How time flies. April is gone as well – and still, there is no summer in sight. But at least there’s no more snow over here in Germany.
Content-wise it felt a little lower in April, this might be due to vacation or just because everyone is busy visiting conferences such as the SMX series which took place twice (Sydney and Munich). But nevertheless – I of course did collect the best pieces for “Germany Search” edition 04-2013 here on State of Search: (more…)
It’s soo ridiculous… March comes to an end and I still see the damn snow when looking outside of my office in Germany. That not nice, really! However… the depressing white – which also covered parts of THE German-conference event in March – SEOcampixx in Berlin – did not prevent from producing quite a bit a great content during this month. So, let’s get straight into “Germany Search” edition 03-2013 here on StateOfSearch: (more…)
Just back from a beautiful and sunny vacation in Thailand to the – still – damn cold German winter. Tried to dig through as much content as I could in just two days and therefore I’m happy to present “Germany & Search” edition 02-2013 here on StateOfSearch. This is what we got in February: (more…)
First month of 2013 already gone – how time flies. And there seems to be no slowing down in content creation. So without further due, I’m happy to present “Germany & Search” edition 01-2013 here on StateOfSearch. So, let’s get into this: (more…)
Another month comes to an end and therefore it’s time again for “Germany & Search” here on StateOfSearch. We’re now counting the third edition. Again, quite a bit of stuff went down this month. For me, November usually is one of the busiest months of the year – seems to be true for a lot of people as well – especially looking at the content that has been produced, events gone down and status updates being made. So, let’s get right into this. (more…)
Wow, how time flies by! October is already gone – it feels kind of surreal. And it has also been a month already since we started with the very first post of “Germany & Search” here on StateOfSearch. I certainly hope you found that kind of “aggregation” to be of use – and even if you just run it with Google translate, I promise that there is definitely some great stuff in there. It’s worth having a look! So, another month, another edition; and here we go: (more…)
Welcome to our very first post of a new series on StateOfSearch titled “Germany & Search”. The series will – for now – be appearing on a monthly basis and covering the most important German-speaking posts (believe it or not: We do have content in Germany as well) and try to give a brief summary of those – in English of course. So, without further due, let’s get into that! (more…)
Andre Alpar is one Partner of an international SEO company AKM3, based in Berlin. Andre has been very busy in the search industry, he has published a number of open source SEO software (www.seerobots.com), is a speaker at key events, podcasts (www.omreport.com), runs a cigar shop (www.noblego.de) and has a book coming out. When I was in Berlin, I caught up with Andre and asked him a few questions about search in Berlin.
I started to build websites in 1996 back when there was just search engine watch.
In 1997/98, I had an internship in a yacht charter company in Hawaii. They wanted to rank for the products and I did get them ranking. Once the internship had finished, I went I back to Germany. The search landscape became more competitive and I thought I could offer SEO as a service. However, I was met with resistance to SEO back then as people thought that as they had a website, they would not need any SEO. I built my own website, I was number one for the term “games” in German. I received a lot of traffic and then when Google appeared, I was still number one.
In 2001, when the dot com bubble burst, I moved away from online. I lost belief in it and I went to do my PhD.
AKM3 – has different meanings. We wanted something short and easy to remember.
1) Our USP is our unique approach. All of the MDs and myself have worked client side so we all put a lot of thought into how an SEO agency should be run so that clients will want to work with us.
Many SEO companies in the market in Germany have in their contract agreement with their clients that the links they develop for their clients are only valid as long as they stay with that agency. Clients are afraid to go elsewhere as it would mean losing their links and rankings.
Therefore from the beginning, we set up our company so that the client is free to leave our agency services should they so wish at any time. If we build links for them, which we call “link marketing” they will still have these links if they leave.
This has proved to be successful as the company grew from 0 to 60 employees in 2.5 years.
2) Transparency
We are very open to our clients, as demonstrated e.g. by how we report our link marketing results.
3) International
We can help with SEO in 20 countries, something other companies may not be able to do. We employ native speakers for each of the different markets. But we have everybody working closely togeather from our Berlin office for these different countries.
