Search Engine Optimization SEO brought to you by India *FAIL*
We tried it on ourselves first: Our own sub-brand. We wanted to test if outsourcing massive amounts of writing articles and content is more about mass production or authenticity. Should we focus more on saturating search engines, or careful branding?
I have been to Sri Lanka, a neighboring country to India. While I’m certain that Sri Lankans would object to me comparing their country to India, I would draw some similarities that are analogous to the U.S. and Canada.
First, there is an upswing in outsourcing to both countries, and both have highly developed technology centers. They are both eager for American dollars and their economies have some similarities where highly specialized programmers make a good living on $800/month. So it’s attractive for US companies to outsource.
Through these former relationships, we made our connections. We were greeted with a friendly English speaking sales person. The conversations went well. We asked some pointed questions about ranking and SEO practices, and I was pleased with the answers. They understood SEO, and understood the on-page ranking process and the off-page article link-back popularity race.
To see if we had a future in India, we tried not just one, but two Indian SEO companies to compare one against the other. We let each company run their campaign in the manner they recommended for success. We measured them both.
We were pleased with the volume and quantity of effort from both companies. They were cordial. But soon it became difficult to understand when we were passed from the excellent English speaking “closer”, to the backroom project manager. It required a Skype call many times to explain our concerns while we try to simply understand their intentions.
The Indian companies wasted effort on irrelevant posts, foreign search article repositories and linkbacks that were so random, Google could easily devalue the page rank.
The worst part of the campaign was perhaps the writing. After providing our own copy for articles, and explaining process and boundaries for writing more, we still saw a copy writing product that resembled a dictionary in a blender. The syntax and semantics were terrible. Rhetoric and persuasion was no where to be found. I mean, the writing was so poorly crafted, and picked over, we had to withdraw and rewrite hundreds of articles because they failed miserably to convey a sense of trust in the brand. We had to work double time at crisis management to preserve our brand’s reputation. This was perhaps the most serious problem.
Outsourcing Social SEO
Google is now integrating social networks so that your search results are not only social, involving your friend’s blogs, twitter feeds and posts, but also a very personal experience, delivering different results to two individuals searching from the same location on the same keyword phrases. Also called Social SEO, Google will enrich a user’s search experience. We don’t think any realistic company will outsource Social SEO to any firm that doesn’t understand your company’s brand, relationships, cultural references, connections and colloquialisms. Outsourcing your relationships? Impossible. India’s SEO economy is going to suffer greatly because as Google or Yahoo or Bing integrates social, the traditional SEO process will not be as predictable to optimize and by itself without social, will become irrelevant.
It’s all changing. Again.
