seo talent Archives by Mark Murnahan

SEO and Social Media Reward: $5,000 for Introduction

Updated 13 June 2011 — This offer is re-opened through 30 June 2011.

I am going to give you an opportunity to pick up $5,000 just for making a simple introduction. This is not a hoax, and I really will put $5,000 in your sweaty palms for introducing me to “the right one”.

Great weather is coming, and I am pretty sure that most people can find a way to spend a surplus of $5,000 this spring. Cruise ships, sandy beaches, mortgage payments, utility bills, and many other amazing delights are right around the corner.

I hope that $5,000 will be worth a few minutes of your time to rack your brain, peel through your list of contacts, and think hard about whether you know this person I am seeking. Mostly, I hope that you will do it because I am a good fit for that acquaintance of yours, and because we deserve to meet each other.

So that you can have a better idea of who you are introducing, I offer you a link for more information about me, but you can come back to that part.

First, I will briefly explain why I am making this offer, what I offer, and who I am looking for. If you just want to skip to the details, click here.

I just reviewed the response to an engagement letter I sent out a couple days ago, and I almost wet myself with laughter and dismay all at once. I send out what seems like a squillion responses to companies that contact me hoping to benefit from my work, but this one was different. It was for a company that was referred to my services by somebody who was referred to my services. Somewhere along the line, it seems that I have picked up a reputation for what I do. This still does not mean that everybody I meet has a brain in their head, a dollar in their bank, or a sincere desire to improve their business.

As I have seen many times before, the recipient of my engagement letter hit me back with something resembling “Duh, wut duh ya mean … ya want us tuh pay fur it?” This was not their exact words, but that was my interpretation. To say the least, I am not very tolerant of cheapskates, or people who talk about action more than actually taking action.

It was after this response that I seriously realized that I had hit the wall at the end of my patience for dealing with this equivalent of The Abominable Snowman on Looney Tunes (video reference). As a husband and father of three, I am all grown up and reasonably mature, but if I must tolerate another of these abominable snowmen who insist I am a rabbit, I will likely use much stronger language than good old Daffy Duck.

Yes, I am a snarky guy, and I prefer to send a good booger from your nose to your computer screen than to make this sound too serious. After all, I am trying to put 5,000 bucks in your pocket, and that should be fun!

In this case, I am going to spell something out in sobering terms. I love the work I do. I help companies to be successful with their online marketing. It is an awesome feeling to see companies succeed. However, I must say this in true Murnahan fashion: “Business is great if not for all the damn customers.” Is that crazy? Perhaps, but it is very true. I am inundated by requests each day to offer my services to build an uncommitted company’s success for a fraction of what my work is worth.

The size of the company doesn’t matter. Building bigger and more profitable companies is my job. Even a small company with a focused desire for business growth can be extremely successful with a good strategy and a decisive marketing approach.

I broke my magic wand a long time ago. So, these days I build companies with other tools like market research, strategy, customer modeling, and well-crafted ideas to help companies look, smell, and feel like sex, bacon, and other things people crave. Yes, you read that correctly. In layman’s terms, my job is to make companies more like sex and bacon. You know what I mean, the things that people like.

That is how companies become popular. It improves their search engine rankings because all of the sudden the whole world wants to link to their website. Understanding their best value proposition and knowing the customers who want their “sex and bacon” improves their social media reach, and response rates. When it all comes together, it makes a lot of other great things happen for a company, including much higher profit.

Seeking a Frog Hair in a Fiberglass Factory

Although I am a very experienced and creative marketing guy, finding the best clients is like searching for a frog hair in a fiberglass factory. I sort through a lot of people rubbing their lamp and hoping for a genie, but a much smaller number of people are ready and able to put a signed check in my hand. They still want their fill of that sexy bacony stuff that comes when I rub a couple brain cells together, but that comes with money.

