Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
    I am also call’d No-more, Too-late, Farewell;

~Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “A Superscription“

We have made the difficult decision to wind down SearchViz.

When I say this was a difficult decision, I mean it. It’s especially difficult because it’s the synthesis of a personal decision and a business decision. Demand for our services was as vigorous as ever, far more so than when we opened our doors. But our demands on each other, two partners in a small agency trying to mature into a boutique, concierge vendor that actually helped to make the Web better, were equally intense and ultimately unsustainable.

It is my great disappointment that you never heard Helen‘s voice through her typed words on these pages. You certainly saw them in the original art she produced for each of my posts and in the design she created for our site as a whole, somehow creating an elegant visual brand out of one of the worst names (SearchViz was a domain name I had bought years ago when I realized how dominant SEO was going to become; apparently I never said it aloud) in the history of business. She could have had an entire blog about markup or stylesheet disasters, or how to build a better mousetrap with Drupal, or a series of posts on why something that might look good to the casual observer was an accessibility train wreck under the hood. Or pretty much anything else that came up in our near-daily banter. So any of you who took the time to look at our site but weren’t a customer probably never met Helen. And that’s a shame.

We serendipitously become colleagues at SouthComm, working on a great team that started to unravel when our group leader resigned, and she ultimately responded to my pleading to walk away from a steady paycheck to do something audacious in a down economy. From where we sat, one would not have known there was a down economy. From day one, we had enough business and qualified leads to keep the lights on and then some. Frustratingly, we left far too many leads hanging because of our over-deliberative approach to adding capacity and preferring to offer high quality service to existing customers, even when it gnawed at our margins.

In our just over two years, though, we (mostly Helen) did some great work that deserves a little more attention, and there won’t be too many opportunities for additional celebration, so we might as well do it here:

• built Ashley Judd‘s first ever official website
• created a website for bestselling author Adam Ross who, with our help, catapulted into the top of the SERPs ahead of that CSI guy
• reinvented the online presence, front-end and back-end, for BookPage, where you should go discover your next great book
• enhanced a great collaborative project now maintained at Perkins School for the Blind called WonderBaby
• launched a completely redesigned and rebuilt Who2, one of the Web’s longest-lived sites with a blog that is and will continue to be worth your time

We worked on a number of other great projects with a group of customers that I think will be as difficult to reprise as our team at SouthComm where Helen and I met. To our customers, many of whom were with us from start to finish, I can only say thank you. It is our hope that our work created mutual and lasting value.

In parting, I will confide that Helen is the only person I would let build a website for me. I’ve never met anyone who understood the complex relationship between visual design and the Web—everything from end-user interfaces to editorial workflow to the semantic underpinnings derived from the raw markup to layered PSDs—better than she. She is also a Drupal expert. And has many other hidden talents besides. She likes to make things, and if you ever have the opportunity to have her make something for you, you should avail yourself of it. I can only hope that she doesn’t wind up too busy with whatever she does next to be available to work on my next crazy idea. If she is, then my next crazy idea will probably stall indefinitely.

For a while, anyway, you can still contact us through the website. But in the spirit of SearchViz, if you’d like to find us individually, we recommend that you just look for us.

Looking back on the early days, we never did make too much headway making it to the top of the SERPs for [nashville seo]. We got too busy with other things. And now we’ll head off to keep ourselves busy with even otherer things.

To my mind, if I’m focused on generating relevance and avoiding penalties for my customers, section 5.3 of Google’s TOS has relevance:

5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.

And a statement in their webmaster guidelines confirms my right to be suspicious, especially on behalf of my paying customers:

Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

So here’s a question: Is it possible to create a disclaimer or other indicator of certified white hat toolkits? Would it even matter without a more open review of toolkit source code? Should there be an independent SEO certification authority of some kind, and would SEOs even trust it? Or would Google (and other search engines) consent to creating a standard badge that a data (or other relevant) license of some kind exists between the two parties?

