I just joined the Ad Club of Seattle in the hopes of meeting some good people I can recruit away from the tradtional ad business into our nefarious circle (insert devious grin icon). As I was checking out upcoming events, I noted a seminar next week with Seattle ad executives Tracy Wong & Pat Doody. Pat & Tracy own the well respected local ad agency Wong Doody, whose work had been an inspiration to me back in my graphic and web design days (in the late '90's).
Upon taking a visit over to their website, I was shocked and dismayed to find it in tatters. Not only is the front splash page useless; it leads only to a second splash page offering entry to either their public relations or marketing and advertising (brilliantly put on separate domains to help spread link pop). Both of these sites are poorly designed and offer no real content... I hope that Pat & Tracy are doing a better job for their clients then they are for themselves in this arena. With a client list like this, they must be doing something right...
It may take time but SEO and advertising will merge efforts...if only because the advertisers will be spending more and more $ on the web and shrinking their other ad expenditures in print, radio, tv, and other. We already do this...and it has a positive effect.
In a meeting w/ ad people classified for our regional/major city newspaper we found (about 1 year ago) that over 40 (maybe46) of the top 50 markets no longer had the majority of want ads...having lost that to websites like monstor.com.
Newspapers are losing revenues and seeing ad dollars go into the web and email campaigns. TV viewership is shrinking...the best rated shows get less viewership than in the past. The Yellow pages is putting more and more effort into YP on the web...and competing w/other entities for similar impact.
High rankings for one's own site are only one of the creative ways to generate this business. We are being solicited by a local radio station that has a "search engine" on its site and is selling advertising like crazy on the site...
Here are approximation of stats they just sent me..." over 79,000 visits for September. ... over 48,000 in August and over 46,000 in July. They mention they had close to 1 million page visits in August. They cross sell visiting the web site off their radio
The smart AD agencies will sink money into SEO expertise sooner rather than later.
>smart ad agencies
Isn't that an oxymoron? *ducks*
Now the site is not even working!
Looks like WongDoody may be out of business... Oh wait... actually, you just need to add the www now to reach the site (they disabled the old re-direct to the domain without www) https://www.wongdoody.com/
We'll see - I'm going to a bar meet with the group on Nov. 1 and I'll certainly report on how that goes.
Rand,
When I tried to click on either of your splash page links they did not work in either IE or Mozilla. (Page not found). You may have a problem with these links?
Big visibility loss here but IMO they will not change it because they think that it is cool... and what do a bunch of webmaster's possibliy know about advertising?
old school vs new school issue
I used to spend a lot of time with ad agency folks in my city. I agree w/ Mick. May not be good for serps...may be good for setting that "first" creative impression.
Being involved with ad agency folks is a sharp idea, Rand. Can dramatically improve your reach and focus. I'd try and hook with great account people...who have good contacts w/the market, design and writers...a real gift.
Looked up their web site on the mcar keyword tool for the following; advertising agency seattle #34 and seattle advertising agencies #33.
Maybe there is a great opportunity to trade and join together...your seo skills; their account contacts, creative writing and creative design work.
A potential match made in heaven.
There are not 32 bigger stronger ad agencies in Seattle. If I was looking for an ad agency in Seattle using search on google...forget it.
Dave
That is often a problem with ad agencies. They are quite confident in their methodology (read: believing their lies they tell clients about their websites) and are often quite stubborn to change it. Many ARE so good at other media, that the web is still trivial.
I really TRIED to work with them for a long time, but many ad agencies are near impossible to convince. Perhaps I should give it another shot some day, but I got extremely frustrated with constantly being bilked for information form the half dozen or so agencies I tried pretty hard to do business with.
When I had first gotten into SEO and was searching for a job, I was actually e-mailing a lot of agencies on the virtues of SEO. I did get responses, which is often tough at all with lots of the "high end" (read: snooty) agencies. Two of the few I ended up interviewing with, I put up pages, and ended up outranking them for their own names (with JUST onpage SEO and one page). Unfortunately neither was ready in time for the interview (this is during monthly updates), and the humor was lost on them at a later time.
I got tired of beating my head against the wall, and realized that for the most part you can only win with ad agencies with more of a "hard to get" approach, than with being really excited an appreciative to work with them. It kinda sucks, and especially frustrating when you KNOW you could help them improve immensely with just some simple things. The trouble is, they THINK it's gonna be simple, and wanna pay accordingly.
Sometimes i think that we think too much. Maybe their website does have way too many splash pages and gateways and the first thing we look at is `how do they get se traffic?` But suprisingly there are people that actually do leave the computer and go and set up meetings. The website is maybe a business card add-on and they use that to give a bit of bulk to their business card.
Its like the people that are ranked for `search engine optimization` in the serps. It dosent make them a better seo than joe soap that never got round to building his site promoting himself due to him being overloaded with business but more that they spent more money and time on the ranking of their own site than they did clients. I like the wong site and it probably does the job.