I have said it many times, and even blogged that “When I go to hell, they will have me selling SEO“. I say that, because I simply do not enjoy the selling process. Sure, you can search Google for How to Sell SEO and find me right up top, but the truth is that I love the work, and not the selling. This is why I am seeking an ongoing project, rather than the short-sighted marketing that many people ask for.

To make this fun for both of us, I am offering you a $5,000 reward to help me find that one special “frog hair in the fiberglass factory”. I want the one who wants the benefits that a great SEO and social media marketing guy can provide.

Claim Your $5,000 Social Media Reward!

The details are easy: If you introduce me to my special someone who is ready to take their marketing to a new level of success with a minimum six month engagement of my SEO and social media marketing services, you get the money.

This could be either contract work, or in-house, working directly for the company. You can introduce me by email, telephone, blog about it, tweet about it, direct them to my resume, or whatever you like. You only have to be the one who brings us together, and the money is yours. I just need to know that you are the actual person who introduced us, so I welcome you to contact me.

When do you get the money? I am sure you were thinking that, right? I will pay the $5,000 reward within ten days of my acceptance of a paid contract, or within 30 days of joining with a company full-time.

This is a limited offer! This is limited to just one … my special one. I don’t take on a lot of clients, and if somebody wants me enough to make me their Marketing Director, that is clearly a one-time offer. I am also limiting it in time, so stop dilly-dallying and claim your five grand!

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SEO, Social Media, and Marketing Balls

I often try to relate concepts of SEO and social media to things that people in other industries can use. After all, who really cares about all of this, unless it can help them do whatever it is they do for a living.

If you don’t have anything to sell, you probably aren’t very concerned about your marketing. But you do have something to sell, so let me give you a hand.

My challenge is to help you translate this into earning profit for your company. In the big picture, two important questions I must address are as follows:

What do you do to earn the food you eat?
How can I relate this Internet stuff to something that will help you eat better?

One way I hope to relate this into your line of work is to use analogies. This time, I will use tennis balls, but it could really be about anything.

Now let’s look at what others competing in your industry are doing.

How Others Sell Balls With SEO and Social Media

A common approach to social media that you may see with your competitors is to create a website and then start tweeting and facebooking things like “I have balls”, “Check out my balls!” After a while, they will figure out that people get really tired of the same old balls, and nobody wants to see them anymore.

This is a common outcome when companies neglect the people they are trying to reach, and overlook creativity in their value proposition. So, it will take a different approach, and they may turn their focus to SEO. They will often fill up their blog with a whole bunch of articles about their balls and hope that will work.

The trouble here is that it will take a lot of time and effort to produce all of that blog content. They may decide to outsource it to India or The Philippines but all of the sudden find themselves sending really mixes messages. Balls are different in other countries, and a lot can be lost in translation.

This is not the path you want to take, so put this out of your mind and let’s think about a better way to move your balls.

A Better Way to Move Your Balls

My experience in SEO and social media has led me to this: I have never found an industry that, with enough dedication, cannot be made more interesting when looked at from the right perspective.

It takes some research and creativity, but every industry has something that makes it interesting. Even paper clips can be more exciting … yes, paper clips!

One of the first things to do is to carefully research who wants your balls. You want to understand them, and what they are likely to look for online. You want to reach them where they are … on their turf. Then you need to get a picture of what drives them to take a desired action. In this case, you want tennis players. More precisely, you want tennis players without balls. In order to find them, you need to think more like them, and develop a sense of what will attract them.

Sometimes you have to look outside of the tennis-related industry to find your potential customers’ other interests. I wrote about this not so long ago in an article about customer modeling titled “Facebook Marketing: Pages, Customer Modeling, Promoting, and Awesomeness“. It addressed how to gather information to produce a better model of your ideal customer, and it is worth a read.

Get Others to Talk About Your Balls!

Once you know more about your model customer, you need to produce information that interests them. If you consistently produce quality information about their interests, it will be much easier to keep their attention. If it is compelling enough, they will subscribe to your blog, your Twitter, your Facebook, and etcetera. Now you have an audience that wants to hear about your balls.

