2011·10·09 · 7:47
OMReport.com - Joost de Valk Part 2/2
The second part of this 2011 interview covers the consulting side of my work at the time. I discuss the difference between doing SEO for large enterprise clients versus smaller sites, how SEO in Europe lagged the US by roughly six months, and why German and Dutch SEO behaved differently from English-language search due to weaker language recognition in Google’s algorithms. I also talk about day rates, the value of coming in as a senior consultant, and why pricing at the right level actually makes your advice land better.
0:02 usually someone here who's here now at SC Octoberfest and uh and tell them like okay if you you probably need more links or something like that go work with him or with her or whatever okay so you have some uh does it work the other way around the guys who are more from the link marketing uh side of things do they do they talk to you when they need it yeah quite often you know there's quite a few link Builders out there who don't know that much about onsite SEO probably it's also a big difference you know if it's like a short head kind of task which you
0:34 know many people can manage and then if you come to something that has several million products and it's like a totally different story the thing is that my the technique it's the technical side but it's also the Consulting side to actually get those companies to implement what you want to do so do you think that's like a communication thing or is it because you're like a heavyweight and it's more it's more politics and and yeah it's it's a bit of coming in as a heavyweight that helps because you you usually end up higher in the hierarchy in a hierarchy and it makes it easier to push
1:05 things through so you think it's probably good that you're even a lot more expensive because then it makes your it gives you words more weight yeah absolutely I think that pricing has something to do with that yeah so is there is a is the day rate of yoast official or not not so it is yeah my day rate is two and a half thousand Euros which is not even that expensive more expensive ones yeah it does cover quite a few in those rooms now but then in the States you know it's a whole different ball game right well two and a half hours a year is used to be
1:37 um not that much but it is now a lot in the states and that's not because of the Euro that's because of the crappy dollar so yeah so now you're going to adjust your rates no no it's just people from the US it's just okay as it is and I usually make project prices anyway or retainers for longer periods but it's around that okay Mark okay so how would you think if you said you worked mostly with us clients so how do you think what's the difference between SEO and the US and SEO in Germany do you think
2:08 there is a difference and yeah everything happens earlier in the US so um do you think like Google algorithmic changes yeah and um then this is like a very small difference I would say right no it's some stuff happens like six months earlier in the US and and in Germany it's a bit faster in Holland it's like waiting for years sometimes um also their language recognition in English is still so much better than any
2:41 other language so um I I would say that the biggest difference is actually that SEO is is somewhat different for these countries okay because it's just a little bit behind yeah yeah and it's a it's a bit more competitive in the states for a lot of terms although Germany can get very competitive for terms as well so what do you think about the the the the interwining of Social and SEO do you think that is different in in the states in in Europe because it may be the same thing you know that the same thing will
3:12 happen here just a little bit later but again it may be that they just use it differently a bit above it will happen because there are probably the best signals Google is ever going to get for ranking if they're gonna get them from Facebook you know they won't get them for Facebook but they'll scrape them off of Facebook like buttons and stuff like that um I think there's one company present here who's going to show something about that yeah but yeah they uh
3:44 they'll use those signals and time will tell of what will happen exactly for now I'm just focusing on all of them and images on all of them just making sure that you have good links and and do the social stuff well the funny thing is that it makes sense to do it all well because getting normal links without doing the social stuff well it's pretty hard you think so why that because if you want to why have at least because you actually have to be talked about and for people to link to you do you have to talk about you and the way they talk
4:15 about you right now is using those social channels so it all ties into one another and I do think that they will use them as tax and balance against each other so if you if they see very little social traffic about your side and they see a lot of new incoming links and it's a very good way for them to see oh wait there's something weird is happening again there's stuff that people are shy to talk about we just have another presentation we had the example of online dating people usually still shy
4:52 my mom for instance does a relationship therapy that's not the kind of thing that people are going to do no no no no they won't even add your Facebook no absolutely not so that makes that stuff harder and at the same time that's the problem that all her competitors have as well so it's not a real problem so it will be there will have there will be huge differentiators depending on what yeah that's already happening anyway I mean shopping search is completely different from so Google is differentiating a whole an awful lot between all those things anyway and basically Google is turning into a lot of different vertical searches so tell
5:23 me one thing that really pisses you off in search there's quite a few things that piss me off quite badly and the the thing that pisses me off most is people using 10 year old techniques a 10 year old black hat techniques and still ranking with them because Google doesn't bother to [ __ ] fix it because it's like in in countries where Google is just yeah when I still encounter insights ranking with no frame spam for instance I you see that happening in Holland every once in
5:55 a while I'm like [ __ ] and does it do you do you have a feeling that at least works just for shorter periods no it works quite well for and it's and there's a lot of stuff like that that just works and the noise is [ __ ] do you think it's probably because it's just you know Holland is not their focus and then right it's not entertainment this spam it's just like such a little part it just doesn't make sense to take care of it it's true it's the same thing I mean they said it they do something about scrapers now look at indeed.com or indeed.nl or all these job scraping sites I mean those are
6:27 incredibly big scrapings so actually doing some good work job on the metadata I think yeah but yeah but they make their [ __ ] results basis look like Google yeah so I click on a search result and I get to a search result I thought Google was against that but apparently that's a different bowl game for some of those sites so that pisses me off okay so what do you think how will that solve because Google is any vertical at some point of time and then the scrapers in that area
7:01 Google file the patent on job search last week and uh so before jobs are three to six months before Google will release job search those sites will start dropping in rankings you can wait for that we have a Mystic update parallel to that yeah take care of some other stuff as well and then accidentally all the jobs scraper science will go down yeah it would just be a side effect of the special uh uh update named after some other animal right yeah or engineer or whatever it is between
7:34 yeah absolutely all right thanks a lot thank you om report and Android IPA would like to thank you for your attention you can get