compare SEO Archives - Page 3 of 7 by Mark Murnahan

Why Do You Want to Become an SEO and Social Media Expert?

If I had an ounce of sand for every request I have received to help somebody become an SEO and Social Media Expert I could retire on my own private beach in a magnificent sandcastle.

As I consider all of the hype associated with SEO and social media marketing, I guess I can understand why so many people are attracted to the industry. The problem I see is that the hype has become far too believable, while reality and common sense have been left to rot.

I love to help people with their learning, and I take a lot of care to do it well. I will never intentionally lead you wrong, but in order to keep being helpful, it is important to understand people’s motivations. I will share some of my observations with you, and I would like your input as well.

My editor, Peggy, has already called this a “rant”, but it is a rant which I believe can be useful, or at least entertaining. I told Peggy this is something I think some people need to hear, and take seriously to heart as they consider their motivations for learning about SEO and social media.

I don’t want to be cruel, because I know that many fine people read my work to learn, and to pick up new ideas. The only cruelty here will come from within, if you find that you are doing things for the wrong motivations. Sometimes, my voice of reason must come out, and I have to be cruel to be kind. I want to understand my readers’ motivations better. Perhaps if I help you to reflect upon your own motivations, it will help us both.

Below are some observations that I find common among people seeking to learn SEO and social media marketing. I am absolutely not categorizing everybody, and I would not begin to tell you that you fit into one of these groups. These are just some observations I have found from well over a decade in this line of work. If you feel a bit awkward because you can relate to any of these, you should perhaps rethink your goals. Maybe you really are built for this, or maybe you should keep your day job. You decide!

Notice that I have lumped the two different disciplines of SEO and social media marketing into one. That is because they are more closely related than most people dare to believe. They often require similar skills, and anybody involved in one should have a good understanding of the other. They are also equally as scam-riddled because of the mythical glamour associated with the Internet.

Did You Think It May Be an Easy and Glamourous Job?

This industry is not lacking for participants. If you want a line of work where your demand will be high, try nursing. If you want a job that requires little training, try house cleaning. If you think that SEO and social media marketing is an industry that has a low barrier of entry, think again! The level of training, effort, and marketing talent required to be successful in this industry is not unlike becoming a rock star or a movie actor … only without the red carpet and paparazzi. Oh, and the groupies usually don’t throw lingerie at you or lift their shirt to get your attention.

SEO and social media is not as easy or as glamourous as those people promoting their “get rich quick” online marketing schemes will tell you. Oh, I suppose you could grab some quick bucks if you want to lie to people.

If you are the type who will do anything for money, I have some wise advice for you: Customers are not stupid for long. They may believe you if you say “just wait … the profit is coming”, but then it will not be long before they wise up and realize that the industry is full of bullshitters like you. Then they look for people with a track record and a reputation. That may not starve you today, but it will starve you. It is an easy way to keep enjoying your canned beans and mac & cheese while living in a cramped apartment with cockroaches and worrying about how to ask Mom to move into her basement. Stop now, save your effort, and get a job. This is a career where you will not last. Even if you straighten up and do the right things, your reputation will follow you and haunt you until you are back to mopping the floor of a truck stop where you may actually have superior skill. Got it, lowlife?

Social Media and SEO are “The Future”

Maybe you heard what I heard back in grade school. In the 1980’s I heard “Computers are the future!” and I took heed and learned a lot about them. Maybe you heard it later and they told you “The Internet is the future!” I heard that, and I founded an industry leading wholesale Internet services company. If you were really late in the game, you heard that “SEO and social media marketing is the future!” Maybe it is, or maybe it is not, but unless you are innovating, you will be stagnating.

Unless you are seriously committed to this industry enough to give up a whole lot of sleep and work extremely hard, you are better off looking for the next big craze. Most people will not tell you how hard it is to become good at this business. They will also usually neglect to tell you how many extremely intelligent people there are who make up the top echelon of the SEO and social media marketing industry. Just when you think you really have a mind for this, you may find that you are just a little more average than you expected. Average people don’t last very long, because the average person in this industry earns about three dollars per day and they move on to something else.

