I have a request that you do not be a stooge, and that you do not treat SEO and Internet marketing professionals as stooges either.
During a phone call a moment ago, I was inspired to point something out about SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet marketing that is obvious to me, but clearly some people do not already understand. This is an extremely basic SEO lesson.
I make a point of asking people who contact me for Internet marketing a very simple question as follows: “How did you find me?” Of course I already know the answer, but so many people do not realize that we can track everything online.
My question has been answered in many ways, and even as silly as “I was just surfing the Internet and came across your website.” Even that answer is just fine. It is usually not a truthful one, and I actually already know when people contact me the exact way that they reached me. You see, when you email me or surf my websites, I can see your IP address, network name, location, what you searched for, and many other details that tell me who you are and how you found me. I ask people this question because of one important follow-up question that either goes right over their head or totally blows their socks off. That question is as follows: “Do you think it was an accident that you found me amongst the millions of other web pages out there competing for your business?”
This is Friday evening and I have a webcast to prepare for, so I do not want to take a lot of time with silly scenarios and rhetorical questions, but I have one more question to ponder. Now pay close attention and answer this honestly …
Do you think that you found this article on this blog about Internet marketing and search engine optimization by accident?
The truthful answer is that it was no accident at all, and I have created the means for you to find my blog. When people contact me about my services, I often have to remind them that if they found me amongst the millions of others out there, it is because I made it happen. If I did not create this article, and if I did not have the means to help people to find me, they would not find me.
When you approach any SEO and Internet marketing professional because you found them, you must question just how and why you found them instead of a website selling pink pantyhose. If you are confused why you found me instead of pink pantyhose, you should probably turn your computer off and get some rest.
Otherwise, perhaps you will be open to this crazy notion. If somebody can be sure that you find them instead of millions of others in the extremely competitive field of Internet marketing and SEO services, they can probably do the same for you.
When I think about the worst things in the whole world, I have this mental list of things like cruel people, wars, child abuse, murder, and all of that awful stuff. Ranking right up there is selling SEO and Internet marketing services. That is why I say that when I go to hell, they will probably strap me down to a flaming chair in front of a smoldering desk to answer a fire telephone and respond to burning questions about SEO services. Really, I have nightmares about this!
How Selling SEO is Like Hell on Earth
I said that Hell would have me selling SEO, but probably because it is the one thing I despise more than almost any other thing on Earth. I will explain this to you, but first, you must wonder how I can possibly love my job? I love my work as a search engine optimizer, probably more than what you would consider “natural”. If all jobs paid the same, I would have two jobs … SEO and racing cars. There are only a few things I love more than my work as SEO, and those are my family, racing cars, and riding motorcycles. So, it may seem strange that I hate to sell SEO, but I will tell you why.
Most People Only Know Enough About SEO to Be Annoying
It seems common that when people will set out to find good SEO, they have no concept that the best SEO have something more than basic geeky programming skills. I hear things all the time which make me believe that people view SEO and Internet marketing services as commodities. People often think what the SEO does is all about things like properly SEO’d meta tags, page titles, h1 tags and other things that really are a miniscule piece of the overall objective.
The objective is to earn the highest return on investment for the client. Technical issues, high search engine rankings, and even more website traffic will not achieve the objective without the rest of the assets a good SEO brings. These are the things the client often does not care to hear nor understand.
Good SEO (search engine optimizers) also have marketing talent that goes far beyond what the client is prepared to recognize (or pay for). They mostly just have a handful of common SEO questions that somebody who knew nothing of SEO suggested that they ask. Then they are shocked when the search engine optimizer will give an honest answer instead of just what they wanted to hear. It is almost as if the truth offends them, and they will keep shopping until they find somebody willing to tell them the right lie. Good for them. The one who will lie to them will also show them the lowest upfront price. So as long as they just want to live for today and not consider lost profit tomorrow, that will work great for them.
