Seo Services

What Sets Architek Apart From the Competition?

Its no secret – anyone can perform SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, on their website. In fact, most entrepreneurs or otherwise internet-savvy website owners have read a book or two (or dozens) on the subject, or have researched keyword optimization, or have at least heard the term “back link” at some point in the past 10 years… which is great! This means that many of my potential clients know the importance of Search Engine Optimization.

However, this presents two very interesting obstacles in the Client/SEO agency relationship:

1. Gaining trust. I say this is an obstacle because most clients expect a solid answer when they have a question, because thats just how most things work in life. Remember – SEO is very much a practice. “It depends,” is a common, and often times infuriating answer for a client to receive when asking a question about SEO. But its true – there is no one size fits all solution that works for every website. With that said, I always follow up my, “it depends,” response with facts, data, my current knowledge regarding the question, and my examples from previous A/B testing that I have performed on the hundreds of websites that I operate to test these sorts of things. From this knowledge, I will make an educated decision on what direction to go when optimizing, and set up testing to make sure we are utilizing the most effective approach. 
2. Educating the client on current SEO.  Clients need to understand that the optimization techniques and practices that they know about have changed entirely. Unless you are working with SEO on a daily basis, what you know about SEO is dated, ineffective, and unsafe.  Shifting a client’s existing understanding of SEO to an understanding of current, safe, and most importantly, effective SEO is often times an uphill battle that can impede progress.

So, what sets me apart from the thousands of other SEO agencies and freelancers? A few things:

1. Many agencies will rely on your old understanding of SEO. I do not do this. This allows agencies to provide poor, dated, and unsafe SEO practices that are easily and inexpensively subcontracted or automated. They send out monthly reports that look as though lots of work is being done, but actually fail to show any measurable impact on your revenue or visibility. Unfortunately some of these old techniques are still effective, but only for very short periods of time before search engines algorithms pick up their spammy and deceptive nature.
2. I wont tell you what I think you want to hear. I do my best to explain/educate in detail why, when, and how I am implementing my SEO practices. I own hundreds of domains, most of which have websites I created for the sole purpose of testing my SEO theories and practices in almost every environment (blog, e-commerce, niche sites, affiliate sites, B2B, small business etc., as well as server environments and platforms – WordPress, NGINX, Apache, Shopify, Bigcommerce, Woocommerce, etc.) with varying levels of power on the server level (ie. amounts of ram, processing power, cloud servers public hybrid and cloud, bare metal servers, data center locations… etc.). 
3. I am 100% transparent in how I operate. If I mess up, I will tell you, and I will fix my mistakes. I dont have the time or energy to turn and burn clients. Thats not good business. Whether you remain a client for a week or a decade, my goal is to become life-long business partners. 
4. I am more concerned about my client’s revenue than my own. My philosophy and business mentality is simple: When you make more money, I make more money.
5. I carry a small client load and strive to create close relationships with my clients. Many of my clients have been with me for 3+ years.

What you need to know about SEO

I am a no-nonsense, no fluff, no “beat around the bush” kind of guy, so I’ll cut to the point – unless you’ve been heavily researching the current state of SEO within the past week, there is a good chance that your SEO knowledge is practically obsolete.

Google introduces somewhere between 400-600+ ranking and search algorithm changes per year (according to Google’s John Mueller – watch: Google Webmasters Q and A session). The exact number is not important – what is important is understanding how this affects the way I perform SEO.

“If you have a bigger website then it takes quite a bit of time for the algorithms to adjust to to bigger changes on the website. So that’s something where I wouldn’t expect to see fast changes.

It’s more a matter of […] several months over which it takes for us to recrawl, re-index, reprocess the website to understand how it has changed, how we need to change how we show it in the search results.

So if you made changes on one day and like a week later you start seeing changes in the search results, that was also a date that other people mentioned as kind of bigger changes that they were seeing, then probably that’s not related to the changes that you made.

Usually you’d really have like this multi-month period of things kind of subtly changing over time rather than like this one big change.”

Adapting SEO to Google Algorithm Changes

Lets keep it simple – Since there are so many (daily) minor ranking algorithm changes, how and why my website ranks for “Indianapolis SEO services” today might be drastically different tomorrow. This also means is that the way two different (or competitor) websites rank for the same key words or search query can also vary greatly.

Up until a few years ago, optimizing a web page for a certain keyword or topic used to be fairly straight forward. Almost every potential client I speak with still views SEO as:

• Using your keywords a certain amount or % per page
• Backlinks. As many as possible. Anchor text matching or containing keyword.
• PBNs and Web Directory submissions

In today’s SEO world, these things will have a highly negative impact on your sites overall reputation, and cause you to rank lower than your competitors who, for instance, use the same keywords but with less frequency.

Are you rolling your eyes yet? If so, I don’t blame you – almost all of my clients have heard a similar spiel from their last SEO guy or web designer or marketing agency, but they still received poor or lackluster results given the amount of money they invested in this whole SEO thing. Why is this?

I don’t actually have an answer for you. Sorry… But! What I can say is this: In most cases, previously completed SEO work goes no further than basic “best practices.” There is a plethora of information regarding SEO best practices on the web, and most people who can use a word processor can edit their site and implement these best practices. Many agencies do the same as soon as they are hired to begin SEO.

Unfortunately, this is where I see most SEO agencies stop. 

Best Practices and Guaranteed Rankings

Implementing best practices on a previously un-optimized page will typically show positive and relatively immediate results! The client feels as though the agency knows what they are doing and continues to spend more money (without any long term SEO results or rankings), until they ultimately start looking for another SEO company.

What I think sets me and my SEO apart from some of the others is my obsession with the data I observe as a result of my work, rather than the methods I employ to get to the front page. When it comes time to really dig in and start increasing SERP placement, I ask my self two questions:

• What is that website doing better than this website? This involves “best practices” and technical SEO:
  • Best practices – On-page SEO, content, images, alt tags, use of h1-h6, etc.
  • Technical SEO – page speed, page size, load times, script loading, server configuration, proper DNS, site mapping, structure, analytics… and many more.
• Most importantly: what makes that website more relevant to a given search query than this website?

If a given SEO technique affected all website rankings in the same manner, “SEO” wouldn’t really be a thing, would it? Using machine learning and AI, Googles search algorithms largely determine what results to display for a user based on a sites relevance to a user’s search query, taking into account the users’ search intent and even user interaction and user experience metrics… Pretty wild, no? Static ranking factors like how many times a keyword is used on a page are a thing of the past!