There isn’t much room in this industry for earning a living with average efforts, average results, average commitment, or average intellect. It takes a lot more than average to even begin to earn a full-time living in SEO and social media marketing. I guess, that is unless you can con your way into an entry-level position where you look over your shoulder every minute for fear of the boss coming to fire you because he found somebody in India who will do your job for a tenth of the money.

Marketing Your Own Company with SEO and Social Media

I know that a lot of people want to learn SEO and social media marketing to improve their own company. I have also seen how badly most of them totally destroy an otherwise decent potential to reach their market and do more business.

Mike and Bob, SEO Experts — Mike and Bob Are SEO Experts Now!

So, let’s say that this is the case with you, and business is so slow that you have time to take on a whole new job description on top of your regular job. Maybe you will delegate it to the receptionist, since the phones aren’t ringing anyway.

Even if you don’t make a mockery of your company by spamming to a disinterested audience in social media, it will be unlikely that you will do a better job than somebody who is already skilled in propensity modeling and market research.

Even if you don’t get your website banned by search engines for using SEO tactics you picked up at WarriorForum, you will never … and I mean never produce the same results as a studied SEO professional. I don’t mean the kid posting on WarriorForum who builds WYSIWYG websites with Dreamweaver or CoffeeCup. I mean the kind who will help you put your wallet back in your pocket before they would ever take your $699 for the instant-failure marketing plan you are asking for.

It is important to remember that for each customer you miss by doing things the wrong way, the cost goes up. You will also miss their repeat and referral business. If your business is already weak enough that you are trying to save money by doing your own marketing, it will likely become exceedingly worse the longer you do.

Have you ever heard that it is best to delegate tasks to people who know the job better than you? You will need a dentist someday. Do you want to take some dentistry courses so you can avoid hiring a dentist, too? What about auto mechanics?

Truly successful results in SEO and social media marketing do not come from people who are part-timers trying to be good at everything. Successful results come from people who do it all day and deep into night, and then lie awake in bed thinking about how they can do something bigger, better, and smarter tomorrow. You cannot get that from a quick course on how to become brilliant online. That comes from experience … hard-earned experience.

Enhance Your Existing Job with SEO and Social Media Marketing

Many people will try to learn more about SEO and social media marketing in order to enhance their existing job. This may have some benefit for people who are deeply entrenched in marketing, web development, web hosting, or other industry verticals. However, if you are not in one of these industry verticals, there really is not any value gained.

If you think that you will augment an existing job description by adding SEO and social media marketing to your task list, rub a lamp. That usually turns out about as good as the pool cleaner deciding to tinker on his client’s Porsche.

Do one job or the other, and make a decision. Being a little bit good at a lot of things is fine, but trying to be an expert with multiple things is about the worst career decision you will make. It may be helpful to know more, but do not expect it to be an enhancement, but rather a diversion. It will divert you from becoming even better at the job you already have.

Learning SEO and Social Media to Avoid Being Robbed

I think this is somewhat realistic, for a few people. I could see why somebody may want to know more about the industry to avoid being ripped off. This is even more important for a recruiter or hiring manager, but how much do you really need to know? There are some considerations to this which should eventually become obvious.

First: You can shop too much. It is easy to become confused, and if you are comparing the wrong things, you will get the wrong results.

Second: There are a lot of great liars in SEO and social media marketing. Look for quantifiable evidence proportionate with your objectives.

Third: Seeking good marketing should never conclude with the best liar, nor begin with the newest fool.

I think a lot of people in my industry can relate to this: My clients do not need to know everything about SEO and social media marketing. They just need to know that I do, and that I am not a conman. Learning a whole new job skill just to be a buyer is like learning automotive engineering just to buy a car. It does not scale well.

