Sponsored Review: 5 Part SEO Guide

When I saw a 5 part SEO guide in the list of opportunities for SponsoredReviews, I couldn’t resist submitting a bid.

The site in question is obusearch.com which is apparently an Arizona SEO company. As the title suggests, they’ve created a 5 lesson SEO Guide that’s actually pretty good. I mean sure, you’re not going to be able to cover everything in 5 lessons, especially when you also cover SEM, but it’s definitely a good resource for introducing someone to the industry.

They do seem to to over use Arizona and Scottsdale terms in their title tags though. I get that they are targeting Arizona Search Engine Optimization and Arizona SEO and all that but what is the point of having it in almost every title tag? They would be much better served to target other cities or terms with those pages and focus on having their home page rank for their main Arizona terms. Also, I’m a bit disappointed that they’ve titled each lesson as “Lesson 1” or “Lesson 2” etc rather than focusing on the subject of each lesson. This is an issue that I see a lot and in fact have been guilty of in the past but to be honest I’d hope for more from a company selling SEO services. I believe SEOmoz coined the term “keyword cannibalization” to describe this fairly common issue and says this about it:

Contrary to the belief of my three fictitious clients above, Google doesn’t interpret this as meaning that your site as a whole is more relevant to “snowboards” or should rank higher than the competition. Instead, it forces Google to choose between the many versions and pick one it feels best fits the query.

While the site does appear on the first page for most of their targeted terms, I’m certain they would like to be doing better (otherwise why order this review) and this would be the quickest and easiest area to address.

Another major issue Obu Web should address on their site is their internal linking. Again, this is something that’s often over looked but can have a HUGE benefit. Looking through the site I haven’t found a single place where they link to their own pages with optimized anchor text. I’ve found several instances of the phrase “Arizona SEO” and yet, much to my dismay it’s not been linked back to the home page. I’m not sure why people seem to overlook internal links or even dismiss them all together, however, good internal linking can be the difference between fighting on the top spot or floundering down lower on the page or even a few pages back. However, when you’re already in the top 10 and you can still make improvements like this, you’re in pretty good shape.

Obu Web, if you end up implementing these changes, I’d love to hear from you and watch the results of this review. Good luck!

This has been a SponsoredReview. If you’d like SEO Refugee to review your site, you can do so through SponsoredReviews.com.