A lot of people come to me each day hoping to optimize their websites for particular search keywords. They usually don’t have a clue which search words will actually bring them results, and they think it is just some basic tasks that an SEO can do to optimize the existing terrible website content they already have that is already not working.
This kind of shopper does not want to hear that their brand image sucks, or that their website marketing reflects a company that cares more about shortcuts than doing something well. They think of only their landing pages, instead of factors like whether those people actually care what they have to say. They don’t look at whether people spend a lot of time on their site, click on the links in their text, and follow their call to action. They think of more in terms of more clicks equating to more money, but remain clueless how the two things actually relate. To tell you the truth about why I consider selling SEO to be hell, it is because this is the norm, and not the exception. This is the way the majority of SEO shoppers see the SEO industry, and it is why most companies fail to reach their online marketing objectives. I have plenty of numbers to back up this statement, and I live in it every day.
Just yesterday, a man asked me for any keywords that I am particularly proud of for ranking well. I guess that should not shock me too much, because a few prized words ranking well on search engines is what a lot of people think will bring success. I told him that I was proud to have each of the hundreds of thousands of search terms people use to find my work, and to narrow it down meant to narrow down my success in this industry. I gave him a few words, but there is not a small list of prized keywords that make up my big nest egg.
Drag Me to SEO Hell
I guess perhaps it is my attitude alone that makes it feel like Hell to explain things that people do not care to really understand. They set out to compare SEO without realizing that there is no apples-to-apples comparison. SEO is an art and a science, and no two minds will produce identical results.
Too many people come to me with a set of questions, but they already have the wrong answers strongly embedded in their head. If you want to ask me questions about how and why SEO and better Internet marketing works, you must first dismiss all of your previous false conceptions.
The fact is that I am probably the worst guy in the world to sell SEO, but I sure as hell can rank for the term.
My SEO tip today is about paying attention and taking action. There are about a squillion things that influence good SEO, and even more things are required to achieve great SEO. Paying attention to details can sometimes make the difference between good SEO and great SEO. Do I have your attention yet?
You are not, I repeat NOT going to get the best results that you seek from this article if you do not pay attention to detail. Good SEO has a lot to do with very fine details, and it often means paying attention to the details that the rest of your industry neglects. Today I am going to give you some thought-candy about the links which point to your website, but first, I am going to be sure that I have your full attention and that you are ready for this brain-exploding tip.
I think a lot of people try to make SEO seem a lot harder than it actually is. Really good SEO is actually quite tricky and time consuming, but there are many things that are pretty simple and tedious, but just need to be implemented properly. Knowing all of those simple and tedious tasks, and how they fit into the big picture of your search engine optimization strategy, and using them properly to receive optimal benefit is why people hire a search engine optimizer.
Squillions of people write tens of thousands of tips each day about search engine optimization. The good search engine optimizers choose their topic carefully, title it just right, tag the information well, add it to their search optimized website, and are sure to address it to the proper audience using just the right keywords. Then they emphasize the call to action, and make it clear why you found the information.
Good SEO (search engine optimizers) write their tips similar to the way they will perform SEO for their clients. In fact, you can tell a lot about them by the tips they give you (it is one of my top reasons to blog). Further, they provide the tips in the same way they expect their readers to implement their suggestions for those who try to take the do-it-yourself (DIY) SEO method.
The Great SEO will take a little additional time to do all of the things the rest of the world can only call “magic”. I do not want to let you down today, but this SEO tip is not designed to make a do-it-yourselfer a great SEO. It is just another piece in the puzzle that will help you to understand good SEO. I will say, however, that it is a pretty damn good tip that can help you move just a little closer to great. I still have to keep you reading regularly, so I cannot just give you that “SEO magic” all at once. Your head would explode, and I cannot have that on my conscience. Yes, imagine that, a search engine optimizer with a conscience … I guess there is just magic in the air today! Besides, I still want to leave you some reason to call on me when you have pulled all your hair out and get sick of letting business pass you by.
