Guerrilla SEO: Can You Do It?
You’ve got guerrilla marketing, guerrilla blogging, and guerrilla warfare. Can you have guerrilla SEO?
Sure, why not? But what is it?
Guerrilla SEO could quite simply be defined as search engine optimization that isn’t centered around huge piles of money. Large corporations have big pocketbooks and they can just throw money after money to increase their search engine presence. But small businesses have a more difficult time fixing their search rankings with solutions involving money. They have to get a little more creative. And that’s what guerrilla optimization is all about.
With a guerrilla approach, you don’t have to rely strictly on traditional optimization practices to rank your web pages. I’m NOT saying you have to resort to blackhat techniques that could get you banned with the search engines, but you don’t have to rely completely on keyword density and inbound link relevance. Don’t be afraid to try something new, or to put a new twist on an old practice.
There are other ways you could play this out. The bottom line is, get creative and build your search rank using techniques that don’t require a lot of money. I call it guerrilla SEO.
12 Responses to “Guerrilla SEO: Can You Do It?”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
You can either do it yourself for, well almost free – We are a web design company and have taken around 2 years to get our web design site ‘Creare Design’ to the top half of page one for web design. Yes this has involved the whole company working to do so, a lot of time and as you say energy, but a keyword like that at the end of the day does need some money spending somewhere as it is probably one of the most competitive keyphrases to come up for bar search engine optimisation. It may be that it would have eventually got there without spending money, it would have taken longer, and therefore prevented us from gaining as much business. So you need to weigh up whether it is worth spending money on it, because at the end of the day, if you get to page 1, 5 months quicker than you would have without spending money, is it worth it? because that 5 months we could have gained many customers which will pay for high end links.
@ Claire – That makes sense, there are ways to build “trust” factor (aka building links) by taking a Guerrilla SEO approach without buying high end links (such as Online Publicity, Article Marketing, Some Directory Submission, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, etc…) SEO is an ongoing process that takes time to build the right way (onsite optimization and off site seo) and should not be rushed…Anyway, thanks for reading and your comment!
Nick, I think you’re right on the money here. With time, persistance, and a small budget it is amazing what you can achieve yourself. We’re #1 for our main keyphrase, and that happened in less than a month. All the best.
Seo is important, but spending money on advertising with the search engine you would like to be on top of is also important. We recently changed the website to a new shopping cart, and it took away all of our old ranking. We were on the first page of yahoo only because the previous owner spent $150,000 in one year with yahoo. Of course i wish he spent it with google but its ok now since our website is viewed as new anyway
I would go as far as to say that if you are an ecommerce business, you have to plan on spending money with google as advertising, to help your rankings. My rankings are terrible on google right now, and we have spent alot of time on seo. The advertising will help the rankings.
@Practice Provider – Thanks for your comment, glad to hear about your success story!
@Daniel – Thanks for reading and your comment. I have actually not seen any evidence about the more your spend with PPC the better SEO results…I think this may have just been a coincidence.
Daniel,
You have a page rank of three, so you must be doing something right.
@TotalVac – Thanks for the comment…I hope everything is going well! Google Pagerank is not as important as it used to be (in fact, I very rarely even look at Google Page Rank these days at all). Generating quality visitors and increases sales/leads from these organic search engine visitors is much more important…
I guess the biggest thing is that SME websites can stretch and adjust their conditions to accommodate advertiser/link requirements.
If you are a government or large corporate you will likely not be able to add a basic element such as a relevant back links page. Another issue the SME can benefit from is that they dont have to use “company pty ltd” as their link text as this which will not deliver as much impact as “your product/industry” keywords…
Quick question about SEO – I was ranked in the top 3 for over 120 of my target keywords and a “SEO Company” offered to do a free niche search engine submission for free if I would take a look at their services. A week after that happened my rankings dropped on all but about 30 keywords. Any ideas why this would happen?
@david – Excellent points! Thanks for the comment!
@Chris Manning – Sorry that this happened to your website…to me it sounds like this other company was black hat and used some sort of mass submission to smaller search engines. Honestly, there are 3 (maybe 4) real search engines, so this would have been a red flag…
My advice is to contact this firm and ask them for a list of the places that they submitted your website. If they don’t provide it then ask them to un-do what they did for you. Another thing you can do is install and verify your website with Google webmaster tools and export a link analysis to locate this bad incoming links. Then contact each of these sites and ask them to remove your links.
I hope this helps & Best of luck!
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