A little bit of reading things like “Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference” and “7 SEO Lies: How to Know When the SEO is Lying” should be enough to make purposeful decisions. Then, if they pass those measures, read more about them, and find out what others say about them.

Lastly, if you are trying to learn SEO and social media marketing for shopping purposes, you will do well to read ““How Much Does SEO Cost?” is The Wrong Question”

Appear Cooler in Social Settings

Maybe you are looking for some cool factor in your social life. Heck, if you can learn SEO and social media marketing, maybe you will be better at arranging a tweetup or getting Facebook friends to love you. Maybe you could even use Twitter to get a bunch of people to go out for drinks with you.

Good luck, but wouldn’t it be more fun to just go out and get drunk without the curse of thinking about that new product launch. With all of those cell phone social media addicts around, you will never get drunk enough to have real fun. You don’t have to be an expert to make social media your party tool, just talk to any college student.

Aside from suckering people into paying your bar tab by sharing your expert advice, the return will probably be pretty low. I know, you may think it will help get them naked, and that is true, but so tacky!

In Summary of SEO and Social Media Marketing

Even with the very best alignment of the stars, and if you wake up to sex, coffee, and bacon every day, the job is still not easy. Finding people who are willing to do business instead of just talking about doing business is about as tough as pulling chicken teeth. There are so many bullshit sandwiches being served out every day that I am shocked McDonalds hasn’t put it on their menu.

Do you still want in? Tell me what you want to know, and I will give you my honest truth. Subscribe to my blog and I will give you some great tips and fresh ideas. If you just want to become an SEO and social media expert because it will make you rich and famous, back off … this industry will kill you and eat you before you will see success.

Photo Credits:
Paparazzi photo by internets_dairy via Flickr
Custom Trike by ale? via Flickr
Closing Arguments by Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia via Flickr

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

“How Much Does SEO Cost?” is The Wrong Question

If you are in a customer-facing job role, you have surely heard the common question of “how much does it cost?” Many of us hear it long before questions of value even come into consideration, and it seems especially common in SEO (search engine optimization).

I consider the “how much does it cost” shopping approach a very worthwhile reason to scream at somebody and demean them. I usually try to hold back that urge, but it is definitely scream-worthy. I have very often answered it by hanging up the phone. That is because I take it as an indication that the person asking will only see a dollar amount and not what it represents.

When it comes to SEO (search engine optimization), “how much does it cost” is absolutely the wrong question to open discussions. I will explain why the cost of SEO is far down the list of things which will matter, and whether you are on the buying side or selling side of SEO, this should be useful to you. I will also explain why the question of how much the SEO will cost is not only a moving target, but also ways to determine an appropriate cost.

First, consider this: The topic struck me when I see how often my wife, Chef and Owner of Mad Eliza’s Cakes and Confections, answers burning questions about the cost of wedding cake. It happens very often that a bride-to-be will ask how much her wedding cake will cost, before even having a good idea of the design or even how many guests it needs to feed. I find a lot of people shop for SEO the same way. From now on, you will know better!

The SEO Cost Should Be Based on the Need

There is no practical way of answering questions of the cost of SEO until the variable of need is addressed. Assessing the need for SEO should be based on client goals and accurate marketing projections. To get to the right number, you must have a good fix on the overall market potential, and how much market share can be reasonably expected at a given level of action.

This is not rocket surgery, but it does require more than just guesswork. A good projection will be based on multiple variables, but a good start is to know how many people are looking for what you offer.

If you are not clear on how many people are looking for you, and what they are looking for, close estimates can be made using tools such as SpyFu, WordTracker, and Google’s keyword tool. These tools can help you find out how many people are searching for what you offer, and provide a glimpse of the overall market potential.

More useful information on this topic is available in the article titled “Improve SEO Return on Investment (ROI) With Simple Math“.

