“Why can’t I get my design site higher in Google?” A common e-mail at the shop (quite odd considering our search engine placement is actually quite lackluster). Short answer – competition is fierce. And it is. Getting into a top ten ‘logo design’ search on Google (or anything to do with ‘logos’ for that matter) is next to impossible without resorting to all sorts of funky tactics. Despite the search engine’s lofty goals, the best design sites don’t always rise to the top, nor is it likely they ever will. There’s only ten front page spots on a ‘logo design’ keyword search, and as I’m writing this, those spots are owned by 8 companies (two of the top eight companies have 2 top ten placements apiece). And with that, I’m going to give you the long answer. How they do it.
SEO tactics – from sublime to ridiculous.
As competition has heated up over the years, so has competition for these front page spots, and the tactics that some people use (often in clear violation of Google’s webmaster outlines) now range from the sublime to the ridiculous. In order to stay in the top SERPS (or try to get there), many logo design companies spend a great deal of time on SEO. Much more time than the average designer or small design firm has available or, more importantly, can afford to. Sad fact of internet marketing I’m afraid. Out here, it’s war. That’s not to say you shouldn’t try, or that you won’t be successful. My father always told me to ‘hope for the best but plan for the worst’. Accordingly, and realistically speaking, I’m going to detail some of the factors you’re up against.
Most top ranked logo design companies go to enormous (and often questionable) lengths to get inbound links (link TO their site from other websites). Why? Simple really. The theory behind Google’s ranking, in extremely simple terms, is that an inbound link counts as ‘vote’ in a supposedly organic and democratic system. These ‘votes of confidence’ factor heavily into the formula and help ‘popular’ sites rank well. Granted, there are other factors – on-page content, META tags, domain names and age of the website, but inbound links are the biggie. Supposedly, if you invest the time and effort in creating decent content, writing articles and features that others find enjoyable, they’ll link to your site in order to ’share’ their find with readers of their site. That (plus on-page keywords) is supposed to bring a site up in the rankings, where more people can find it, feature your link on their site, and so on. At the end of the day, and in the simplest terms, the websites with the most inbound links win.
Most top ranked logo design companies go to enormous (and often questionable) lengths to get inbound links (link TO their site from other websites). Why? Simple really. The theory behind Google’s ranking, in extremely simple terms, is that an inbound link counts as ‘vote’ in a supposedly organic and democratic system.
Predictably, many logo design companies spend most of their SEO time cultivating links to their site. We do it too (though to a much lesser degree), and most of our inbound links come from other websites, forums and other blogs. We own several other domains that link to our main site – some functional, most are simply parking pages. As do most of the internet logo design companies. Others take it a little further, hiring a merry band of copywriters (usually outsourced from off shore, hi-tech savvy companies), who’s only job is to travel around the web, posting comments on design blogs and forums – with an inbound link, natch. Others go even further, creating blogs on services like blogger and wordpress (often referred to as ‘splogs‘), the only purpose of which is to drive so-called ‘link juice’ to their sites. They also pay well-ranked bloggers to place copy on their blogs with suitable anchor text (a violation of Google’s anti-paid-link policy, though impossible for big G to police), post comments on design blogs, forums and design directories, often disguised as helpful suggestions and tips.
Regurgitated web content, blog scraping and not-so-creative editing.
Trouble is, these outfits often have a real issue with coming up with a mass of original material on a regular basis (they’re not logo design experts after all) and often these content placements – particularly blogs – are simply articles that are scraped from other websites. Sometimes heavily edited. Often word-for-word knockoffs using snippets, oddly strung-together paragraphs reworked from other efforts or entire swaths of articles. All to embed an SEO friendly link to the target site.
There’s other ways too – so-called article sites – where folks can post supposedly ‘expert level’ articles, the payment for which is an inbound link. Like most things in life, this works better in theory than in practice. Most of these sites are abused to hell, and a quick read of the majority of these articles will show you they’re nothing short of rubbish. If anyone wanted to submit a decent article, it’s not really worth the bother. People looking for content for their ’splogs’ often rip off content in it’s entirety, negating any benefit via Google’s duplicate content feature and then ‘forget’ to place the inbound link on their site – the supposed point of the exercise in the first place. Accordingly, and as the main purpose of these ‘articles’ is to score an inbound link, people can’t be bothered writing decent pieces, and we often find keyword soaked nonsense that’s been scrapped from another source, heavily edited in an attempt to hide the original.
