Business in General Archives - Page 10 of 25 by Mark Murnahan

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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7 Reasons Your Marketing Sucks

Get ready to feel defensive, because I am going to tell you what you are doing wrong. I am going to share seven (of many) things that suck about your marketing efforts. These are things that you are doing wrong, or not doing at all which suck so bad it is like a vacuum cleaner pulling money right out of your pocket. I am not telling you how terrible you are at your marketing just so you can pout about it and leave nasty comments on my blog. I am telling you this so you can stop going broke and making bad excuses for your failures. Note that I am also not telling you this to sell you a solution, because if you are screwing these things up, you are probably not in my target audience. I get paid for my work, and if you are screwing up this badly, you cannot afford me.

Got it? OK then, pick up your bottom lip and stop drooling on yourself about all the money you are going to earn with this new information. I am not giving you the keys to the kingdom. I am just going to try and help your marketing to suck less. So let’s stop sucking and start fixing some of your marketing screw-ups.

In case you wondered: Do I really have to be so abrasive? Not really, but unless I slap you around a little and let you know how much terrible marketing really sickens me, you may not get the point as clearly as I intend it. Maybe it will help you to realize that this is not just another ploy to dig my hands into your pockets. Besides those points, who wants to read another dull blog post about how to perform better marketing? I think the Internet already has plenty of that. Heck, have you seen my archive? Yeah, you didn’t pay close enough attention or your marketing would probably not suck this badly.

On with the list! Here are seven reasons your marketing sucks. These are not in order of importance or suckness. They all suck, and I will bet a photo of my middle finger that you are doing at least a couple of these.

Reason One That Your Marketing Sucks: Lack of Measurement

It is really easy for people to just keep tossing out their name and trying different ways to increase their business, but if your results are not measurable and accounted for, your marketing sucks. What good is it to gain more business and not know precisely why, and how to repeat it? I see this a lot, and it is a novice mistake that you make because you do not understand the value of good marketing. Without useful measurement, you never will.

Reason Two That Your Marketing Sucks: Lack of Plan

When you do not have a plan, it is hard to have proper measurement. Many would-be great marketing efforts fail by lack of a sustainable plan. A plan includes research, goals, measurement, budget, and good old fashioned hard work. If you are opposed to work, you really should avoid marketing what you offer anyway.

Reason Three That Your Marketing Sucks: Lack of Budget

A measurable plan will still suck if there is no budget. People tell me all the time that they do not have a marketing budget. Seriously? No marketing budget? How can you be in business and not have a budget set aside for marketing? A marketing budget should be based on known factors surrounding your market and it uses logic-based, mathematically provable facts. This is not mythical, this is the real world. If you don’t have a marketing budget, your marketing sucks … and it sucks really bad.

Reason Four That Your Marketing Sucks: Lack of Goals

A goal does not need to be 120 pages of unsustainable crap. It should be easy to understand and it should be achievable. It should be based on real information, and not on hype, fear, or other subjective junk your mind will throw at you. Goals should be meaningful. Just think about this: If some thug comes to pick up your daughter for a date, do you look at him differently if he lacks goals? Set some purposeful and researched goals so that your marketing can begin to suck less.

Reason Five That Your Marketing Sucks: Selling Product

You are trying to sell a product or service rather than address the reasons somebody would want your product or service. If you want to sell a car, you are not selling four wheels and a bunch of metal. You are selling freedom to roam, fun road trips, family safety, peace of mind, personal status, comfort, pride, dealership reputation, brand reputation, and other things. If you are selling the car without understanding the reasons people will benefit from buying your car, your marketing is wasted … and it sucks.

Reason Six That Your Marketing Sucks: Price-Selling

We all heard about this recession, right? It is not a secret anymore, but if you are marketing based on cost over value, your marketing sucks. There will always be somebody willing to sell it for less and bastardize your market. When you join them, there is little chance you will ever beat them. Raving fans and brand advocates are not created by price tags. Look at Apple Computers as an example of not selling based on price alone. They may not rule the personal computer market, but they rule their market.