With an attentive audience that likes what you do, it will be a lot easier for your balls to be ranked well in search engines. This is because your attentive audience will share your information with other interested people, in the form of website links. They will tweet it, facebook it, and even blog about it. Now, unlike your competitor who talks about his balls all the time, you will have other people talking about your balls.

This is a huge reward to you, because all of those links to your interesting website are crucial to making it rank higher in search engines than the competition. You will want to be good to these people, and keep them fed with more interesting and useful information. So you add more to your blog, and it grows bigger and bigger and eventually gets even more popular.

The cycle has begun, and you are on your way to greater things. You may even decide to grow your business with bigger balls, like softballs, volleyballs, and basketballs.

Selling Balls Takes Dedication

When I claim that this all requires dedication, it means spending time researching, and doing more than just the same old thing the competition is doing.

Before you put this all to use, it is best to develop some degree of marketing talent. Since you are not in the SEO and social media marketing business by profession, I want to recommend subscribing to my blog and reviewing my blog archive to learn about other things that can help you.

I do a bang up job of ranking in search engines for things in the SEO and social media marketing industries. I am supposed to, right? That way, new people can find me.

This was not always the case. I had to work really hard to discover what people want, connect with them using social media, and produce a lot of compelling information, just like I suggested for you. It does not happen overnight, but with dedication, it does happen in time. It will be worth it.

Now, back to those two questions I mentioned earlier:

What do you do to earn the food you eat?
How can I relate this Internet stuff to something that will help you eat better?

Since you can’t just eat your balls, you are going to need to sell them to buy food!

If you do everything just right, before you know it, people will be begging to play with your balls.

If you need more help promoting your balls, there are a lot of people in my industry who can make this happen for you.

I am always looking for people with balls. In my line of work, I encounter a lot of people every day who have no balls, and I will be happy to help you connect with them.

Balls image credit to shawnzrossi via Flickr
Old ball image credit to basykes via Flickr
Ball in mouth image credit to TCL8TO7 via Flickr
Splashing Balls image credit to ingridtaylar via Flickr
Bored ball image credit to greenkozi via Flickr
Begging image credit to sunsets_for_you via Flickr

SEO and Conversion: Increasing Website Traffic is Only Part of SEO

I write a lot about SEO (search engine optimization) and social media marketing. You expect that, and I am here to deliver. What I think a lot of people interested in SEO do not want to face is that SEO is a lot less about tricky technology issues, and a lot more about producing brilliant marketing.

The industry of SEO is ever-changing, but at the same time, many things are constant. For the largest part, the same things that mattered ten years ago still matter today. There have been many technical changes, but the technical aspects of SEO are not as individually important as some people may lead you to believe. The technology is really just a lot of little pieces which we fit together to assist the larger cause.

Early in the industry of SEO it became popular to chase information on the latest tricks to stay a step ahead of the search engines. Although there were cases when this became valuable, it seems pretty convenient that it is also used for confusing customers in order to seem more valuable. Many absurd yet popular myths about SEO such as meta tags still persist, even today.

There is value in understanding the technologies involved, but the truth is often less popular than myths. The truth is that search engine optimization and the value it represents is influenced a lot more by human response than by a computer. Giving people something which holds value to them has always been the most important part of SEO. This is the truth, and it is backed up with numbers.
Providing value to customers is not just a principle of good SEO, but marketing as a whole. When you give people something of value, they are more likely to share it with others. On the Internet, they often share it with links. In SEO, those links are like votes telling the search engines who should sit at the top as the “President”.

The Best SEO Trick Ever: Provide Value to Others

If you adhere to this one solid principle of providing value to others, your marketing will take a positive turn. A trick I have learned through two decades in the marketing business is that sometimes you must give until it hurts. Getting everything you want may not always work on the time frame you have set for yourself. I have often discovered that this challenge simply means that you are either not giving enough value, or you should have started sooner, and with better research.

