Great in Bed? Great in SEO?

I recently met another “Brandon” by the name of Brandon Wirtz at a recent event that Chris Pirillo hosted with his team at Locker Gnome.  As usual at these social gatherings, we introduce ourselves and our professions as a nice little starter bit of information and all he mentioned initially is that he was with Pirillo’s team at Locker Gnome.  However, as the conversation matured through the night, I eventually learned he was an SEO as well & ran his own separate operations called Black Water Ops.  He was nice enough to give me one of his business cards and reminded me of a cool graphics design company (I think it is) that produces business cards called Taste of Ink.  I wanted to give an online shout out to Brandon for being so nice to remind me.

However, the point of this little online rant isn’t about him being so kind with reminding me, but the stuff he was saying last night was sort of let’s just say “…uhhhh weird.”  Well, not necessarily weird per se, but confusing to me.  It was funny as well…so I should say it was funny and weird.  Basically, he was talking about some notion about how people don’t find SEO’s via regular searches like what I believe they look up them with: i.e., “seattle seo” which we rank #1 or #2 depending on the week.  However, I wasn’t there to argue with him.  I’m not a big fan of conflict and didn’t want to debate the merits of what we should target.  Instead, he said we should probably rank for searches like “rank online” which interestingly enough only gets 16 searches a month in the U.S. So, that sort of worried me that he would say something like that yet he was also talking about (maybe joking) charging clients $20-30,000 a month for SEO services (which frankly, I think is sort of outrageous).

So, the next thing I did, which I always do for any website is checked where his website was ranking for his own title tag.  Well, he’s #2 for the phrase “blackwaterops” – yes, all the words crammed together with no spaces.  And yes, there are basically no searches a month for that phrase.  The intuitive search would be “black water ops” with spaces in them, but unfortunately for that phrase, his site ranks #8.  Despite his on page variables not looking so pretty, his page authority by SEOMoz is 34 and his domain authority is 26.  Seattle Organic SEO’s is 50 and 41 respectively.  And this man was saying he wants to charge companies $20-30k a month for SEO?  Now, I see why I have challenges periodically when some prospective and current clients come up and tell me they’ve had some problems with past advice by their SEO’s.

Please note, I’m not trying to dig on “the other Brandon”, but rather, just the whole idea of many folks out there who don’t practice what they preach – especially online where people find you.  I’ll admit that even though we do incredibly well for Seattle Organic SEO, we don’t do a lot of SEO for our parent company.  There’s a purpose behind that: we don’t want people finding it that much right now.  We have a bit of work to do on it. (despite this, I was surprised to find today we were ranked in the top 3 pages for the title tag “interactive marketing services“) We are also just starting the work on our first expansion city: Portland.  So, again, we don’t rank for that site (only 5th page for “portland seo“) because we haven’t done any link building on it at all.  However, there’s a reason why our Seattle Organic SEO website is 100% optimized “on page” and is ranking high for the phrase we targeted 8 months ago (seattle seo).  We knew that we should “practice what we preach.”

Wirtz did offer a funny suggestion on what else I should or rather anyone should rank for: “great in bed.”  He said that people would be looking for this phrase we joke about in conversations.  Well, we may say it in conversations regularly, but Google tells us actually only about 58 people nationwide on average search for the phrase exactly “great in bed.”  In it’s many other permutations and meanings (broad search), it is searched more often, but we like to use the “exact basis” for search and believe it’s a nice metric to start from.  And when I think about it, I’m truly wondering how many people look for this phrase “great in bed?”  I’m thinking not many from an intuitive standpoint.  How many girls do you know go online and look for other guys’ websites who rank for “great in bed?”

Well, I thought I’d try to rank for it (starting today) and see.  Maybe if my blog post becomes #1 for this phrase here in a few months, I’ll get lots of emails and calls by random women?  I’ll have to thank Wirtz then for giving me that advice.  However, let’s see if I can get there first.

p.s. There probably won’t be a lot of people reading this, but if you do want to know if I’m “great in bed” ladies?  Just ask my x-girlfriend.