The Point of Diminishing SEO Returns

It is possible to overestimate your efforts and do more SEO than you need. I have never seen it happen in real life, but the theory makes sense. If you are spending more money on SEO than the potential for your entire market, there is a point where it would be wasteful. However, the ugly monkey which stares many people in the face is that in the beginning, most SEO efforts will cost more than they return. So, this brings up the point of how far you can see into your future.

Short-Term SEO Cost vs. Increased SEO ROI Later

Let’s look at this with a bit of logic. There is no return on investment (ROI) at the point when you write the first check for SEO. Having short term (30, 60, and 90 day) goals is important for most companies. When more effort is focused on short term SEO goals than long term goals, the expected overall ROI is lowered. There is a balancing point which is important to reach.

If you need to meet short term objectives in order to produce cashflow to achieve longer term goals, the end cost will generally be higher. This is because you are overemphasizing the short term objectives just to pay for the higher return long term goals.

Where SEO Cost Goes Off The Rails

While I was writing this article, I was distracted by the ding of a message coming from the live chat on my contact page. It was from a really nice guy named Eric, and here is how the chat went:

[11:04] Eric: Hi Mark I’m interested in asking you about some of your services if you have a few minutes

[11:04] murnahan: Sure.

[11:05] murnahan: You are welcome to ring me if you prefer. My direct line is *REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE* or my Skype username is “murnahan”.

[11:05] Eric: I came across your site researching SEO tips and first off, great information. I’m trying to gain an understanding of SEO, and it’s obviously very in-depth. I’m a vey tech savvy person but not really on the “up and up” for SEO. Anyway, I manage a national moving company, and we’re looking to increase our search traffic. What type of services do you offer that you think could help us out?

[11:07] murnahan: There are a lot of answers to that question, but perhaps the best one is this: I can make your company more attractive, somewhere along the lines of sex and bacon.

[11:08] Eric: Hm. I do like both of those things

[11:08] murnahan: When you make your company more attractive, the word spreads, and you get bigger pay checks.

[11:08] murnahan: See what I mean … most people do! LOL

[11:08] Eric: I would actually like to speak with you. can I call now?

[11:09] murnahan: sure … my ears are on.

Well, Eric called me and we spoke for a while. It was a good talk, and I listened to what his company does, and where they hope to go with it. As we talked, I was thinking … I do that a lot. One of my first thoughts was how important it is for a moving company to gain people’s confidence. I have heard a lot of nightmares about how moving companies break stuff, steal stuff, and scam people out of extra money once they have your stuff in their trucks. In fact, I have a friend who is in a lawsuit against his mover right now.

Eric asked me if I had any ideas on how I could help his company. Although this is the exact stuff I am paid to do, I thought I’d at least let him know I was listening and thinking. I discussed a few ideas with Eric about how we could make his moving company a little more sex and bacon-like.

Since his company has complete access to people’s stuff, I suggested that overcoming the potential customers’ fears about movers would be an important step to increasing their business. Of course, this is only one piece of a larger strategy, but a critical one.

I told Eric I thought it would be really neat for them to walk into each job and hang a half dozen IP cameras on the walls and provide customers a website login in case they want to look in on the progress. Then I pointed out that the cost of an 8 gigabyte SD card is under 30 bucks, and it may be cool to hand people a complete video record of their move when he hands them their bill. Not only could this set them apart as a more trustworthy company, it could also be a nice benefit for people to document all of their belongings for insurance purposes. It would provide customers with greater confidence, and give them something valuable, all at once.

OK, so it may cost a few bucks. It could easily have a one-time cost a thousand bucks or more per truck for wireless cameras and a laptop with a built-in Internet connection. That is not bad, considering it is a tiny fraction of the cost of a tractor trailer and other moving equipment. It would take them an extra 10-20 minutes (of a 4-6 hour job) to hang some stick-on hooks to place the cameras, and $30 for an SD card. The technology part would be a breeze, for me. Heck, I did a 6,000 mile live mobile webcast from a race car. This one would be a no-brainer, and the moving guys would only have to know how to turn on a laptop and click a “start” button.