Transforming a business from good to great is not simple. If it was simple, every business would have great results and everybody would win.

It is popular these days to award medals and ribbons to every kid in the race, but let’s face it … that will not translate well in the business world. We do not all get ribbons and medals.

Making the best of any market means knowing which people to reach and knowing what they want. It means knowing the customers’ needs and desires, and knowing the best way to solve them. When you take a close look, SEO starts to sound a lot like marketing, which is exactly what it is, but SEO is often viewed at as a technical trade. What many people are hesitant to understand is that SEO is more about producing great marketing in a very competitive atmosphere and less about geeky magic tricks. It requires an understanding of what people want, the unique ways they interact online versus offline, creating an appropriately compelling message, and being able to properly apply technology and mathematics.

SEO is a lot less about programming code and geek stuff than it is about people and psychology.

SEO Meets the Human Factor

The technologies surrounding SEO can help a lot, and increased website traffic is a great thing. I certainly love watching big numbers. I know that big numbers of website visitors will always impress my clients. They really want to see those new visitor statistics, because that is something they understand. What they have a harder time focusing on is that if those numbers do not inspire the conversion of lookers into buyers, or convert their brief message into a lasting one, most of the value is lost.

With any marketing message, there is a right group and a wrong group to deliver it to. It is easy to assume that if somebody performs a given search, they are the right audience for you. This is not always as simple as it seems, and often leads to spending a lot of time and money learning hard lessons. Taking a stronger approach to researching your market reminds me of something my father often advised, which is to “measure twice and cut once.”

Focusing on delivering the right message and presenting that message to the right people leads to higher conversion rates. The research to affect this result is in the top two most important roles of a search engine optimizer, second to getting out of bed.

Getting the research right is what tells us how to reach the right audience and what they will respond to favorably. It gives us the information we need to convert website visitors from lookers into buyers. Secondarily, it tells us how to bring more website traffic based on what people are searching for. Yes, bringing the people is secondary to knowing what they will want once they get there. Why should this concept be so difficult for smart people to grasp? Perhaps it is because they are blindsided by a lot of technical talk and SEO lies.

Educating a client on the importance of increasing conversion by producing a better message based on proper research may sound like an excuse to overlook the traffic numbers, right? This is not the case. More traffic is relatively simple to achieve, when you are actually providing high value based on good research.

The fascination with big numbers has created a culture of promoting valueless junk on the Internet aimed only at bloated traffic numbers. As the importance of traffic volume over traffic value grew roots early, many businesses overlooked doing the things that actually produce revenue. This misjudgment has lead many companies to underestimate the value of the Internet for their business growth. They may have hired SEO services which produced a huge volume of traffic, but then when it did not convert to revenue for the company, they lost faith. More often, they find that the SEO either did not really understand their role, or did not make a stand against the client’s preconceptions of the SEO being just a tech job. It is easy to see how these things could make a company stop trying.

Improving SEO Conversion Means Great Marketing

What can you do to convert more website traffic from lookers into buyers? This is an old question that every good marketer faces. The best answer is usually in finding the right audience. It is always easier to sell a product or service if you are selling to the right audience.

It is commonly accepted that good search engine optimizers who have done their research will know how to get more links by providing useful and compelling content. This will create a lot of website traffic, but that does not always mean the money train is coming down the track. If they are trying to sell tractor tires to race car drivers, they may gain a lot of website traffic, but they will probably have a hard time selling tires.

Good SEO also know, which I suspect a lot of people do not realize about the business function of SEO, is that they must produce reasons for those website visitors to take action and convert into something valuable to the website owner. This may mean a sale, a sales lead, a subscriber, or whatever it is that provides value and purpose to the effort. The first step is knowing who those visitors are and what will compel them to take action. The common tragedy is to get the traffic and then try to figure out why people are not responding.