Reason Seven That Your Marketing Sucks: Zombie Marketing

Zombie herding is a thing of the past, but yet you still try this against all odds. When you think that simply finding a bunch of people to pitch your goods to is marketing, your marketing sucks. You try to reach out with your message as far and wide as possible, but then forget the importance of all those active and vibrant living human beings who will spread the message for you if you just stop treating them like zombies. Tweeting and Facebooking your latest special is easy. Any mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, drooling and babbling fool can do that … and they are! Pull yourself together and be memorable. Your customers are real people with real brains. Stop treating them like zombies.

I see this all day long on the Internet. People tend to forget that the intent is to reach real live people, and not just some fuzzy demographic.

Summary of Marketing That Sucks

There I go again, giving away what I know. I keep saying I will stop doing that, because when you know everything I know, I am out of a job. The good news is that if everybody who comes to me for marketing had this much sucking in their market, I would not want to do my job anyway. Knuckleheads be gone! Come back when you begin to suck less and want to do more business.

Bonus Reason Your Marketing Sucks: You have no backbone and you are trying to please too many people. Build a brand and stand strong to the brand. If you are afraid that somebody will not like your brand, let me burst that bubble for you early. Some people will hate you. They will hate everything you stand for and everything you do. If you are too afraid to polarize your audience, give up now. Being famous often requires having the guts to be infamous.

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How To Sell Paper Clips: A Closer Look at Marketing

Think about paper clips for a moment. They are about the most basic thing you will find in your desk drawer. When you consider your marketing, try to imagine selling paper clips. You probably do not think much about what brand you are buying when you need to replenish your paper clip supply. This is likely true of your product or service, too. Unless people have a good reason to remember you, it will be a lot harder to grow your paper clip market share and to become more prosperous.

If you challenged multiple companies with a truckload of paper clips to sell, somebody would sell out sooner than the rest. One would almost surely hit their stride and empty that truckload of paper clips before the others, and there must be a reason.

A basic essential of marketing is to get people to talk about you in a positive way. When other people talk about your brand, it is far more valuable than when you talk about your brand. This is proven every day, and in many markets. Just think about the ones you remember and why you remember them.

In order to emphasize the point, I have created this short video to show you how to sell more paper clips. I hope that you will enjoy it.

Addendum: After comments from Jim Rudnick at Canuck SEO (JVRudnick) both below and on social networks, I picked up the phone to call and thank him. We chatted and he told me of a remarkable story about a man who traded a paper clip for a house. If you doubt the value of good marketing and how to build value in something as simple as a paper clip, you should see the story of Tyler Wright.Thanks for sharing, Jim!

Your Recession is Yours, My Recession is Mine

I talk to a lot of people. I have some amazing friends, with amazing perspective. The wise ones are not afraid to talk about recession, and brainstorm ways to improve their respective place in this recession.

You are a bit scared, right? I hope so, because you should be. If you have just consumed a small fraction of reality over the past couple years, you have certainly noticed something different about people’s spending habits. Lines at restaurants are shorter, and lines at homeless shelters are longer. Let’s not sugar-coat it. Shit hit the fan and business is harder to come by these days.

One of my long time close friends is a well-informed Magna Cum Laude Princeton University graduate of economics with his MBA and a bunch of letters at the end of his name. He is a top-level economist and one that many other number-crunchers rely on to evaluate major business decisions. He is about as scared as it comes. Me, I lost squillions since recession started in 2007, and I got sick of being scared. Instead, I made a plan, and I continually work with my plan.

Improve the Future You’ve Got

This is not an uplifting “rah rah, go get ’em” sermon I am here to give you, but rather the cold hard truth of where things stand, and ideas to improve the future you’ve got. Ahh, but there is the key! If you note that I said “the future you’ve got” I mean that the future is something you already have. It is not some unrealistic thing that lives in some other dimension and never comes to pass. Time keeps marching on, and every day marks another day into your future. You do have a future, and if you are too freaked out about today, the future gets pretty blurry. In any case, your future will get here, and you are the one who makes all the tough decisions on how it will look.

