Probably not. “Too many cooks spoil the broth.”

Sometimes a client will ask if it will be helpful to hire an additional SEO company, or a few extra individual SEOs, to help with all the work. This usually means we have failed to educate the client on how it all works, or we have not had that conversation yet.

Much of the “work” involved with SEO is analysis, and strategy development. Unless your multiple SEO services are working closely together, the chances of any two SEOs coming up with the exact same strategy or even the same data from analytics is pretty slim. SEO is more of an ongoing process than a list of labor intensive tasks. Good SEO is a long term endeavor – a marathon not a sprint. When it comes to the actual work of optimizing the site, it is unlikely that using more than one SEO is going to work since each SEO will have different ideas about things like page titles, structure & navigation, content strategy and the optimization of the content.

Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen, by John Cherry

During the early stages of a campaign, clients will often learn that some of their competitors have many more backlinks than they do, and assume that we need as many people as possible to help get caught up. Good intentions, but it doesn’t work like that. Even if the quantity of links was as important as the quality, getting a lot of links in a hurry can be a signal to Google’s algorithm that you are trying to manipulate the search results.

Even if one SEO is handling on-page and content, and another is handling link building; if your SEO people are not working together closely, the overall strategy and timing of everything is going to be off the mark. Multiple SEOs or link builders can also make it difficult to know who is responsible for success or failure. When your site is doing well, it would be nice to know why. When your rankings are dropping like a rock, you really don’t want to have to figure out who is responsible for all the spam links that none of your SEO people said they would use. You will end up needing another independent SEO Auditing Service to figure out which one of your SEOs is doing more harm than good – AND have to clean up the mess.

Does Hiring Multiple SEO Companies Make It Work Faster? is from: Ker Communications

A few years ago, a common but spammy practice was to buy as many domains as possible that contain your keywords. The idea was that you could then have many sites showing up in the search results since it was often easy to rank high for “favorite keyword” with an Exact Match Domain (EMD) like “favoritekeyword.com”. If that didn’t work out, you could have the extra domains redirect to your real site and still get some of the benefit. And by owning every possible keyword matched domain, you could avoid future competitors coming along and having a really easy time ranking for some good keywords. Google’s EMD Algorithm Update eliminated some of that and made it more difficult to succeed with this somewhat spammy strategy.

Regardless of the EMD update, Google’s increased focus on quality makes it necessary for all of those sites to be pretty good, or have some really effective link spamming in place in order to rank well. Even then, it isn’t likely that these sites would stay at the top of the search results for very long unless you put a significant amount of effort into making those additional sites useful and full of good content. It is much better to put your resources into improving your real website.

Google’s Matt Cutts made a video about this about two years ago and Google has advised against it other times, but people still think lots of doorway sites on several domains is a good idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOB5biRQXVA

Like most things in SEO, multiple sites can still be used in moderation (as in just a few of them) if the sites are different enough from each other. Maybe they sell different products, or are aimed at a different type of customer. As long as they are unique and good quality, you can still make use of them. Or maybe your company’s name happens to be a commonly searched competitive keyword, therefore it is actually a brand domain, too. But don’t expect multiple domains to count for much in terms of SEO when linking them together. 

Is Having Several Websites with Keywords in the Domain Names a Good Strategy? is from: Ker Communications

Lots of Followers, Likes, +1′s, Circlers, Retweets and Pins are indeed good – as long as they are real. Don’t fall into the trap of forgetting there are real people looking at you, not just search engines and social platforms.

Buying social media endorsements like Facebook Likes, Twitter Followers or Tweets makes you look deceptive, and the social media platforms and search engines are wise to this scheme.  If you have a small business that is not likely to serve more than a handful of people a year and your site doesn’t have a lot of exciting things to share, but you have 20,000 likes on Facebook, people will recognize that you are not exactly trustworthy. 

Is It Good to Get Lots of Fake Social Media Followers? is from: Ker Communications

More is sometimes better, but better is worth more.

When Google rolled out the Penguin algorithm update which filtered out sites that were benefiting from a high number of manipulative, spammy backlinks, it really called attention to the fact that the “more is better” myth is still strong in SEO link building. Sure, you can still bring a website much closer to the top of the search results by posting hundreds of “nice post” blog comments, buying a bunch of spam blog guest posts or a variety of other ways of getting links that really don’t benefit users at all – but the site will not rank well for very long. As soon as the algorithm catches up with how bogus the links are, you’ll be back where you started – or worse.

Instead of spending a lot of time and money trying to get a high number of links to maintain an imaginary ranking factor like “link velocity”, work on making connections with popular, influential websites or authorities within your field; and put your efforts into making the content of your site, or even the things you do in offline, link worthy. 

