13 months ago, a client asked about SEO. 1 month ago, a client asked about SEO. Intrigo gathered 27 new clients in that twelve month window, none asked for SEO, and it was wonderful. This article (hopefully) addresses why (plus some)?

Background:
For many years, I worked in the, (keyword) “non-profit consumer credit counseling” industry. Starting as a small company of three, (keyword) “debt consolidation counselors,” and myself, we decided, early on, to generate our OWN leads. I remember sitting down, with my boss, and hearing “$100K to generate organic leads should be adequate.”

FYI: You should hate leads. These are nasty little one sheets ($12-$35 each) that have all your personal information so “debt counselors” can call you at work, soccer games, dinner, on dates, but before 9pm.

Leads convert at different rates. Some companies sold leads ($25-$30) that converted at 12%. Most sold $15 leads that converted at 4-6%. A good counselor would go through 12-15 leads per day. So with an expectation of generating 36-45 leads with high conversion, I started spending money. I optimized, built out high PR inboard links, dined with search engine folk, submitted to directories, wrote hundreds of “keyword rich” content pages, etc. Six months later, our company was number three for the keyword; “non-profit credit counseling.”
The metrics were decent too. For only $35K (no pay per click) I was generating almost 50 leads per day that saw 25% conversion. Between our own lead generation and discovering a new, high converting, low priced lead source, the company grew to 65 counselors in ONE year. This increased the lead demand to over 700 per day. My SEO accomplishments paled in comparison to our new needs.

Eventually, after spending much more moola on SEO, I learned some very basic, but incredibly valuable lessons. These have proven to be great metaphors for Intrigo’s growth.

Lessons Learned:
First and foremost, build a good site. As I recently told a client, “Think of a billboard with a two sentence title, paragraph tag line, placed every 500 feet along a beautifully landscaped road on your drive to work.” The search engines love quality content and concisely accurate summaries of the content. They HATE the inverse (lots of nothing). And if you do things they hate, they reward you with poor rankings.

Blogs and wikis show up in so many search results because they survive solely on there delicious content. You want people to pull your RSS feed. Even more, you want a site that influences users to comment and interact. But you NEED good content and by this I mean, write content that is interesting, lacks clutter, and says EXACTLY what you want.

I “suspect” that search engines are companies who compete with one another. Yahoo versus Google. So as any good natured, intelligent company, you try to maintain a quality of service that supersedes that of your competitor. You go to search engines to search for something you may know little about. The quicker you find quality results for that ambiguous query, the more likely you will return again. Google and Yahoo compete on the quality of their results. So why would a fully “optimized” site filled with unnecessary (key)words and pages upon pages of meaningless content ever be ranked (well) by either? Beat’s me.

First, create a QUALITY site. THEN get people to talk about it.
You need authorities talking about your site. By talk, I mean link. And by link, I mean descriptively link. If my dietitian mother tells a friend about Intrigo, that’s dandy, but if Sun Microsystems tells their investor base about Intrigo’s usability niche, that’s a BIT better. To rank well, you need respected people, relevant to your site’s purpose talking about your site. I’ve seen a lot of companies spend a lot of money to “persuade” individuals to talk. But, if you have a purposeful site that helps someone with something, people will naturally talk.

BOTTOMLINE: There is NO magic. Just good sites.
This article’s (real) purpose was to illustrate Intrigo’s trade secret: it’s people (Intrigees). We are as ethnically diverse as we are skilled. Our talent, all IN-HOUSE, comes from France, Chile, Korea, Egypt, and of course the US. We have HCI gurus that work with our graphic designers and marketers who all work with our web developers who are all coordinated by some UI inclined project managers that show our testers who eventually make everything friendly for everyone. Our architects wait for questions. Every Intrigee works on every project.

Good development is about understanding EVERYTHING that makes a product sustainably succeed. We hired at least one of everything to work on our team. Our sites and applications are search engine compliant because they are coded perfectly. The interfaces are simple and need no tutorials. And our client’s users actually adopt them. We love working with startups because the applications we develop must be adopted. If they don’t, our clients are penniless to pay us.

So when a client asked me last month if we do SEO, I responded, “We’ll build you something that’s useful; well.”