I understand that it gets harder to envision your future when you are still fighting today. I have seen the future become blurred, too, but I have made a plan. I made a flexible plan, and one that can be amended as needed. I keep my eyes moving, and I always look in all directions. It is tricky and requires constant attention, but without a plan, results would be pretty bleak. Don’t you think?

If you feel like you are alone in the recession, stop feeling that way. Not just because I said “stop feeling that way”, but because you know it is true. You see it all around you. There are two divergent ideologies on the topic. One says the sky is falling and we are all doomed, and the other talks in ambiguous Wall Street phrases about improved economic indicators and tries to influence a stronger market by helping people feel safer to spend money. Reality is somewhere in the middle, and your economic reality will come from the actions you take.

Owning Your Recession

Let’s face it, you own your recession, and the sooner you realize it, the better. Sure, it has affected most of the people you know, but there are still people thriving in a bad economy, and I will give you some reasons why. It starts with making good decisions, having confidence in your decisions, and taking action on your decisions. That is a lot of decision making, and many people are more comfortable making the decision to “wait and see what happens” and to follow the same course. Getting ahead means getting uncomfortable, and if you are in business, you must understand that fear affects success in more than logic.

I can own up to my recession, although it is not all my doing. I still know that my decisions have everything to do with where I am and where I go from here. I will give you an example. In 2007 and 2008 I watched some huge suppliers to my company kill thousands of jobs and shut down some of their operations. One of my suppliers of network services laid off 5,000 people in a single day. I knew my industry very well, and I knew in advance that I should have sold off or severely downsized one division of my company. Instead, I wanted to be a hero to my clients, so I took a “wait and see” approach. It was not long before the “wait and see” kicked me squarely in the ass.

You will not catch me seeking sympathy, but I saw my corporation’s annual accounts receivable drop by over half a million dollars in a single month during 2008. As the CEO, I knew that it would eventually hit my personal economy pretty hard, so I made sacrifices. I cleared out $250,000 worth of cars from my garage, I suspended a six figure per year auto racing budget, I downsized my home by over 3,000 fewer square feet, and I worked harder and for less money than I had in many years. It made sense to cut certain things that I did not require, and it made sense to kick myself back into gear. I made many sacrifices!

Making the Right Sacrifices

I write a lot to help people regain vision for their business and personal lives. In fact, I wrote three books last year and a whole lot of blogs. You surely cannot knock me for dedication. So much of what I write is aimed at helping others to grow their market and regain the market they once enjoyed. I know I make some people very uncomfortable, and I am pleased for that. If you are comfortable with how things are, you have less reason to do something brilliant. On the other hand, if you get sick of being scared, like I did, maybe you will come to make the right choices to build upon your own economy.

Maybe you never read any of my biographies or ever heard of me before, but from the time I dropped out of school at age 15, I have built multiple very successful companies. Something I have learned well is the value of sacrificing unnecessary comforts today in return for a better tomorrow. Sure, you can say that tomorrow never comes and that you should seize the day, but isn’t that the same thing your credit card issuers count on? If you work harder, try harder, create a solid strategy, and do more for your future, you are the one who collects the interest.

The Wrong Sacrifice

I could bang my drum and toot my horn all day and night, and you can still call it all “bullshit”. I can give you good ideas and direction, but you can still call me crazy. A lot of good thinking has been called crazy. Christopher Columbus was “crazy” for saying the world is round, and Albert Einstein said “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

Crazy is relative to your own sense of reality. I was crazy to leave school at 15, but less crazy as I earned millions by 25. Something which cannot be denied and is based on solid math is that effective marketing will grow a business. Effective marketing can get you the job you want. Effective marketing and reaching the right people with the right message is what creates opportunities, from meeting the right spouse to becoming the head of a political party. So how can you possibly abuse and neglect your marketing when it is the one quantifiable thing which can lead you to your goals?

My Murnahanism for Today: “If you want something, it mostly requires asking the right people. You should place quality first, and quantity second, but success usually requires both. If you keep asking the wrong people, refine your efforts. When that fails, you probably need to ask more people.”

