It is hard to put into words how exciting today is for us at SEO National. We have been working hard for the last 2 years. While we have always had a strict order of fulfillment to ensure quality SEO implementation, we wanted to “put our money where our mouth is.” As we’ve continued rapid growth over the years, in April 2011 we made the decision to document all of our processes and develop an auditing system for all of our SEO company’s campaigns.
While each of our client’s SEO campaigns receive customized fulfillment, a documented process would ensure that the fulfillment is backed up by exceptional quality control processes. It seems that many SEO firms are only as good as the last guy they hired. With any turnover in the staff, their fulfillment model becomes that of whatever the new hire knows. While we’re happy to report that we’ve still had no turnover for more than 3 years, we still didn’t want to be the type of firm that didn’t have an established process.
Over the course of 2011’s summer, our auditing process started as a new client checklist. With each new company’s SEO that we began fulfilling, we’d run down the new client checklist. This list quickly grew and we needed to reverse engineer some of the quality control processes into existing clients’ campaigns. This is when the checklist evolved into an audit that would define our overwhelmingly stringent approach to becoming one of the most efficient SEO firms around.
A year into fine-tuning our audit process, applying it proactively to new clients and retroactively to existing clients, Google Panda and Penguin algorithms rolled around. We have been fortunate enough (or just really good at what we do) to not have had a client impacted by algorithm updates, nor any of the subsequent releases of the algorithms. This goes to show how future-thinking our mindset is when it comes to SEO fulfillment. All of the items in the algorithms that caused penalties for many SEO firms and their clients were things that we were considerate about far prior to these search engine updates. That doesn’t mean that these updates didn’t make us take a step back though. We wanted to make sure we maintained our edge over the competition.
Over the year that followed 2012’s spring/summer of algorithm updates, we made further efforts to circle back and begin double checking all client’s campaigns against our finalized audit process. As of today, we have successfully completed an extensive list of 100 audit checkpoints, addressed any items, implemented needed elements, etc. for every one of our clients. (How ironically official is “100” items? That’s exactly how many items our audit ended up with.) Some of the audit checkpoints included obvious items. Others were very detailed, in-house approaches that we personally take as an SEO firm. Yes, we fulfill our SEO 100% in-house. This included many hours updating CMS versions, adding dynamic code, re-configuring plugins, manually editing files, compressing various outputs for quicker site loads, updating validation efficiencies, etc.
Words can’t describe how excited we are to have completed this project. So excited that we’re not quite sure what to do with ourselves. Ensuring that every client was thoroughly audited has consumed us, particularly for the last 18 months. With our newly found time we will be able to start launching some long-awaited projects of our own. Not to mention, start working on a new, overdue design for this old work horse that we call seonational.com. We look forward to this new chapter of our company, to increasing our output with these new processes and continuing to grow exponentially.