Can you imagine how much that relatively small extra effort could pay them with customer confidence? Can you imagine what would happen if major tech blogs picked up the story of their success in using technology to overcome real-world trust barriers? It could make a nice press release for tech bloggers, television, and more. Can you imagine how that could affect their SEO?

How Much Does SEO Cost Now?

I never worked with a moving company, and this idea sprouted up fresh from a short conversation during a free consultation. It gets even better if Eric pays me for my ideas. Eric didn’t call to ask me about the cost of SEO. He asked the right questions, centered around value and calculated return on investment.

When he asked me about how much SEO would cost, it was more about how much he needs to beg, borrow, and steal to get the results that he wants for his company. He understands that good marketing is what makes companies bigger, and that bad SEO can cost a lot more than good SEO. That is a whole lot different than simply fearing the cost of SEO.

Get the SEO Questions Right

If you know the right questions to ask about SEO, you will have a lot better results. It will help you to avoid being taken advantage of by SEO lies, and to realize why SEO is a lot more than just technical geeky work.

I have always said that coffee and cigarettes are the best SEO and social media marketing tools. If that sounds crazy, please be sure to see this video explaining why I know it is true.

My Answers About “How Much Does SEO Cost”

Every search engine optimizer will have a different answer about the cost of SEO services. Some of them will be right, and some of them will be woefully wrong. We each work differently, and each have different skill sets and levels of marketing talent. In my case, I require a sizable investment, and I am not a good match for most companies. I prefer to only work with two to four clients at a time, and my projects come with a three to twelve month commitment. That should pretty well explain why I don’t do SEO for dog walkers.

Something important to consider is that until the other important questions are answered, the matter of cost will always be incorrect. This is simply not a commodity business, and everybody will have different needs and expectations. Throwing around dollar amounts is a waste of time if the purchaser and the provider do not fully understand each other, and the job at hand.

I want to leave you with these thoughts regarding the cost of SEO from my perspective:

Yes, I have a family of five, and each of them like to eat every day.
Yes, I do own a motorcycle that cost more than my first two houses, combined.
Yes, that is a real Picasso hanging in my living room (pictured above).
Yes, it will cost you a lot more than the money in my hand to get my attention.
Yes, my clients always earn more profit from my work than I do!
Yes, I will probably scream at you and hang up the phone if you call me to ask “how much does SEO cost?”

Some search engine optimizers will promise 1,000 links to your website and first page ranking in Google for $300. Isn’t that search engine optimizer a great deal?

Now, please answer me … do you really think that it is the same thing wherever you go?

Here are some related articles I have written regarding the cost of SEO and placing cost above value. I hope you will enjoy them.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

What Created the SEO Monster, and Who Keeps Feeding It?

Have you ever been hit by a stroke of Genius, telling you that automated directory submissions will help your ranking in search engine results? Maybe you thought that some nicely crafted meta tags would help your search engine ranking. I may be a bit too hard on people at times, but common sense just completely eludes many people when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). Many website owners want to rank in the top of search results so badly that they will try almost anything. Well, as long as it is cheap, easy, and sounds techie-fancy.

When I started to write this, I was going to rant about automated directory submissions. Then I realized that I have touched on the topic of directory submissions before. I still have something to get off my chest, and I still have something to say about the toxic lies and misinformation that have been created surrounding the SEO industry. It is often fueled by greed and hope of getting something for nothing.

It is easy for liars to make something believable to people who know little about the topic. This has created an ugly monster of the SEO industry.

The SEO Monster Eats, Every Day!

In just the last spin of the clock, I have had several people ask me for information about automated directory submission services to improve their search engine ranking. It reminds me that most people really do not understand SEO. Judging from the glazed look on their faces, I can tell that many people really don’t want to understand. They just want it to magically work. I understand that, and I can imagine how frustrating and stressful it must be for non-SEO people to filter reliable information about search engine optimization through all of the common SEO lies (although this may help: 7 SEO Lies: How to Know When the SEO is Lying).

