Image credit goes to www.portent.com

The launching of Panda (2011) and Penguin (2012) to assess websites’ ranks has scared web-developers and SEO recently. There have been continuous debates online about the death of SEO. The quote above spiced up the debates even more. Having done my own research and talked to some SEO professionals, I came up with one conclusion: SEO is not dead, it’s maturing and becoming a more fair practice. SEO has been always an evolving process in response to the ever-changing internet market. What the experts call “social content replacing SEO" is no other than what SEO is evolving to. SEO old practices do still matter.

I was really sure about this until I analysed how a leading digital agency applied SEO on their websites using 2 different tools: Power Mapper and SEO Workers.

The results were absolutely shocking.

Power Mapper Assessment

Power Mapper assesses websites by looking at errors, accessibility, compatibility, privacy, SEO, standards and usability. It specifically points out specific pages with issues.

AKQA: 5 out of 10 web pages with SEO issues (worse than average)

AKQA's integration of social media and the website is impressive. The site also has a lot of internal and external links. However, a lot of pages are missing meta-tag descriptions and keywords. Also, some links don't include the most relevant keywords in its descriptions.

SEO results

AKQA scores the highest for its own brand name on Google and Bing. However, the site isn’t on the first page of both search engines when we type relevant keywords s.a. digital, digital agency, online agency, innovation,…. you name it.


What does the competitor do?

To answer my question, I assessed another digital acency's website, Koozai, which has high visibility on Google, The website is always listed on the first page of Google when we type “digital marketing agency” or “digital agency”. Apparently, Koozai implemented all Google search engine guidelines perfectly. 

I believe that the reason why AKQA doesn't fully apply old SEO practices is simply because they don't aim to achieve high search engines scores. People in the industry already know their name; online brand awareness is not their main goal.
So, good old SEO isn't dead. At least not yet.

ht.

Image credit goes to mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl

AKQA is one of the world's leading digital agencies. Founded in 2001, the multi-award winning agency has now 11 offices in the US, Europe and Asia. AKQA caught my attention for having a lot of interactions online, without being interactive.

AKQA implements all the general beliefs of “how can you be successful online” except being interactive. Having analysed their online efforts, I could say that AKQA’s online contents are perfectly integrated to communicate a consistent message: AKQA is the thought leader in the industry. This leads to the creation of desire and interest among its target audience, which will generate sales leads, quality employees and free publicity.

Let’s take a closer look at AKQA’s brilliant online strategy and how it has been implemented.

User classification

AKQA’s target audience includes professionals who are classified as potential clients (top level management), potential employees and media. This can be seen from the content of all online activities mentioning the brand that focuses on the agency’s achievements, notable work and thoughts.

Positioning & Strategy

AKQA’s positions itself as a thought leader in digital marketing industry to strengthen its image as one of the world's leading digital marketing agencies. Thus, its online strategy focuses on informing rather than interacting. This demonstrates AKQA’s extensive knowledge about the industry.

The contents it promotes highlight the company’s USPs (innovation, quality, service and thoughts) by presenting their work, achievements and opinions. Additionally, AKQA uses professional tone-of-voice in all its online contact points to relate with its target audience.

Channels

AKQA uses a number of owned media to communicate its brand message:

Goals
Having analysed AKQA’s online activities, I noticed its two interrelated goals:

Findability

AKQA has excellent online findability for people who already know the agency name. When you type “AKQA” on the two most used search engines (Google and Bing), the first 50 pages of both search engines are filled with AKQA's online activity and news mentioning AKQA. However, AKQA’s website is not listed on the first two pages of any of those search engines when you type “digital agency”, “digital marketing”, or “interactive agency”. This shows that increasing awareness isn’t AKQA’s objective. AKQA assumes that its target audience already know their name.

Success

AKQA has been playing its cards right. Either by performing excellent PR or executing its online strategy well, AKQA has gained a lot of earned media. Forbes, Adweek, Wall Blog, Marketing Magazine, and many more have given a bunch of favourable publicity. Along with that, a lot of the employees voluntarily (I suppose) mention AKQA in their personal blogs. Here are a few of them: James Hogwood Blog  and Tink. 

All those earned media is very powerful to boost the company’s credibility and AKQA's image. The company has met its goals.

I believe that AKQA’s approach in being informative and less interactive online is the best strategy to position the company as a thought leader in the industry. This shows that AKQA knows the industry the best and doesn't need any input from their target audience. AKQA is a great example of a company that refuses to follow the general belief “brands need to be interactive” in its strategy, and still excels.

Do you see it differently? Share your thoughts on the comment below.

ht.