Traffic quality is an area where it seems that many SEO (the good ones) would like to concentrate on more, but they get their hands tied by the client. The client often looks to the SEO primarily for the purpose of driving more traffic, but then neglect the value an experienced SEO has as a marketer and not just as a part of a tech field. This can create a case where conversion is viewed as secondary to a primary goal of traffic, which is totally backward and often a fast track to failure.

What do you think?

Photo credit to landofnodstudios via Flickr

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SEO For Hire: The Worst Job for an Honest Person

I have been in the business of SEO (search engine optimization) for over a decade, and it has provided me a very handsome living in that time. I fell in love with the SEO field with the excitement of having nearly anything I ever really wanted listed at the top of search engines reach the top, and remain there. I still do that, today … every day.

In the time I have been in the SEO industry, I have accumulated so many stories of winning that it is no wonder it feels like a bad drug habit, and I am addicted. Through the 2000’s, SEO was the basis of my means to sell millions of dollars in Internet access and web hosting services to over 2000 Internet access providers and web hosts. I rocked that market and earned squillions as the CEO of a wholesale Internet services company. SEO was really fun, indeed!

Adding to all the fun and games, I have enjoyed things like a relatively small client crediting me for increasing their new home sales by over $82 million in the first year they were my client. That is like an intravenous drug to me, and hearing how many jobs it created for that somewhat small organization means that I have done something meaningful.

I have a lot of stories like these, which keep me going and keep me seeking that next “drug” high.

When SEO Became the Worst Job

I have really had a blast performing my work for clients over the years, and I still love performing the work. However, it was a lot more fun back before every con artist jumped in and said they could do the same thing for pennies, and then cheat customers out of their money. Liars and cheats have made a mockery of the SEO industry, and given people reasons to doubt the truth.

Of course, a good SEO can see right through the lies, but many business customers cannot tell the difference between good SEO and bad SEO. Although I have tried to warn many people, lies about SEO have lead a lot of people by the nose (and the wallet).

I have often said that business is great, if not for all of these damn customers.

For much of my career in search engine optimization, I have worked as the man behind the curtain, as a sub-contractor for other firms. That is largely because I have often felt, and said that “business is great if not for all of these damn customers.” What I mean by that phrase is that in a field where I am quite deeply engrossed and knowledgeable, it can be very challenging to bring SEO down to a level that people will relate to and understand. I am simply not a good person to ask if it is helpful to be listed in the top of search listings when somebody searches for something in your industry. I am a really bad guy to ask whether marketing is a commodity and if everybody can do it just the same.

I have written my thoughts of dealing with prospective clients who do not understand, nor wish to understand, what it takes to develop really effective SEO and social media marketing. I believe I said it well in an article titled “When I Go to Hell, They Will Have Me Selling SEO“.

SEO is Like a Drug Habit, and I May Relapse

Although I may have a relapse from time to time, I have finally decided to set a course to end my services for hire by mid-2011, in order to focus on other endeavors. As I have indicated, SEO is like an addiction to me, so I know that if I do not actually say it in public, right here on my blog, I will probably never quit it.

The fact remains that the field of performing SEO for clients has lost much of the joy. I am tired of having people return to me for cleaning up the messes of another SEO after they decided to go with the cheap guy with a pocket full of fairy dust. More than that, I am tired of defending the truth while realizing that the truth is not what people really want.

For the past couple years, I have sought to gain retail clients to work with directly. I decided to take on a small group of clients who understand what it really means to build success. The ignorance (don’t know), apathy (don’t care to know), and dishonesty (will lie about it) that I have witnessed in the last couple years have caused me to lose much faith in the SEO industry and in the popular business mindset of the day.

Unfortunately, I find that far too many business people are not interested in creating real success when they can settle for just getting by. As a web guy who really does care about delivering results for a client, I have decided that the ignorance, apathy, and dishonesty of the SEO industry, and much of the SEO shopping public are not worthwhile to me.

