Posted on by raymond Posted in Freelance MS Office Developer (VBA)Tagged , , ,
I love this job.
As promised in My Entrepreneurial Life as a Microsoft Office VBA Freelancer Part I,  I am going to do a bit of a dive into SEO challenges and complexities – For the newbies out there I will start with the basic key concepts.  For those of you with some familiarity with SEO, stick around, I am going to confirm some of your worst fears.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine. SEO refers to the improvement of unpaid results and excludes direct traffic/visitors and the purchase of paid placement. Wikipedia. In laymen’s terms it is ‘tuning’ your website so you get as many visitors as possible.  So, if you are a blogger, more readers and if your are selling a service like Microsoft VBA Freelance Development, more potential clients. Seems simple enough right? Wrong -It is anything but simple. In my opinion the best way to illustrate SEO challenges and complexities is to do a Google search and analyze the results. Let’s do a search on VBA Freelancers, a subject I have some familiarity with.  Oh, there’s another acronym you should be familiar with SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) which is exactly what we are analyzing.
First note the little Ad to the left of upwork #1 post spot, well that’s an Advertisement that Upworks pays a pretty penny for. You can search  the internet and find sites that will tell you that there are 210 searches per month for the keywords VBA Developer and the Cost Per Click is estimated at a whopping $7.87.  Yes, thats just a click it doesn’t guarantee there will be a sale.  When we look furter at the page we see  the first 4 sites are clearly marked Ad. Continue to look at those pages and you’ll see pattern emerge. Even if they are not designated as advertisements, They are all the big players. Upwork, Toptal, ExcelHelp, Indeed etc., Page after page is litteraly smothered with ads or big players. It can pose a daunting prospect.  I am sure there are some organic sites (organic = Not a Paid Ad) from small players out there in this google query but they are in pretty deep, Page 5?.

There’s a Joke in the SEO world:  “if you want to commit a murder, bury the body on page 2 of an internet search.”  Think back how many times did you go to page two or three?  The question then becomes- How can I get past these big players? The answer is you probably can’t.  You can, howeve,r use alternate meanst o go around them and secure business.  It will require more work.  Of my two last clients one found me through my website and one through a social media post.

Fascinating Google Stats (bluelist.co)

  • Google has 90.46% of the search engine market share worldwide.
  • 15% of all searches have never been searched before on Google.
  • Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day.
  • Google has a market value of $739 billion.
  • An average person conducts 3–4 searches every single day.

Gone are the days where you could put up a simple website, include the all the keywords in your metadata and get business.  So is SEO dead? In a competitive Market perhaps not dead but transformed into another being.  In my business with so many Excel Users and so many businesses creating complex uses of excel, Access and Word I only need to snag a tiny portion of those Google Searches to have a viable business.  So far it seems to be working.

My Other Strategies
Google factors in a number of things in what is called the Google Search Algorithm.  PageRank (PR) is an used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages.  Past history and the number of prior search hits is said to play a role on your placement. So, this is a long game. Whatever your Strategy, it will take time.
1. Join relevant groups
2. Create posts in those that demonstrate you are a subject matter expert.  To satisfy my creative side, I love to create tools that allow me to polish my skills.
3. Give away free stuff- the aforementioned tools
4. Create and write a meaningful Blog with quality content.
5. Build a portfolio of past jobs that you can point to demonstrate you deliver on what you promise and your customers would do business with you again.  

Your goal is to get enough people to your site to get business.

If you enjoyed my blog and would like to comment or share a similar experience please send your comments  Here.
If you would like to say hello and Buy me a cup of coffee please follow the link.
Raymond Mills, M.B.A., M.S.  has spent over 20 years of his career as Accountant, Investment Bank and Credit Card Technical Auditor/ Data Analyst.  His specialty was using Excel to get Big Databases including Teradata, Oracle,  Squel Server and Sybase to give up their secrets. Ray has said “I love nothing better than using VBA to unleash the power of Microsoft Office.” You can contact Ray @ 484 574-3190 or by emailing him Here

If you have a challenge with Excel, Access or Word and would like to speak with Ray,   You can get his contact details by clicking here: Contact Me