Outdated, Outrageous, and Downright Dishonest SEO Garbage

There is so much bad information and outdated material spread across the Internet that I think it would frustrate the heck out of me if I was trying to feel my way through it for the first time. What bothers me is how many people are out there trying to earn a buck by selling things that do not help, and even more commonly, severely damage paying customers’ hopes of being found in a search engine.

The world of SEO truly is like a foreign language to most people. They read something about SEO and meta tags, and they think they are on to something revolutionary. It just stuns me that with all of the great information out here on the Internet, how many people are fooled by the first scam they come across.

For some people, I think there is a sense that if it is written, it must hold some truth. Once they find out the hard way that it was a scam and it didn’t work, they either give up and hate everything about SEO, or they take the time to learn the difference and read something sensible and logic-based like “Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference“.

Even in large corporate settings, I have often found people in the role of search engine optimizer collecting a nice salary who got their job just by spouting out a few industry buzz words. The people hiring them are either enamored by their “vast knowledge”, or just give up and offer them a job on blind faith.

A really hard pill to swallow is that most of today’s SEO “experts” have never ranked for anything significantly competitive. That is not a gouge against my industry, and these people are not my competitors. It is a statistical truth. To make this point clear, just have a look at the backlinks to most SEO websites and then see where they rank for the first four words of their home page title. Try this with the website of the SEO who reaches you by email, on the phone, or in a paid advertisement, instead of you finding them through a search.

Productized SEO Services Created a Monster

I think that productizing SEO and selling easy to understand pre-packaged SEO services has created and fed this monster. As an industry, those of us who sell SEO services realized a long time ago that it is much easier to package things up and say “Here is your price, and here is what you get.”

This certainly makes it easier to sell SEO. After all, it is easier for clients to choose from a list and compare it to what others offer. Also, it is a lot more profitable for the SEO to create something once, and sell it many times. The truth is that it is seldom what is best for meeting the customer’s objectives, and it creates a mentality that ranking well in search engines is merely a predefined set of SEO tasks.

This is not to say that things like SEOmoz’s SEO tools, SpyFu, and the squillion other SEO tools are not just great. These are tools, but like a paintbrush, they are only as good as the person using them. A tragedy that happened is when a lot of SEO realized that they could sell far more, and easier, if they promised something such as top ten ranking for “x” number of keywords and then price it and put it in a shopping cart for people to buy. There are countless types of SEO services being promoted with a “buy it now” approach, without any consultation, without any strategy, and with a promise of easy results.

Do you really trust anything that is so easy? OK, rephrase … Do you really trust anything that is so easy in 2011?

Directory Submission Service Example

I started my rant with directory submissions, and I will still use it as an example. “What is a directory submission service?” I hope that is what you are thinking, but in case you did not already know, I will explain it. It is a once-heralded way to automatically submit a website to long lists of search engines and directories, with a hope that it would help search engine rankings, bring more visitors to a website, and boost sales.

I suppose it seems logical to a lot of people that if they use SEO directory submission services to add their website link to a squillion directories and search engines, it will produce magical results. Now let’s clear this up. Seriously, do you think that a magical automated fix like directory and search engine submissions will be your pink pony ride to success?

Oh, and nobody else ever thought of that, so it will be revolutionary! Right? Search engines will suck that up like grape soda and will count all of those backlinks (links to your website) as proof that your website is valuable.

Rub a lamp, sucker! Maybe a Genie will come to your assistance, too.

The Productized SEO Monster Awakens My Inner-Sailor

There are just a few things which make it hard for me to hold back my inner sailor and refrain from dropping severely foul language all over my blog. People falling for things like automated directory submissions and other simple tricks helping their SEO efforts is one of those things. I just don’t think I can even be nice about this. Shit! Call it a temporary case of Tourette’s Syndrome, but this inner-sailor in me is wanting out pretty badly.