I am tired of explaining the difference between doing something, and doing something well. Being able to prove results and giving factual proven data, but then having people too indifferent or scared to take the best actions for their own benefit drags me down and quite honestly makes me very sad. I see the actions of the large number of businesses who reach out to me as a microcosm of what is wrong with our business world and our economy today.

There are still a lot of myths to bust and lessons to teach, so I intend to continue blogging on topics of the SEO and social media marketing industry, for now. Besides, I still plan to perform search engine optimization.

Maybe once I officially do not take clients, people will have more trust when I say that the majority of what you hear about SEO and social media marketing is bullshit. It actually does require work, and it actually does require marketing talent to build success.

Your comments and/or well wishes are welcome here. If you can relate to this, I would love to hear your stories! If you would rather throw tomatoes at me, that is just fine as well.

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Why Do SEO Lie? Their Customers Demand It!

You can often catch me defending the importance of search engine optimization, but I am just as likely to criticize the industry. Actually, I tend to be more critical than defensive, but today I am defending the industry honor. This is because although there are a lot of slimy, no good, low-life, bottom feeding, liars, cheats, and rip-off search engine optimizers on the fringe of my industry, there are also many SEO with integrity. These are the men and women in the SEO field who work hard and uphold good business values and deliver on their promises. These are people who take pride in their work and are as excited to see their clients succeed as the clients themselves. So the question must be asked, “Why do SEO lie?” and we should also question the reasons it has become an expected norm in the field. It turns out that a lot of people simply cannot handle the truth and the market started demanding lies. The truth is that it takes more time, knowledge, and expense than most SEO will be willing to tell you. The lies are a whole lot easier for most people to take.

I have done a lot of thinking about why SEO lie and I think I have some good insight to the matter. I have been in the Internet business since about the time graphical browsers came into existence and I have earned millions of dollars for myself and my clients as a search engine optimizer. This is nothing new to me, and I have watched the evolution from beginning through today. I want to share a bit of that with you, and I hope you will understand this from the point of view of a guy with no reason or intent to lie to you. Note that although I may say I am “for hire”, I am extremely selective about who I will work with, and it is statistically unlikely that you will be one of them. That said, if I bullshit you once, just stop reading and move on.

SEO was once a field in which the biggest challenge was to help people understand the value and the need to be listed at the top of search engine results. Being listed as number one in search results delivers many times the return of being listed lower. If you want to learn more about the math, just read the article “Improve SEO Return on Investment (ROI) With Simple Math“.

A Reason to Perform SEO

I will tell you why I entered the industry of search engine optimization for hire, and fell in love with it. Once upon a time, I merged two companies and created a monster. When I say a monster, I mean something big and with teeth that could bite the head off the competitors. We were in the field of website development, web hosting, Internet access and many other things Internet-related. We quickly found that marketing online was really effective, and we made a stand in the wholesale end of the Internet as the geeks behind the geeks. We found ourselves providing Internet access and web hosting services to over 2,000 Internet service providers and web hosts. It soon got to a point when we made calculated efforts to avoid the retail customer. We were doing so well at wholesale services that I often found myself saying “business is great if it wasn’t for all these damn customers!” What we knew was that it had everything to do with our reach in search engines, and so that was obviously an important service offering. What this means is that I joined the industry because I was already successful at it for my own services. I did not enter the SEO field to earn money, I entered it because it was already earning me money.

By providing SEO services to our customers, our customers can sell more, and in the wholesale end of the industry, that is great. Making customers successful means that they sell more, and since the service our customers sell comes from us, it is an obvious formula for success.

Where SEO Lies Began … The Money

Because SEO was such a lucrative field for top performers, it only made sense that there would eventually be an ugly turn in the market. When money flows fast and easy, it is very alluring for every con artist with a computer and a modem. Don’t tell me you have not seen this sort of greed online unless you have never received an unsolicited email for pharmaceuticals. SEO took on an ugly face as it was flooded with people making false claims and unrealistic promises. This was bolstered with extremely high demand for quality search engine optimization that could not be met by the relatively small number of good SEO vs. bad SEO, and due to the huge growth of the Internet.