To other people in this space: Does it matter at all to you whether services, many of which are probably charging you money, are operating legally? Do you have some mechanism I’m missing for identifying toolkits that are thoroughly white hat?

Consequentially, I wonder what the ramifications are for the companies that are building black hat toolkits. With the rise of cloud computing (e.g., Amazon EC2) and IPv6 (and, thus, essentially unlimited/untraceable IPs), can Google and the other major search engines even identify SERP scrapers and the like?

I’ve heard tell (can’t find a quotation at the moment) that Matt Cutts is dismissive of scrapers as any sort of threat to Google (presumably in the context of bandwidth as the scrapers hit their servers), but I don’t know whether that means there is any kind of internal effort to track SERP scrapers. I’m personally more interested in whether they could wind up creating a cascading penalty if it were determined that SEOs were using a toolkit that was in flagrant violation of TOS, such that sites being tracked by an SEO wound up suffering.

A bigger social question: Does the ease with which TOSes and copyrights can be violated online make us all likelier to be criminals? Or is it justified as online civil disobedience?

Now, SEO is only one part of the SearchViz approach to getting found through inbound marketing, but it’s an important one. In a recent video in the excellent Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel, Matt answers the question of how he would run his own online marketing company. While he doesn’t give the million dollar secret to SEO success, he suggests that reputation and transparency are reasonable hypothetical foundations for good services. And that’s something we generally strive for at SearchViz. We’re not in the habit of doing things we’re uncomfortable telling our customers about, just as we’re not in the habit of doing things where we have to explain to the customer, “Look, we did this special for you, but it’s… unconventional. So we wanted to let you know this is how we did it, but don’t tell anyone, okay?” In short, when it comes to SEO, we’re not trying to game the system; we’re trying to ensure demonstration of relevance.

If some SEOs seem to wear black hats or practice dark arts, it’s likely because search is a black box. The proprietary algorithms used by the major search engines are one of the primary domains of market competition. If Google itself were a truly open system, it would be possible to tailor sites exactly to the algorithm, regardless of actual relevance. Viagra spammers could likely adapt to an open algorithm to ensure that they did well in queries for [art museum]. An interesting question is whether an open search algorithm would increase or decrease relevance in search results. To my knowledge, no one has attempted to create an open search algorithm that has achieved any sort of liquidity. So because search is currently proprietary, SEO research and development frequently yields short-term tactical advantages for those quickest to market with reverse engineered discoveries about the algorithms employed by the search engines. As these tactics become disseminated, their value decreases. With standard search engine results pages (SERPs) containing 10 results for most search engines, each keyword or search phrase has a supply/demand problem based on relevance.

We’re not really interested in the black box churn. To us, SEO is akin to an ideology, but it’s one that is evidence-based while still taking a long view. Here at SearchViz, our strategy is relevance, and our tactics include mostly widely known best practices designed to highlight relevance for the search engines. We’re not going to charge you to stuff a bunch of useless paid directories with your site, and we’re not going to promote articles about your site to sites you’ve never heard of unless they’re high-quality sources of information relevant to your site. What we will do is ensure that you have quality semantic structure that matches your content and markup that matches the recommendations of the search engines. We will make sure that you’re in quality directories and have quality inbound links that reflect the best relationships you already enjoy but might not be fully leveraging. We will keep up with the practices recommended by search engines and leveraged by SEOs to ensure that you are exposing your relevance.

The simple truth is that there remain a number of sites on the Web that, largely because of an unfortunate legacy of Web standards existing prior to standard tools for creating documents, are non-optimal for the search experience. Imagine if copywriters could create Word documents without using Microsoft Word akin to the way web designers hand-rolled their own HTML with no validity checking built in. Basic documents would have been nearly impossible to read or to transfer between computers. Try asking a web designer sometime, for instance, about designing for IE6. With Word, there are very few compatibility issues between versions or across platforms. With the Web, there are countless rendering issues across browsers and platforms. In some ways, our role is to improve the Web by returning to standards and exposing relevance.

