Website SEO Client Q&A

A thread of a recent email exchange from a new client asking questions about how Frondesk's SEO software works.

The Q&A below gives some pretty good answers about why SEO agencies are actually switching their clients over to Frontdesk and oursourcing their work to our experts. I've posted it here since these are exactly the kinds of questions that every business has around their own SEO efforts and how they can actually see what's going on. You can get a lot more insight an information in our website SEO software videos.

I've italicized the questions for clarity.

Laurie,
I will check out the login info later, thanks for setting us up.
Some more info regarding moving forward: Attached you will find some files with more info that is noted below. (Client sent Excel reports from the SEO agency they were using and asked us to take a look at them.)

Question: As to keyword research - You will notice they specialize in pre-existing health insurance coverage, these are the ideal / realistic terms we could target as trying to compete with "health insurance" I'm sure is not realistic.

Answer: Keyword research is of the the utmost importance as we've stated. Since this is time intensive and something of an art, without expending time it's difficult to asses where the 'bang for the buck' is that crosses the line between traffic (good) and competition (bad). However, there are always long-tail keywords that can be found in every niche. You're right that 'health insurance' is not going to be one of them.

If you're a local plumber, restaurant, or medical center the competition locally is probably not too great unless you're in a major metropolitan area, so keywords and phrases like 'plumber 84060' or 'plumber Jackson WY' that are pretty standard should work just fine.

That being said, we have very sophisticated programs that can analyze every competitor, every keyword, and every phrase to find where we can compete and where we should be expending time and resources. If we're asked to generate possible keyword lists we can go into real depth. Each keyword is a completely different campaign though. Getting to the top of the listings for 'pre existing health insurance' does not mean that we will rank for 'pre-existing health insurance'. For each keyword we will need to generate backlinks. That's why keyword selection is so critical, and why the cost to go after everything at once is usually prohibitive.

Note: 'Health insurance' is very deep water. It will take considerable time and cost to become a real player in this area. Since we can see that Yahoo only has something like 164 back links indexed to the site there's a long way to go. The good news is that we can show some real traction within the first few months. That being said this is a race that you have to continually run since all of your competitors are.
 
Question: As at 05-2010 - if you look at this backlink report - curious your opinion on if these can be considered back links in anyway. Also what is your overall opinion on the quality of this work, also compared to what your business plan will / can deliver.
 
Answer: The report provided is a general report in an Excel file. It's the way that most agencies work and they tell you that 'links exist'. Frontdesk differs in that you can see each and every task in real time and track everything that's done, and what the results are. We also offer individual keyword tracking so you can see where you rank for every keyword in real time. (I've included the video above.)

There's really not a comparison with our solution and the generic monthly Excel spreadsheets when it comes to reporting.
 
Question: Regarding the client I already signed up with. If you view - BV Monthly Report as at 04-2010 - these are some good keywords the client wants to target locally. My question is within your system, how do we distinguish these to be targeted local vs national - without including the local (city / county) keywords? Is it done by default with geo-ip - or?
 
Answer: The difference between local and national distribution in Frontdesk takes place on the back end. This is part of the back end special sauce. Frontdesk analyzes a all the competitors and sites and builds a workflow that maximizes both the speed, and efficacy of the campaign.

If you choose 'local', the software feeds different links into the work flow than with a national campaign. For example, if you're 'local' and you're in Dallas, TX, Frontdesk will place special  emphasis to find relevant links (blogs etc) that are also local to that area. This means that the competitive and keyword tasks can be dramatically different. (Frontdesk accounts do not support the ability to be both 'local' and 'national' at the same time, but you can switch between the two easily.)

If the client is outsourcing the work to us, this is all include in the workflow automatically so our team is automatically using the correct settings and not just creating 'generic' links. Every link has the highest possible Google Juice.