People who actually fall for things like this drive me nuts. I just want to say “Hey, Genius, do you want to know the truth, or would you rather waste more money and time to screw up your website?”

If you want the real truth about SEO, slow down, pay attention, and stop breathing those SEO fumes in the air. Spend some time to learn things that will actually work, and will help you to grow your business. For example, those links in the text of this article are not just there for me, and they may help you, a lot. Better yet, here is a link for some relatively easy SEO tips that can save you a lot of time and frustration: SEO Lessons You Should Know.

These tips will not cost you a penny, and will only take a short time to read. Maybe I am just full of hot air, but if so, go ahead and search Google for SEO lessons and see where that link I just gave you shows up in non-advertised, relevance-based organic results. Hint: It is not number two on the list.

I do not write about this because I am seeking a bunch of customers. I only work with a couple clients at a time, and I turn away far more than I work with. Yes, writing about SEO helps people to find me, but it is not just here to help me. This is here to help you.

Just one more thing! Have you subscribed to aWebGuy.com yet?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Are You a Participant in Your Business, or Just a Witness?

I blame the Internet. Attack this all you like, but I blame the Internet and its many over-hyped success stories for allowing people to let down their guard and take a “witness” approach to their marketing. We all know that the Internet is a hugely important tool to businesses, but the lack of understanding how and why the Internet is valuable to a company has led a lot of people to throwing their hands in the air and giving up participation in their marketing. It is a knee-jerk reaction people make because all that information about Internet marketing is beyond the comfortable things they understand.

What makes this worse is that as so many people give up trying to be participants in their marketing efforts they give up on even knowing the right questions to ask or directions to take. It is as if they just throw all their fate to Google and a few other websites, and hope they get the right results.

A Non-Participant Seldom Gets Exceptional Results

I received a message a couple days ago that bothered me. It bothered me enough to write this, but it was a message that I see every day from small business people. I want to share it with you, but first, I want to say that this is a good example of why small businesses remain small.

The real problem is the sentiment and lack of attention, and not the actual message content. The sentiment is that of a business owner not really wanting to be a participant, but rather simply a witness to their business. I see this all the time, in a lot of different forms. Obviously, the most common way I see this is in marketing, because that is my job.

I will share the message I received that inspired this topic. On the surface, this may be easy to question how it shows me a lack of business participation, but I will get to the point of how apathy and lack of involvement are common attributes which often destroy small companies. The message reads as follows:

Please provide me with a quote for search engine optimization of my website xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx.

Thanks,
xxxx xxxxxx

Maybe you think I read too much into this, but let’s dig a little deeper and consider the implied “hands off” hope of being ranked in search engines … or the hope to sell more goods or services with little or no effort.

The email, which came through a form on another of my websites, did not even include a telephone number or good time to discuss their business objectives (although it is requested in the form). Does this person want three customers per year, or 1,000 customers per month? OK, so they just want a dollar figure. If SEO is a commodity, as many people wish to see it, then why do some people have huge online success and others (most) never see a dollar’s worth of benefit?

You could say that this individual did not understand that SEO (search engine optimization) is much more than just some fancy programming code that is put into a website to magically bring in the business. The page they visited just before clicking on my contact page clearly explained things in human terms, but what confusion did they absorb just before they read what I told them? Maybe they just thought they were buying pink ponies and fairy dust like so many other people in online marketing tried to sell them. Maybe they do not actually believe that search engine optimization also means researching the search terms with the highest possible ROI (return on investment) to rank for, fixing any technical deal-stoppers, creating a strategy, and more than anything, discovering and promoting the reasons anybody would want to do business with the company.

