SoloSEO

Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz - Do NOT Market to Ignorance

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 30th, 2007

“Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz, I don’t know what’s in it?”

Just 2 minutes ago I heard a radio commercial from Alka Seltzer. They put their whole radio ad message into a jingle (clever…) with the line “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz, I don’t know what’s in it”. They are betting on my ignorance to sell their product, and that does not make a customer out of me. They want me to use it without even knowing or caring what is in it.

This is 2007, not 1907. Back then you didn’t have ready access to all the information you wanted even if you wanted it. Big difference, no Internet (and obviously no Google et al.). Today’s average person is information-oriented. They aren’t going to just go on the advice of some celebrity spokesperson (okay, some people still do). The customers that I want to serve love information and want to know as much as they can before making a decision.

I’m building a new house right now. I feel bad for my sales rep and the builder because I am so information and detail-oriented. Sure you can offer me a water softener, but I want brand, price, any other options, and contact information for the installer. I don’t want to just look at the fireplaces I can install, I want to know what company makes them, what kind of finishes are available, what else can I customize, and I want to know who the vendor is.

Give them information, they want it and will ask for it, now just give it to them. Case in point. We run Applied Content, a well known company that writes content for large and small web sites. For almost a year we went without displaying pricing on our site. So much of our time was spent informing our contacts of what our pricing was. We of course got clients from it, but obviously just a small percentage. Now we display our pricing on our homepage. The conversion of those who actually call or contact us? Nearly 90%. Now that’s efficient. Information is powerful.

Oh, you wanted to know what’s in Alka Seltzer. It’s made by Bayer, so it of course has Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) as a pain reliever, but it also has citric acid to neutralize stomach acid and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to react with the acid and dissolve it all (and make it fizz fizz). I for one will probably go with Tylenol (pain reliever), some oranges (citric acid), and some fresh cookies (baking soda).

4 comments Visited 1702 times March 30th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Killer Keywords

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 28th, 2007

In search marketing keywords have the potential to render a site useless, give it wings, or get it shoved somewhere in between. Keywords are the connection to potential online clients, to attract them to what you offer, while bolstering online visibility. As more searchers find the snippet of your site applicable and click your link, the more relevant you will become for those keywords in the eyes of the search engines. Win for you, as you get a potential client to your site, as well improve your ranking for those keywords, but also a win for the search engines, as they were able to deliver a relevant search result to their searcher. All good things. However, once your keywords are working well for you, the work is far from over. Keywords are not a static list, they need to adjust to market demand as any other marketing campaign should. What may be working now, might not be all that 6 months from now. A recent experience comes to mind. I was talking to the golf pro at our club and he was talking about this “spin milled” wedge (golf club) that was awesome. So I thought “I need one of those” (Note to wife: Honey, I needed it, we can go to Europe next year). When I got back to the office I searched for “spin milled” in my browser. The online golf store I usually buy from was noticeably absent from the first SERP page, so I just bought from another shop. The spin milled process is a fairly new technology in golf, and was first used on clubs starting back in 2005. My normal shop should have should have added new content with “spin milled” included to reflect this new technology years ago, but apparently still haven’t. Not good. I checked today and the shop I typically use does carry these clubs, but they missed out on my sale. Lesson… continual keyword reviews are essential when attempting to get the most bang from the current online buzz and the resulting search requests.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is just a different animal, which is hard for some more traditional marketers to grasp. Recently, Michael and I have been working on TV and Radio ads for another company we own, and it has been quite an exercise. We have talked frequently about how we need to grab the attention of our target audience with a good tag line, and we have all of 20 to 30 seconds to do it. Through our discussions we have come up with some pretty good ones (at least we hope so), but it got me thinking… I wonder if most site owners do the same kind of brainstorming for keywords? It makes sense that we should, it is essentially a message we are attempting to get out to the public, but we seem to just grab a bunch and throw them up and hope for the best. It is because we aren’t dropping thousands of dollars to broadcast these keywords to the public? That might be part of it, but it is hardly a good excuse. In the case of our TV and Radio ads, which will play on stations where we feel the listening audience is most likely to have interest in what we are pedaling, but the reach will be limited to a specific regional market. On the Internet we have the opportunity to get our message out to essentially the world if need be, and bring them to us.

How nice to have potential clients looking for us through search, instead of attempting to convince a general audience through a 20 second radio spot to visit our site if they happen to be interested in ________. Essentially, if our keywords are well researched and appropriately utilized, pre-convinced buyers will be the ones visiting, so we cannot let the low cost of keyword creation detract from the importance of using killer keywords to obtain online notoriety and attract qualified buyers.