Let’s take a look at a mess of logo design themed articles over at ezinearticles.com – a site with a laudable goal that’s been taken over by content-writing monkeys, all interested in getting their keyword-rich links aimed towards this site or that. A few posts ago, we talked about logo design review sites and the legitimacy of same. One of the review sites mentioned was some outfit calling themselves companylogos.ws, for whom we’ll find a whole team – there’s Jessica, there’s Ram Jee, there’s Stacey, there’s Jennifer, there’s Nicole, there’s Bradley and let’s not forget about Takemi. There’s lots more but I think you get the picture. Somebody is spending a lot of time and effort pimping companylogos.ws and Logo Design Guru’s do-it-yourself flash logo generator Logo Snap (read more in our logo review site follow-up). Trouble is, this stuff works, regardless of whether Google says it doesn’t or not. At the end of the day, you can’t really blame folks for ‘working the system’. And if you want to rank highly for anything to do with logos, better start pounding those keyboards.
Love Child websites.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. Multiply all of this by a host of what I refer to as ‘love child” websites – engineered clones of a website in form and function, albeit disguised to look like another company. Here’s how that works. Say I had a logo design website. The Logo Factory for example (well I’ll be – I do). I’d use all the tactics described above to get decent Google placement for the keywords ‘logo design’. Fair enough, but being the greedy sort, I’d like a little more traffic. No, scratch that. A lot more. Maybe for the phrase ‘company logos’. I’d register another domain – hopefully with ‘company logos’ in the address and build another site. Wouldn’t want to call it The Logo Factory – already have that going – so I’d make the site look like another company altogether. Steve’s Company Logos perhaps. For all intents and purposes identical to The Logo Factory, it would appear to the casual observer to be another company entirely. As the investment in developing a ‘fraternal’ website is nil (especially when you already have the bare bones set up), peppering this new website all over the search engines can prove very cost efficient. Clients would be working with exactly the same designers, and getting the same deliverables if they ordered a logo, but wouldn’t know it until it comes time to pay (and even then, maybe not). The site would be just different enough to get us past Google’s duplicate content filter (if Google recognizes ‘mirror’ or ‘fraternal’ websites, only one will be ranked, and you run the risk of losing both altogether). And I’d eat up more of those top search engine placements that you’re trying to get.
Trouble is, that new ‘love child’ website needs some SEO love too, so I’d have to unleash my copywriters again onto the interwebs, only this time they’re embedding links to the new site. And setting up splogs. And posting gibberish articles to ‘free article’ sites. And blasting out completely irrelevant press releases. And I could do this again. And again. And again.
Takes quite a bit of Google-Fu to sort out who’s who. Take this logo site – businesslogo.net and another – e-logodesign.com. Despite looking different, they’re fronting the same company. And while both contact forms will tell you that the company is located in Texas, the company behind them is actually housed in Karachi, Pakistan. Both sites perform well for their keyword searches – online logo design and business logos.
Often ‘love child’ websites are set up for the sole purpose of ranking for very specific key word searches, usually from the logo design family. Let’s take a look at Logoworks. They’re number #1 on Google for the keywords ‘logo design’. One would assume that they’d be above such ‘love child’ website nonsense. Not quite. Businesslogos.com is theirs (though you’d be hard pressed to find that out on the site). And that site happens to be number #1 for “business logos”. The #4 site for “logo design” on Google – Logo Design Guru – partnered with Pakistan based design company Right Source – also sets up shop as corporatelogos.ws. Which shows up as #2 on a Google search for “corporate logos“. And on. And on. And on. There are times when keyword domain stuffing has some fairly humorous outcomes. Logo-design-logo-design.com? Nice. No idea how they answer their phone.
A rose by any other name.
Sometimes logo companies create two, three (or even more sites) offering design services. Different vehicle-wraps with a minor detail – they’ll offer exactly the same logo ‘packages’ with exactly the same parameters (number of preliminary designs and revisions, etc) but, at different pricing structure. The theory is, if the potential buyer cringes at a logo package price on one site, they’ll buy it for less on another. Naturally, clients purchasing at the higher price might get a little ticked, so the connection between the two (or more) sites is often heavily disguised.