“But wait,” you might be thinking, “Shouldn’t I be partnering with someone willing to put on the black hat at least occasionally?” You can if you want, but that’s one of many reasons why SEO isn’t the only part of our strategy. Remember: We’re an inbound marketing agency. This means we use a variety of tactics to help you get found. As long as you’re creating quality original content, you will be relevant to search, in social media, in email, and wherever else you’re likely to engage your audience. In the long run, we think this strategy yields more value to our customers than Googlebombing ever could.

If you’re concerned that your site might not be letting search engines know just how relevant it is, please contact us.

As an SEO, I’m actually glad to see so much competition in the toolkit space. Honestly, I’m still evaluating a number of available tools (reviews likely forthcoming in a later post) to see whether there’s anything that I can regularly use to benefit my customers outside of Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and the AdWords tools (Keyword Tool and Placement Tool), which are all extremely helpful.

But for people who know enough about SEO to understand that it can add value to their businesses but also know enough to know that they aren’t equipped to manage SEO effectively themselves, it’s hard for me to see what benefit a paid toolkit or automated reports offer.

If you operate a business that maintains a website but is small enough in terms of personnel and revenue that you don’t maintain a full-time or even part-time webmaster or other Web professional, I’d doubt very much that you’re going to be able to leverage comprehensive reports or have time to spend interpreting your search engine result page (SERP) trends for important keywords. I mean, you might get out of it the sort of thing that a CEO or CFO gets out of seeing an overview of projects, but you’re unlikely to be able to spend any time leveraging the information immediately in a way that advantages your business.

And if you operate a business that is large enough or mature enough to have a full-time in-house SEO on staff, then this person probably has a preferred set of tools for doing the important work of SEO.

We hope you’ll consider us for the middle ground if you can’t afford a full-time SEO. Because there is added value in getting found. And no matter how smart and refined the search engine algorithms become, there will still be room to optimize the search experience. Because search engines don’t (yet, anyway) control your content; you do. And for a decade, we’ve seen sites designed to look good but not perform well in search. Here at SearchViz, we will still focus on SEO web design by making text text (instead of images) and exposing previously unexposed and uncrawlable pages on entirely Flash sites. Our SEO web design process means we’re designing for both users and search engines.

I’ve known some people who have stated that the concept of business success is making money while you sleep. And the Web and real-time commerce certainly enable this concept. Retail sales and subscription-based revenue models do not require you to be minding the shop to book revenue. But in the world of SEO, just like with much of the Web, where we’re only now seeing some maturity in the content management system (CMS) space, automation is often used as a poor substitute for added value.

Often, the most valuable thing I bring to the table for inbound marketing projects is the consultative process. I should be the one reviewing the analytics and implementing changes recommended by the results I interpret. What I shouldn’t be doing is signing up my customers for a recurring Web-based service that sends an email every now and again and hoping they mostly forget about the monthly charge and never call me.

I tell our customers up front: the day we stop delivering value, you should fire us. I stay very focused on the bottom line. We typically know something about the value proposition and revenue stream of our customers, and we’re lucky to have customers who trust us with their numbers and their data. One of the core SearchViz maxims is that you can’t improve it if you can’t measure it. I’m measuring all the time, and when I cease being able to improve for one of my customers, I either cut my rates (assuming that if I continue measuring, I might see something later that can be improved) or walk away.

Similarly, all of our recurring services come with customer time built in. We want our customers to understand what we’re doing. We offer transparency and thoroughness. That’s where our value proposition is. Customer service as a concept has been remarkably devalued in the big box, franchised, IVR marketplace. We’re prepared to bring it back as an agency.

There might come a time where we develop our own toolkit that meets our business needs perfectly, and that’ll be great. But we won’t use it as an excuse to have to stop talking to our customers. Providing better customer service adds value to our business.

So if you’re tired of seeing a monthly charge on your business credit card for a report you never read anyway or a service you logged into a few times several months ago, and you want to renew your focus on getting found, please contact us. We like customer interaction, and we have great customers.