If you want a better economy for yourself, do something different. As I have said before, “Do Shit They Will Remember” and note that sometimes you must “Choose Logic Over Emotion“.

If you want more, market more, and market better. Of all the sacrifices I ever made in business, marketing has never been in the list. It has always been the one thing that mattered most. Recession is actually the best time to market your goods, because your competition is running scared, too.

I wrote of sacrifices I made to create millions of dollars in business from my 6th grade education (I left at 15, but I failed a few times first) in my book “Living in the Storm“. This is not my evil plot to shake you down for the huge $2 royalty I make per book, but if you have a hard time understanding the sacrifices it takes to grow a business, you should consider reading it.

Accepting your own recession and doing more to improve it does not mean everything will be amazing again. However, if you are not doing more to market yourself or your business, you are accepting what you have and that will become less as others keep moving forward.

Photo credit to Eric Pouhier via Wikipedia

Improve SEO Return on Investment (ROI) With Simple Math

I share a lot of information about marketing topics and SEO (search engine optimization), but I realize that many people still wonder if SEO is real or just make believe. I have a pretty good idea of why this is the case, and I will share that with you. It is usually due to a history of low return on investment (ROI) for their SEO efforts, or a fear of low ROI for future SEO efforts. This pretty well covers it in basic terms.

Let’s face it, if you knew that you could hand a dollar to the search engine optimizer and they would hand you three dollars back, you would go to great lengths to get your hands on more dollars … to hand over to the SEO. So, what in this world would ever hold you back from that? I will venture an experienced guess. It is mostly a concern of whether you can actually see a return on investment, right? You want to know there is profit in the future, before you spend money on something you may or may not fully understand.

I am going to give you some simple math to help you understand and improve ROI of SEO in your business. I will also provide tools to help you measure your market potential. I hope that you will pay attention and use this to your benefit.

A big step to achieving this good math I speak of is to use mathematical logic in your marketing and stop fussing about low budgets, drained bank accounts, or anything else outside of these more important numbers of how to grow your profit. You see, this math will be lost on deaf ears unless you can overcome your own obstacles surrounding effective marketing. If it is mathematically sound, and a better answer for your business, it is your job to do what it takes to achieve better results.

The first thing to understand will be the potential value of SEO to your business, and then realize that SEO is extremely measurable. Thus it carries a very low risk when it is done well, and done completely.

How Much Potential Business is There For You Online?

If you are not yet aware of your market potential, we must get past this part. Do you have something worth marketing? I wrote an article on this not so long ago titled “Things You Cannot Sell Online“, but the list is pretty small. My wife even sells wedding cakes online … and lots of them! She does not take the orders online, but because of her online presence, she is busy enough to turn away customers every day.

If you are not clear on how much business is available to you, try using a tool like SpyFu, WordTracker, or Google’s keyword tool to find out how many people are searching for what you offer. Once you have some idea of the potential, which is likely more than you would expect, and even more than you will discover in just a few minutes of effort, it is time to turn it into an increase in your business.

Turning Market Potential Into Real SEO Numbers

Using basic figures, let’s consider this: If your average customer is worth an extra $50 to your business and you know that one in every 1,000 exposures to your business will bring you a new customer, you can see how 100,000 exposures to your business will be worth $5,000. This is easy so far, right?

Now, what if you could relatively easily raise some of these numbers? Which will you raise first? Maybe a better marketing message could reduce that one in 1,000 exposures to one in 700 that becomes a customer. That same number of visitors would be worth over $7,100.

What if there was an even easier way to improve your ROI? What if you had better market segmentation and a more targeted audience searching for exactly what you offer? Then, it may mean you earn a customer’s business once in every 500, 250 or even fewer exposures. That could add up pretty big.

Now, let’s consider increasing volume. What if you could realistically multiply your traffic just by moving up one or two positions in search results? Do you think that is impossible, improbable, or just doesn’t happen to people like you? Well, let me comfort you a bit by saying that it is clearly definable in the math, and it is quite achievable, too. Somebody will be there at the top of every search, and it is not just by luck.