Take a look at the oddly named Logo Design Club’s website. Using garish parking sign graphics, these good folks make a big deal about ‘no advance payment’ (a design project retainer is pretty well standard in the industry). They think this is important enough to forgo the typical first step of looking at a design company’s logo samples (who knew), telling us excitedly that there’s “no need to waste (our) time searching portfolio (sic) and reading testimonial because (they) have covered (our) risk“. Fair enough position, I guess, but others may differ in these pretty fundamental positions. Take this other site Logo Design Xperts (guess the ‘expert’ domain was taken), where there’s no such proclamation and it appears you have to pay up front. Prices are quite different too, though the logo package descriptions are identical. These folks tell us that looking at a portfolio is very important, at least if the number of links and graphics promoting theirs is any indication. Funny thing – it’s the same company behind both and, one assumes, employs the same designers. And speaking of scraping content for search engine placement, I do wish the so-called Logo Design Xperts would remove the articles they pinched from our site – sort of a blemish on their claim to be “the world’s trusted design service”.
Sometimes the ‘love child’ phenomenon can take on a theater of the absurd vibe. Take this page, supposedly a comparison between two competing companies – Logo Design Pros and another outfit called (sigh) Mighty Logo Designs. Trouble is, they’re the same company. In essence, they’re comparing themselves to, well, themselves. Luckily, the comparison does end in a tie.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not on a holier-than-thou soapbox or anything (uh-huh), and ultimately people are free to market their sites, and companies, in whatever manner they see fit. All fair enough I suppose, but not exactly anything to do with developing a superior design service – the supposed point of the exercise in the first place – or the industry itself. It also amazes me when supposed branding and logo companies spend so much time pretending to be someone else. Isn’t building a brand part of these OWN marketing equation? And isn’t a design company represented BY their website, not defined BY it? I’d think so – a web domain and a couple of HTML pages does not a company make. Nor does a web address.
Not that my humble shop can’t do the same kind of stuff, we can. In fact, we’ve dabbled with ‘love child’ websites in the past, only to nuke them after realizing we wanted to build The Logo Factory brand. Not some vehicle-wrapped website that’s only purpose was to saturate the search engines, while tricking clients into believing they’re working with someone that’s not The Logo Factory. I’m also a follower of the ‘what we should do‘ school of thought as opposed to ‘what we can do‘.
Not a bad position to take I guess, but it comes with a price tag. Over the years I’ve seen The Logo Factory website drop from #1 in Google SERPs (where we sat for years) to page #3 and sometimes even #4 (hovering around 25 – 40 in organic ‘logo design’ searches). Normally, that would be a death knell for any online company. However, as our site is fairly extensive (almost 1800 pages) we get traffic from a lot of keyword combinations, and we manage to remain in the top 100,000 sites in Alexa. Amazingly, our traffic is often higher than all but the top three or four websites in the top ten results for ‘logo design’. All of which combines to keep us relatively busy at the shop.
Could be better, but a while back I threw in the SEO towel. Didn’t have the time, the resources, or to be honest, the inclination. On a more pragmatic level, I was always terrified to do what some of my competitors were doing, figuring we’d be banned the second I did. I also waited for Google to clean up the mess, figuring that at some point their ‘webmaster guidelines’ would kick in. Still waiting for that to happen. And if you’re trying to rank highly for anything to do with logos, so are you.
Sometimes it comes down to figuring out what the other cats aren’t doing, and take advantage of it before they do. A couple of years ago, I was an early adopter of Google’s image search. I realized that a lot of traffic was coming from people who were searching for images of logos, as opposed to actual website pages. That was cool. I figured I’d let other logo design companies duke it out over the top ten searches for ‘logo design’ and I’d quietly set out optimizing our site for the logo images themselves. Nothing spammy. Just clear, concise descriptions of our logos in ALT tags and on-page keywords (though you have to be careful with this one – when Google indexes your images, with matching thumbnails, it can cause a massive drain on your server). Here’s how it worked – if potential clients were searching for real estate logos, they’d find real estate logos as featured in our gallery. A sports logo image search would result in some sports logos from our gallery. And so on. Was pretty cool for a couple of years, but even image search is being abused by folks that operate under the “what we can do” school of thought. We’ve even found images ripped from our site, being used on other sites to drive their traffic (for more on this see our new logo review post).
Alas, and like most things on the interwebs, my ’secret technique’ was good while it lasted. My latest? Developing the best logo company we can, and growing a blog that readers might dig, and link to. Because, as the Google webmaster guidelines tell me, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Might work for you too. Or you can reverse engineer everything I just told you and give every other logo design company a run for their money.
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