Now, on with today’s SEO tip!
Who Links to Your Site and Why Should You Care?
Links are at the front line of search engine optimization. The more high-quality links that point to your website, the easier it will be to rank for the things your site is about. The text within those links makes a huge impact on your ranking for certain topics. This is why many links to my blog include the words SEO and social media marketing. Those things are a focus of my blog, so it only makes sense that the links reflect this.
When important websites with a lot of authority start linking to my blog, I want to know it. I also want to be sure that they continue to link to my blog. I can control this in a couple ways, and the best of which is to keep producing consistently useful content. You know, the stuff people want to link to. Thanking them is not such a bad idea, either.
Another way to be sure the link-love keeps coming is to watch what received good links and write more of that. For example, a useful tip about a given topic (in this case, SEO) will often find its way into a lot of good streams of content, including both automated and manual linking. The automatic ones are pretty easy to manage, but the links created by people are a bit more tricky. You have to really blow somebody’s hair back to make them take the action of creating a link to you in their blogroll, or to submit your content to Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and etcetera. If you want them to write about it and link to you in a blog post, you practically have to reinvent electricity or come up with something so amazing that they want to print it out and rub it all over themselves. Short of that you must at least write about things that people want to read, and present it in a fashion they will keep reading.
Finding Your Best Backlinks
You should know who is linking to your website. I don’t mean just the links that are being clicked on. I mean the links that make your site more visible and valuable to search engines. Here comes a big fat juicy SEO tip for you. It is called Open Site Explorer and the information it can tell you is more than you may see on the surface. Yes, this is where you have to pay attention to the details. For example, I just looked at an Open Site Explorer report for this blog and found the interesting facts as follows:
The Technorati tag “guerrilla-marketing” has produced a link pointing to my blog article titled “Marketing Without a Budget: Guerrilla Marketing Tips“, but the new content under this tag has moved my link off the page as newer articles arrived. So it seems to me that since that link is from a valuable source page, I should probably write something about guerrilla marketing and be sure to tag it with “guerrilla-marketing”. Oh yes, this article is kind of Guerrilla Marketing related … gosh, I am glad I was paying close attention. I am going to add that tag in this blog post.
I also noticed that there was a pretty nice link from the tag “whiteboards” that pointed to my article titled “Smart Slate, Smart Airliner, and Other Interactive Slates“. Perhaps I should write a follow-up to that piece and tag it appropriately.
My point is that if you pay close attention to the things which make your website rank well, there is a lot clearer path to success. Knowing that I am in the blogroll of great blogs like the ones listed below can give me a lot of reason to want to throw back some link-love to them and also keep reading their work.
These matter to me, and certainly deserve my attention (Thanks Guys). After all, they show faith in my work by linking to me. To some people, this is just a small detail, but to me it is a really important factor.
Paying attention to the sites linking to you, both automated and manually, can make a huge difference in your success. Now the question that remains is this: What will you do with this information? Were you paying attention and will you use what I have suggested? I want to guess the answer is “yes”, but there are a lot of people who do not pay attention. I hope those are your competitors and not you!
Are you in need of a real bargain for your next website? I have a great deal for you today, and it starts at just $175,000 and $25,000 per month maintenance cost. But wait! There’s more!
It sounds like a great bargain, right? Well, maybe and maybe not.
I wish I had recorded the conversation I had with a woman desperately in need of an answer about website pricing. She just wanted to hear the answer that agreed with her. She did not have any desire at all to hear the right answer. I do have the urgent voicemail message she left for me, and I will include it in the podcast.
Listen Here:
After hearing the voicemail message, I promptly returned her call and she was even more frazzled in real-time. The purpose for her call was that she was frantically seeking some way to sway her business partners from an offer made by a website development company for what she believed was astronomically high. The part she could not answer was why it was too high, or how much too high it was. All she knew was that it was too high, and she wanted ammunition to fire back at the developer and her business partners.