It is true that where you are listed in search engine results for any given user’s search will have a huge impact on your reach and your ROI. Just how much does your search engine position relate to exposure to your brand? Allow me to explain it with math.

Using Simple Math to Improve SEO ROI

Let’s consider some very reliable numbers to help you increase your SEO return on investment. These are not sketchy make-believe numbers. These are numbers which are widely accepted and observed across the industry.

First, second, and third positions returned for a search receive over 50 percent of users’ clicks.
First page search positions receive over 90 percent of users’ clicks.

Now think about this: It means that if you are in the top three search results, you can expect that over half of the people visiting a website when performing the particular search will land on your website. On the other hand, if you are on the second page, you can expect a website visit from only a minuscule number of people searching for the given term. The way the math works out, if you are number seven and there are 10,000 monthly clicks to websites from searches for a given phrase, you can expect 2-3 percent of the search users to visit your website on average. That means 200-300 visitors for that search phrase each month, whereas the top of the list can expect over 5,000 by being just six spots above you. Now try plugging that math into the examples I gave earlier about value per customer, reaching a better audience, and the potential profit.

It really is true that you can have many times the number of people looking at your website and checking out your offerings, simply by moving your search engine rank upward. Sometimes, it is just a small move that keeps you away from success, but do you know which terms you are almost successful with? I hope this is some pretty serious thought for you, because you may actually be on the edge of success, but you do not know it or know what to do with it.

If you are concerned about the ROI of search engine optimization, the first place to look should be whether you are almost there already, but only doing it part-way and ending up somewhere down the list. If you budget and plan for top 20 ranking instead of top three ranking, you will often waste money and risk wanting to slash your wrists sometime down the road. On the other hand, if you plan and budget for top three ranking, you will shoot coffee from your nose while laughing on the morning you walk into your office and see all the new business coming in.

Reducing the Competition Can Raise Your ROI

Another place to look for better SEO ROI is in the pieces your competition left behind. If you are only focused on highly competitive keyword phrases but only making it to the second or third page of search engine results, you are likely thumbing your nose at a lot of money. Two reliable solutions are to do more of what it takes to reach the top, and also refocus some of your effort toward lateral keywords which are more achievable and can be snatched up by the thousands. Yes, by the thousands!

For example, searches for terms like “lateral keywords“, “SEO meta tags“, or “how to sell SEO” (which, by the way, has a lot to do with being able to do it well) will show my articles in the top of search engine results. Although these items receive a lower volume of searches than other keyword phrases, they are valuable because there are thousands of phrases like these where users find my websites … and your websites, if you choose to embrace your lateral keywords.

Less competitive lateral search terms are often very specific to the users’ search, which means they are more precisely getting what they want. It is a winning solution which can often dramatically increase the ROI of SEO. Oh, and I want to repeat that there are thousands of these potential search terms just ready for you to sweep in and rank at the top.

ROI Requires Investment

Yes, return on investment requires investment. Are you surprised?

I see it every day how a potential client will flinch at the cost of good SEO. In fact, depending on how serious they are about increasing their business, I am lucky that some of them don’t stroke out and lie dead before me. I would really hate to administer CPR to somebody before the check is written, but I have come close a few times. So to minimize the risk, I try to have some good numbers to explain the process and benefits of SEO done well.

If you do not have an investment, you surely cannot expect a return on investment (ROI). This is pretty simple to understand. I realize how scary an investment can be. It is especially scary when it is something that you do not fully understand. I hope this has given you some thought on how you approach your search engine optimization efforts and how to increase the ROI with some very basic math.

Now after all this math, can you believe there are actually trained and experienced SEO for hire who can do all this for you and minimize your loss of ROI? It is a crazy thought for some, but you want to increase your SEO ROI, and I am sure you will try to use this information wisely.

Here are two more articles you may appreciate that discuss marketing cost:

Please be sure to add your comments.

*Photo Credit to Acid Wash Photography via Flickr

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