Too Many Links?

I wouldn’t want anyone to read this and think “well I will just start a brand new site and go right to the top without link building”. “Build it and they will come” does not work on its own and a site does need proper promotion. In recent months, however, I have seen many brand new sites with very few incoming links rank very well with some better than average content and a few good links.

The links you earn by having good quality content and promoting your website properly are typically going to be worth much more than the easy links you can get in huge numbers.

Links Are Like Votes. Should I Get As Many As I Can? is from: Ker Communications

How often can you really publish worthwhile content on your blog?

There is no question that a blog is a great way to share information, promote your business and connect with your audience. Having a decent amount of good quality website content is also a good thing.
Do you really need to blog every day like many SEOs recommend?

There have been a few times where someone at Google has said something about how the search algorithm favors “fresh, unique, quality content”, but a lot of people either miss the part about quality or don’t know what it means. Someone with an SEO blog then writes an authoritative sounding article about how you absolutely must blog every day, maybe even more often. Then, other bloggers who are too lazy to do their own work will cite that first article as if it is a golden nugget of irrefutable truth, webmasters find it, and the web gets filled with repetitive useless filler. Some may argue that Google brought this on by not recognizing this behavior and failing to be 100% clear about what “fresh” means, but I would guess that Google felt common sense would prevail. (Let’s see if anyone starts repeating that. After all, it is a guess on the internet so it must be true, right?).

Where content marketers often go wrong is assuming that quantity or even frequency is more important than quality. First, let’s look at what “quality content” means. Many seem to think that if the blog article has few spelling and grammatical errors, then it is automatically “good quality”. Google does consider those things, but remember that the search engine also favors things that are popular. Pages and sites become popular not because of things like good grammar, but because the message hits home, entertains, provides new information or a new take on old information.

Quality is more than just “no spelling mistakes”.
Uniqueness is more than “not plagiarized”.

Copying the content strategy of a competitor and churning out “me too” articles to match what they have done can also be a big waste of time. It has already been said. Can you say it better or add some value to it? Content that has a truly unique angle on a topic, or is somehow compelling is much more likely to be shared on social media and gain real, natural, editorially placed links that will help your site rank better.

How often should you really blog?

That depends on your site, your audience, and you. If you have lots of information about your business to share, blog whenever you have something to say. If you have some helpful tips to demonstrate your expertise, big news within your company, or have some special offers or coming attractions, these are all things that can be blog worthy. It doesn’t have to be often, and sometimes just one piece of content like an exclusive article, a really interesting video or even a useful PDF can be enough to get your website some attention.

Is Anybody Even Reading Your Blog?
If your blog does not already have a lot of regular visitors or subscribers, you will need to promote your blog articles in some way to get it in front of people who may be interested. This is where your efforts should shift from thinking up your next blog posts, to promoting what you already have. Reach out to other bloggers who write about similar topics – make friends and learn things. Just like real world networking, these people can help you get your message to more people. They may link to you from their website, or simply mention you in a Tweet, share your post on Facebook or Google+ or spread the word about you in some other way.
Use your content marketing time wisely. Instead of posting five uninteresting, easily ignored blog articles every week (or two weeks, or whatever will work for you), just do one really great article and work on getting those influencers to read it and share it with their following. 
For more about why blogging every day can be a waste of time, see Why Posting Every Day is a Silly Strategy at BoostBlogTraffic.com

The Search Engine Results Pages are not a “Who Has The Most Content” Scoreboard.
The point of Google’s emphasis on “fresh, regularly updated websites” is not that Google wants us all to blog mindlessly in an attempt to put out the most content. It is just that they don’t want to send searchers to your site if it has been collecting dust for months or years. But even then, there are still valuable sites that have not changed at all in a very long time.
Many of the things Google recommends are not because Google wants to keep you busy, but because Google knows what readers want. They have a lot of data about that sort of thing. Many of the most popular websites and blogs are updated every day or more often, but they probably didn’t start out that way. Now, they have the resources and writers to publish several times a day and reach lots of readers with nearly every article. But if you are writing for your company blog and not planning on growing into a major online publication, it just isn’t the same situation. 

Regardless of what Google wants, if you find yourself rewriting what is essentially the same message in a different way, your readers are not going to love it. They may even resent coming back to your blog for more of the same old same old. It is spam.
To rephrase what many of us in the online marketing industry preach so often: “Create great, unique content… as needed“. If you really can provide value every day, then do it. But you don’t need to keep writing the same thing over and over unless there is something new to add as a follow up.

Fresh, Regularly Updated Content = Blogging Daily or More? is from: Ker Communications