I agreed with her that the $175,000 plus $25,000 was extremely high for a “basic website” or “simple website”. It is funny, but from a customer’s standpoint, they usually are just “very simple”. That is, unless you take them to the mat and have them show you just how damn simple it is by telling them to do it themselves.
I did my best to calmly and logically address the woman’s concerns and told her that this amount of money should indeed buy a substantially complex website with a lot of functionality, or otherwise be justified with some really fantastic marketing services. I expressed that there was very possibly a lot of fat to trim from the price, and that I would be delighted to review her requirements and provide a competitive bid for the project. To my amazement, she really had no clue about the site’s details. She did not have a project scope laid out with details of her needs. All she knew is that she was getting the shaft from some development firm, and she needed proof that the quote was many times too high. For all I knew, the pricing she had received was the bargain of the century. She wanted to hear nothing of the truth, and instead, she hung up the phone when I told her I needed more information to determine whether it was a good deal or a bad deal.
The point is that if you are shopping for technology or marketing services, the cost is really never too high or too low without the missing variable of what you are getting for the money. There was really no way I could tell her if the quotation she had received was ten times too high or one tenth of the cost it should be. Did it require two developers or two hundred? Did it involve tens of hours or thousands of hours? Did it include software licensing and a cluster of dedicated servers, or a shared hosting account?
The trouble I see with this is that it has become far too common that people who are non-technical and have little or no understanding of an industry to seek something based on cost and not on value. These are the people who get screwed to the wall with bad results and then blame an industry instead of pointing the finger back where it really belongs, which is at themselves for making fast assumptions based on cost of things they know.
Now, if you really want to know how much a website should cost, or how to determine website development or SEO rates, I invite you to read the articles as follows:
Of course, I could write all day about different pricing models and how to determine the cost of a website project, but in short, I will just say that if the price is all you look at, you are a sucker!
I would also like to add that if you are in such a rush to get your website launched that you do not have time to hear the professional’s answers to your questions, you may be a jackass, too!
Turning away business from a customer with a fist full of money and a desire to buy what you sell may seem like a bad business tactic. For many people, turning away a customer is viewed as a tragedy, but in some cases it can produce great benefit. In fact, there are many instances where this tactic can be extremely profitable. I know, it sounds crazy, but let me explain. First, I want to be clear that this is a tactic versus strategy, so don’t start trying to make a bunch of money turning people away just yet.
Examine, for a moment, a couple of reasons it can be important to turn away business, and how it may benefit your business to do so. Face it, not all customers are great customers. There are bad customers in every business … yes, I said every business. Even if you own a coin operated vending machine company and never have to face the customer, there is such a thing as a bad one. There are ways to turn away business that are tactful and useful, and sometimes we just have to learn when it is right to say “no” to the customer.
What brought me to write about this today was that I recently expressed selectiveness to a friend who is in need of marketing services. It is not a matter of arrogance at all, but in my line of work, there are very good reasons I absolutely must turn away business. I only have a limited amount of time to render my services, and if I am spending time working with people who do not pay well, have a bad product offering, or are difficult to work with, I may as well stay in bed. Working with a client for the money alone would be miserable to me, and likely to them as well. Mine is an extreme case, but in every service industry role where time, creativity, and knowledge are the product, it is very important to seek the right customers and stop wasting time with the ones who hold us back. Turning away business can be a painful transition for those unfamiliar with the concept, but it can save a lot of grief.
Opportunity Cost
(economics) The cost of an opportunity forgone (and the loss of the benefits that could be received from that opportunity); the most valuable forgone alternative.
When you are striving to be profitable, you must consider opportunity cost. That is the cost of opportunities that you will miss by taking on each customer. Any time you take on a new customer, there is a loss of potential opportunities elsewhere that could slip by because you are too busy.