Our clients are mostly German and they have a certain idea how they want their SEO agency to be run such as the reporting, the on page optimisation and the link marketing. They have problems finding agencies abroad when they want to take their product into different countries. For us it is really easy to service German clients when they develop their product or service abroad. We help them to get an SEO presence in every market they want to enter.
Germany is one of the most competitive markets. There is a reason why there are a lot of good SEO in Germany. There are lot of people all round the world, who want to live in Berlin. We employ them to work in their native language and the fixed costs of living are much cheaper then if we were to have this office in London.
We have the same KPIs as many agencies.
CPC, CPL (cost per lead) if fixed fee, CPS (cost per sale) (CPA) – not used CPA in Germany.
Visibility index – aggregated ranking usually evaluated via different German SEO tools.
I am unable to disclose the clients we have at this company. However, before I was working at AKM3, I was at Rocket Internet (eDarling, Wimdu, Groupon, Zalando, etc.) servicing more than 30 of its companies with SEO consulting and other services.
They definitely understand PPC over SEO. We give a lot of strategic advice, where as not much is need for PPC. There is a higher tendency of doing PPC in house but outsourcing SEO to an agency. I have just written an article about In House SEO.
They have all increased in rankings –mostly affiliates got killed. If your client is a legitimate site and a big brand, then it has not been affected.
There has been a shift more on the quality of links which has an effect on cost. It is more important to have less links which are of higher quality than many low quality links. We also help clients to set up internal process to acquire links.
Yes I attend SMX and this past year have spoken at 20 different conferences throughout Europe. I set up and run OMCap (www.omcap.de) which is partnering with SES. It takes places in October in Berlin. From this year on we will have some English presentations as well and hope to attract some international online marketing people as well.
We offer on page optimisation and link marketing.
Reporting is included in all the services. If use the sophisticated tools, then there is no a lot of reporting needed. Sometimes we even teach the clients how to use the reporting tools.
I mostly use Sistrix – my colleagues at AKM3 like Searchmetrics and SEOlytics as well.
We use one of the SEO tools mentioned above for reports – what we have been doing, what links able to acquire, information about the links, where we get them from etc.
I think it is will be more strongly interlinked with regular marketing. SEO will be more about relationships and the relationship it has between PR, marketing and social media.
The Germans have a long history of privacy matters, even outside of the Internet. They are especially keen on protecting their citizens from unwanted collection of data. That has lead to some strange situations, like for example people opting-out their houses from Streetview and then talking about that, with a picture in front of their houses, in the German newspapers.
One of the ‘targets’ of this privacy-sensitive policy has for a long time been Google Analytics. A few years ago it even looked like the Hamburg Data Protection Officer was going to get Analytics declared illegal in Germany. The Data Protection Officer has been working with several commissions and webmasters, as well as Google, to come to a solution. They have now declared officially that Google Analytics can be used in Germany without complaint from the German data protection authorities. (more…)
Searchmetrics earlier this week responded quickly to the latest move from Google in their algorithm updates. The Panda Update which was rolled out World Wide and thus in Europe last week saw winners and losers in the different countries.
We already saw the list of Germany earlier this week, now Searchmetrics has released the list of winners and losers in France and is giving us more details on the winners and losers in Germany. It turns out that if you lose, you lose big and if you win, you only win a little. According to Searchmetrics visibility can go down to almost 99%, but winning only means a few percentages gain. (more…)
Germany was probably one of the countries which was the most difficult towards Google when it comes to Streetview. The Germans just didn’t seem to like the privacy concerns around it. At least, some Germans didn’t. And they now seem to have ‘won’.
According to Searchengineland Google has stopped all Street View cars from driving around and taking pictures in Germany. It is a bold move, especially after Google had recently won a case in German court which made Streetview legal in Germany. (more…)
Today I would like to share a little news story with you. I know we are not a newsblog ( we just got a news section though!) but I think this news is good food for an interesting discussion. I’m talking about a “scandal” in Germany, also known as “Bloggergate”.
So what happened? On the 21st of january Sascha Pallenberg, author of the blog netbooknews.de, published a tweet saying he got some interesting secret documents which will cause a “Tsunami” in the German blogosphere. In perfect Wikileaks-style he said that he will “review the material” and publish it later.
(more…)
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