Phrases SEO and Analytics people love …

Yesterday I was at the Search Metrics event and one of the slides from Drew Broomhall amused me –  I think it happens to often to SEO people that it sparked quite a murmur through the (SEO) audience …! 

Worst words an SEO can hear? #searchmetrics twitter.com/dergal/status/…
— Gerry White (@dergal) July 11, 2012

I snapped it as it looked all too familiar and tweeted it –  suddenly my pocket was vibrating away with retweets and mentions of it, turns out it wasn’t just familiar to the people in the room!

I don’t think it is just SEO guys that struggle with this, I am assuming IAs struggle when someone says “this is the new design” or analytics guys struggle when we spot a key feature (conversion point) on a website such as downloading a white paper or sharing an infographic that doesn’t seemingly get tracked like it should and you know in a few months someone will ask for the results …

For anyone who is involved in a website life cycle, please do me a favor and get to listen to Drew Broomhall talk! He is one of those truly smart guys that gets the business angle, plus he comes from a copywriter background which makes him able to converse with journos that are typically a “special crowd” (hint, just like developers, buy them drinks … or  as Martin Woods says, Biscuits as they are cheaper…  Ooh, if you in a hot office based in Leeds buy a bag of cheap ice creams down the market – they worked well before the air conditioning,  cheaper than chips too! 

I was thinking of expanding this list into a list of “hated expressions” from SEO people, feel free to leave some in the comments…

My choice few are 

“…don’t worry the developer knows how to SEO”
“… So when it loads I want this flash intro to play full screen with our company anthem.”
“….it is ok – I put Google Analytics code on” –
…”The reason the bounce rate is 1 or 2% is because our website is that awesome … ”
“….What do you mean how are we tracking email…”
“…What do you mean how are we going to send the email” after assuring us that they would send the one we had designed (ok, straying out of the SEO department)

I am guessing most of you have already seen http://clientsfromhell.net/

On an unrelated note – the Search Metrics product is very cool and I suggest you take a look if your a data driven SEO guy