In good and proper business transactions we can see that the customer is just as fortunate to make a purchase as the seller is to sell their product or service. If you focus on a better value proposition, competition really does not affect you as much. I have created many instances where a client raises their prices because their offering is worth more than they realized, and they were able to qualify it in their marketing message and quantify it in their business volume. This is the way it is supposed to be, after all. If somebody is willing to trade their hard-earned dollars, the seller clearly has something they want or need. If it is something with a limited supply and a sufficient demand, turning away business is sometimes not just the best option, but rather the only option. That is basic supply and demand, but there are still other reasons to turn away business.
The Arrogance of Purchasers
As purchasers, we often do not see things clearly and we become arrogant with our spending. There is always somebody else out there willing to sell things as if they are a commodity even when they are not. These sellers will offer something that is inferior, and price it low enough to capture the business of those who cannot understand the value difference. What this seller often misses out on is longevity and sustainable profitability. They do not understand the notion of turning away business for any reason, and the value it represents. This sort of selling as a commodity affects most businesses at some point (either internally or externally), and it is important to address it in your marketplace. In service industries, especially, it is a tragic end for many companies to fall into the trap of selling as if they are a commodity just to keep doing business … profitable or not.
Commodity
A commodity is a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. It is fungible, i.e. the same no matter who produces it.
A valuable lesson for both buyers and sellers is to recognize when something is not a commodity. Seeking qualitative differences is important to good purchasing, and conveying these differences is an essential of good marketing.
Overcoming Commodity Selling
I write what I know, so I am using examples from experience in my own companies to illustrate my point. Perhaps if you see that I live by my own advice, you can at least view it as sincere. When I consider people selling something as a commodity that is indeed not a commodity, it is easy to find examples. Let’s take web hosting as an example (the service that keeps websites up and running). I have been in the web hosting business as a wholesale web host selling to hosting resellers for a decade. Is it the same thing anywhere you go? Well, without a long drawn out explanation, I can say that it clearly is not a commodity. My company’s web hosting prices reflect the millions of dollars invested in higher quality equipment and network architecture that sets us apart. We turn away a lot of business, and thank goodness, because it allows us to keep the quality standards extremely high for the customers who want something better.
Is SEO a Commodity?
Another absolute case of a non-commodity that is often sold as such is marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) services. I see people every day who sell dreadfully ineffective but cheap marketing and SEO services. Tragically, I find many people in the marketing and SEO field who will drop their prices to try and compete as if they offer a commodity. In my line of work as a marketing consultant and enterprise SEO, it is pretty clear to me that my clients receive more quantitative benefit from the transaction than I do. Maybe you have a similar case of providing great value as well, and if so, it is best to recognize it. Sure, I get to earn a good living, but the dollars the client gets in return far exceed what I am paid. It kind of makes me like a money duplicating machine to clients. Would it make sense for me to take on every project that comes my way? Of course not, and especially considering that much of my profit is derived from performance-based contingency SEO. So I refuse to sell it as a commodity, which is why I turn down the vast majority of potential clients who approach me. It is stupid? Some may say “yes”, but my clients are fortunate for it, and my reputation has become valuable because of this.
Do You Want Cake or Do You Want Cake?
I also see the benefit to turning away business very clearly in another of the companies my wife and I own and operate, in the cake and confectionery business. It is a very busy time of year for cakes. There are a lot of weddings, anniversaries, and graduations this time of year, in addition to the constant baby showers, birthdays, company parties, and etcetera. Designer wedding cakes and custom gourmet cupcakes require a lot of time, creativity, and skill. If we tried to take on every customer, it would degrade the product for all customers. So we turn away business to keep quality standards high. This makes it better for business on both sides, the customer and the company.
If you are not selling a commodity, it is unwise to try and compete as if you do. There will always be somebody willing to cut their own business throat to beat you out of a sale just to drive revenue. Discovering and conveying your value proposition is essential. Sometimes that means that you will need to start turning away business.
