergising with good on-page work.

Providing examples of clients means providing easier access to that competitive edge – it’s not hard to reverse engineer any website’s link profile, or deeply analyse the relationship between content and content, links to content, links to links.

And that also means making it easier for potential competitors to more easily access that.

Competition in SEO

A problem is that many people just do not realise how competitive and dynamic major verticals are, and therefore how key retaining a competitive edge is.

This is probably because a number of people looking for “examples” are small businesses looking to rank for “glory” keywords which offer little in terms of sales or conversions, but help a webmaster feel smug because they are at least somewhere to be found on Google.

They therefore expect similar examples to be provided.

The trouble is, the only SEO companies that seek to deliver on glory keywords are not the sort of SEO company you should consider hiring.

Not only are they probably charging a premium on useless keywords, but additionally, the work they do could be either done by the client themselves just reading a few simple SEO articles, or else outsourced for a few dollars.

Such people need educating about the real purpose of SEO anyway – to provide a cost-effective sales channel that delivers relevant rankings, highly-targeted traffic, and strong conversion rates.

Would you give away competitive edge?

Of course, some may disagree with my opinion, so I’ll offer a direct challenge to anyone who disagrees:

To provide a key list of PPC keywords you are bidding on, and at what price you’re paying, in the comments below.

I’ll bet there should be no takers, because the people mostly looking for glory keywords have no real marketing plan anyway, and see PPC as a cost, not an investment, and SEO as a simple cheap way to make sales.

Anyone who does have a working PPC list which is delivering real results – which offer a competitive edge – would be insane to start publishing this around the net.

The reasons for not wanting to do that are entirely the same as for SEO.

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