Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Have you ever heard that term before? If not, just ask anyone in digital marketing or who runs a strong website and they should be able to tell you all about it. Or just search the letters SEO and you’ll see all types of paid listings and paid posts since that is what many companies are trying to focus on these days.
In addition, SEO is on the top of our minds since a member of our team recently listened in on a digital workshop about SEO.
What’s interesting is that if you look at the chart above a couple of those logos OR parent companies are on our site, www.cardzforkidz.org/participants. For example, we have Google in the Diamond section. Verizon Media, who owns Yahoo, is in the Gold section. Microsoft, who owns Bing, is also a Gold participant.
One key point from that SEO workshop was how all major search engines use different variables and formulas to rank sites. The only thing is that no one outside those companies really knows the complete formula. The teacher highlighted how there have been many changes, but no one, even within companies (e.g. Google), knows exactly how the system weighs the different variables. People may know some characteristics, but not all of them or how valuable they are. To test the secrecy, we reached out to some of our contacts at Google and SEO experts to see if they knew the secret formula.
With this being a blog post, we must be 100% open and honest. Originally, we reached out to some contacts at Google and different search companies to see if we could quote them for this post. One contact told us, after having reviewed some internal documents, that this information was such a secret that they weren’t even allowed to say that they didn’t know because it was a secret. A secret’s secret?! Another usually responsive contact never responded. Literally – no comment. When we heard from one search expert outside of the Google walled garden they stated, “It’s a long axx explanation. Let’s get a drink and talk about it.” At this point, we’ll have to keep our fingers crossed that you trust us enough to understand that the Google SEO formula is top-secret.
Since we have search companies joining in on the conversation, we figured we’d create our own formula on how to rate the overall value of our participants. Once again, based on the secrecy, we’re not sure how the current search companies do it, but we created our own tool by grouping some metrics and weighed them in various ways. Here’s a raw unsorted listing of SOME of the key characteristics for how we evaluated our most valuable groups:
making/amount of cards
making consistent donations/fundraising
loyalty – making cards consistently
behind the scenes volunteering
providing their logo for our site
being on the board
mentioning us on their site
creating cards in other languages
multiple locations hosting events
sponsoring events
sponsoring cord cutting event
volunteering their services
There are a lot more characteristics and of course they’re all weighted differently, but we’re being secretive. Maybe not as secretive as some other companies because we’ll willfully tell you we can’t tell you! 😉
After all the mathematics and calculations here’s a listing of our top “groups.” Wait, wait, wait. Before we break that out, we just want to explain that we have “groups” in quotes because one of our top participants isn’t a group, it’s actually Independent Artists – people who make cards on their own in their free time. We decided to lump all those artists together for this ranking. Now, let’s roll back the curtain:
Although we had multiple global corporations and universities, it’s interesting that two groups of individuals who gathered friends or people with similar interests almost made it into our OVERALL Elite Eight – Carla Sue Travels & Busy Bee’s both had 17.5 scores.
If you wanted to investigate it as more transferable/understandable numbers, we could evaluate it as out of 100 index or maybe a percentage breakout. With that in mind, UBS is 102% and Google is 100%. Although we have HIGH expectations and are rating these against 20+ different attributes, with everything combined, UBS and Google, met or exceeded our goals, while our Secret Admirers, Independent Artists, and Schneider are currently within 12% of meeting EVERY expectation.
These are the scores as of June 30, 2020. As more participants and cards come in the total scores and breakouts may change, but currently UBS is the most valuable. We will show some of the other exciting attributes for UBS when we have some more of their upcoming ‘cord cutting’ events at local hospitals.
Thankfully, we’ve had participation from 550+ groups. One of the main hashtags we always use when touching on the cards is #EveryCardCounts. That’s because all the cards are important. Even though this blog post has been focused on highlighting our MVG, MOST VALUABLE GROUP, please don’t forget, Every Group Counts; they’re all important as well.