High demand created a challenge for many SEO, because the industry not only had to explain the needs and benefits of search engine optimization, but also to defend themselves against a growing public perception that was created by the fringe of our industry trying to cash in on the latest craze. This created a market where legitimate SEO had to compete with liars with nothing to lose. On the surface, it put us at a disadvantage, because we planned to be there for the long haul, while the SEO who lie are just there to collect their money and move on and change their company name as needed. In many instances it caused the skilled to stand out, but many SEO took a stance that “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

SEO is Flooded In Recent Years

SEO has taken some obvious directional changes over the past couple years as companies desperately seek cost-effective answers to their marketing needs. The most sensible answers are usually not the easiest or most comfortable for businesses, and this paved the way for an even larger majority of fringe SEO willing to lie to get their business. Many dirty SEO have preyed on notions that if it is cheaper, it must be lower risk, and that search engine optimization is something way over the customer’s head.

The Internet has grown at an astonishing rate, and along with that, there is a huge population of website owners who know so little about the Internet that they are very easy to cheat out of their money by offering them false hopes. Just consider how easy it would be to lie and cheat somebody who knows little to nothing about an industry, and has little patience to learn enough to make good decisions. Then add in the desperation of a recession and you have a formula for disaster.

Many people launching a new website are of the mindset that it will be a quick and easy way to rake in a ton of business and that SEO must be pretty much the same everywhere. This is a huge open door to fraud and misrepresentation of the industry as something confusing and technical. Just imagine how easy it would be to make up a few catchy lines to confuse the public and haul in the money.

What really hurt the industry over time is that as more of the professional SEO who really do know the industry and do a good job for their clients are asked to justify the cost of SEO, more of them lowered their standards to become affordable. It made it likely for honest SEO to take on projects without the resources they needed and only deliver a fraction of what they otherwise could. It started going downhill from there, and it began to blur the lines between the skilled and the unskilled. It caused many of the good SEO to tell seemingly innocent lies of the hard work and long hours it really takes to do the job well. It lowered the good just a little closer to the level of the liars. This also drove many of the good search engine optimizers out of the SEO-for-hire market to focus on their own SEO projects.

Why Would a Good SEO Need You?

It is important to consider that good search engine optimizers who know the job can choose their products and choose their clients. Any time you hire a good SEO, you are buying their time away from other projects, and that creates a cost to them in the way of lost opportunities elsewhere. The best results often come from the SEO who chooses to work for hire because they love it. All the same, they will expect to be compensated well to achieve your success, and often in the form of “pay for performance“.

On that note, I will say that the continued decline of the SEO-for-hire industry is the reason I have recently been blogging less frequently than usual. I am working on my own projects and taking less time to share my talent with others. After all, for the good SEO with integrity and knowledge, we will always earn more by doing the job for ourselves than to do it for our clients. I hope that you will consider this fact when you seek a search engine optimization provider.

I know, my picture says “For Hire”, but the truth is that it is only for those rare few who are not fooled by the lies. It would take a couple sticks of dynamite and a bulldozer to fully drag me away from some of the projects I am working on. Either that or a client with a real understanding of the job at hand and willing to realize that much of what they hear about SEO is a lie. Especially the notion that it is cheap, easy, or the same everywhere.

Search engine optimization done well is worth the effort and the challenges. It is what makes companies more successful than their competition, and it has an important place in nearly any business. I have no reason to lie to you about that.

Good search engine optimizers will agree with the decline of integrity in the industry, while others will prefer to sweep this bit of ugliness under the rug and keep on lying. There will always be those with integrity to defend. In my case, I feel like I can defend SEO for hire more effectively from the outside looking in, and separating myself from what I see as a good market gone in a bad direction.

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