Without a purposeful message and understanding who to reach, how to reach them, and what message to reach them with, the whole effort is lost. I’ll bet this guy didn’t think of that. In fact, I’ll bet he will be suckered out of whatever few dollars he is willing to part with. Yet, he may never consider the cost of his missed opportunities. He will probably totally deny the fact that marketing done well, including proper and accurate mathematic, demographic, and psychographic research, will always provide a positive return on investment. I did not say “sometimes” … I said “always”, and that is a truth that most non-participant business owners fail to grasp. It will often take more money, effort, or time than the impatient non-participant business owner is ready to face, but if they are willing to do it right, it will earn them more money. Tragically, it is also a truth that most SEO fail to grasp. Yes, I said “most SEO”, and if you disagree with that, then you must not have seen how many people with three weeks of marketing experience call themselves a search engine optimizer these days.

How Do I Define a Non-Participant Business?

You may wonder how I define a non-participant business, and I will explain this with an example.

As I looked at the website this individual wants to have optimized, I found that it was created with Microsoft Word. It was a really terrible “do-it-yourself” job with no call to action whatsoever. It has zero known incoming links from other websites, and even the business address was in the form of an image instead of text. It was really a great example website to reflect all the worst possible scenarios for ranking in search engine results, and more than I will get into in this article. It was like one of those awful at-home haircuts you see while standing in line over at Wal Mart. Yes, this person really needs some proper assistance.

What makes this story better is that I took a few minutes, out of sheer curiosity, to make a good estimate on his potential reach and effectiveness in his marketplace. I found that if they were willing to pursue a path for success, they could pave their street with gold.

Will I contact this person with a proper SEO proposal? Absolutely not, and I’ll tell you why. It is a non-participant! Only a non-participant would ever try to develop a website using Microsoft Word and ask somebody to fix it with SEO magic tricks. Only a non-participant would overlook the need for proper marketing instead of believing in the Voodoo which people make SEO sound like. Asking for SEO, while every other available factor in my cursory marketing audit of this company showed horrible results, is not good business sense, and it is not the mindset that makes for a successful outcome in any business plan.

You may recall hearing the term “survival of the fittest”, and I am here to testify that it works exceedingly well in the business world. It works just the way it has for millions of years, except it works even faster when you apply it to Internet marketing.

Simply “SEO-ing” a website to rank highly for search phrases is like spitting on a house fire and telling the insurance adjuster that you tried to save it. Asking the search engine optimization professional to SEO your website in this manner is like calling the fire brigade and directing them to spit on it for you.

SEO is just one tactic in a larger marketing strategy. Until you grasp that concept, you are just spitting.

Please realize for just a moment that money alone will not create success in small business marketing efforts. OK, maybe with huge amounts of money, but not the “get it fast and cheap” amounts of money that most small businesses bring to the table. Success takes participation, and often a lot of it. It means having a direction in your business, being ready to follow that direction, and changing direction as needed.

Why Small Companies Are Small

Small companies are small for a reason. That reason varies a lot between companies, but it is often because of lack of participation and attention to the things which grow a business.

Many small businesses do not have the resources in place to oversee important areas of their business growth. When they lack the needed personnel to manage things like legal, accounting, marketing, research and development, and etcetera, they must improvise. That can create a huge burden, but if it was easy, it probably wouldn’t pay very well.

Putting somebody in charge and delegating your weak points is fine, in fact, it is a great idea. However, when it comes to your marketing, the part of your business where it reaches the customers, you should pay close attention to getting it right. Marketing is what will direct many of the other growth factors in a business. Lacking participation and just being a witness in your marketing can cause a chain reaction that destroys many other areas of a company. Marketing is an integral piece of a company that brings in money for all the other things a company needs.

Try asking a couple of marketing professionals how often they find themselves waiting on clients to complete simple tasks. It is often startling how much a marketing person has to hound clients just to send over the pictures they said they were going to send last week, or the reports they asked for two months ago. Willingness to pay attention and complete simple marketing related tasks is often reflected in the overall success of an organization, and it is what I call being a “participant” rather than a “witness”.

I am not trying to sell you this idea, because you can probably already see it in companies all around you … maybe even your own.

Photo credit to Son of Groucho via Flickr

Podcast: Play in new window | Download