I think we all understand that ranking well for one-word, or long-tail keyword phrases becomes more difficult as online competitors become more SEO savvy in any given industry. And for most of our sites, gone are the days when just driving random traffic to a site is good enough. I remember the days when impressions, and “eyeballs” were all we talked about, and all are online efforts were focused on driving traffic, just as many folks as possible. We didn’t care if they where old, young, bald, thin, or dead, anyone and anytime and we were happy. Of course that didn’t translate into a whole lot of sales, but it did help our valuations. Now is a different age, and we have had to adjust our strategies and SEO has evolved accordingly. And yet there still some out there focused improperly on simply increasing overall site traffic, instead of properly focusing on using targeted keywords to obtain qualified traffic. Just yesterday I heard a radio ad for a local “SEM company” that guarantees to increase search traffic to client’s sites, or they don’t pay. Geez, if any client of this group never has to pay it would be miracle, that is easy money.

So the question is, how do we develop more/better keywords? And in honor of our good friend Lee Odden of TopRankBlog.com, let me present my ideas in the form of a list.

1. Internal Brainstorming: No one knows your site and products better than you do (at least we hope so). Think about what you think clients are looking for, and how they would search to find you, this is typically a good place to start. Get with employees/partners and just talk it out.

2. External Brainstorming: Ask family and friends what thoughts come up when they think and see your site. It is amazing just how insightful this can be. I asked my wife and 8 year old son about one of our sites, and what they thought it was about, I was quite surprised with the answers and ideas that came from those discussions, and their words got me thinking.

3. Client Feedback: Ask your clients what impressions they get of your site, ask them to describe your site in their words. These will be phrases and ideas which come from those that found you and bought from you. You might get some ideas to help address the demographic and localization differences in phrases customers use to find you. The other day I purchased some stuff online, and got an email from customerloyalty@thesite.com which asked me if I was satisfied with the goods and if I had any comments to help them improve in the future. Thinking about it now, my comments would really help them with the creation of new keywords.

4. Competitors: The Internet makes competition a more even playing field, which is great in my opinion. Check our your competitor’s sites, see what keywords they are using and ranking well with. You may come up with a slightly different rendition or just go at them head to head for the same keywords. If you have the unique content and links to back it up, you might just out rank them quickly.

5. Use Keyword Tools: Obviously SoloSEO (free trial)has keyword tools utilizing Google, Yahoo and WordTracker APIs to help you come up with keywords that you might not have been able to come up with through your own brainstorming. I have found just seeing these variations lets me get out of a keyword rut and opens my mind to new brainstorming avenues.

and finally…

6. Frequent Reviews Check to see your existing keywords and how they are performing. Quit focusing on or perhaps adjust the ones which aren’t performing well, and try some of the new ones you feel will do better. You can’t rank for a killer keyword if you don’t implement it, and searchers not finding you are potential sales ops missed by not capitalizing on a pretty simple opportunity.

Good luck, and happy keywording.

3 comments Visited 1182 times March 28th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Accidental Page 1 Ranking for One Word Keywords

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 27th, 2007

Have you ever found yourself ranked for a popular one word keyword that you never intended on ranking for? Maybe we’re an odd ball, but the top one word keyword (besides our company name) that drives traffic to our site is “tagged“. That’s right folks, as in tag you’re it. Last year I created the Blog Tag Tree and it drew in literally thousands of links, many of which used the anchor text of “tagged”. Obviously this wasn’t one of those keywords in my keyword glossary, so I found it interesting how much traffic we actually get from this pretty unrelated keyword.

Content alone isn’t going to make it happen, links with specific anchor text is needed.

What one word keywords do you “accidentally” rank for?

5 comments Visited 1379 times March 27th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Mobile Search Madness

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 26th, 2007

Last Friday William Slawski posted on an interesting new patent registered by Google. Essentially a non-browser program for mobile phones which allows search through Google, and viewing of emails. After my recent trip to Japan, my mind has been consumed with the mobile aspect of all things search, and how we may need to adjust our site optimization techniques to better address the mobile phone search industry. Especially in Japan, where over 60% of those accessing the web are using their mobile phone, sites need to be concerned with how or if they are going to be found through mobile search.

For me personally, most of my time during the work week is spent at a desk, so most my searches M-F are on my laptop. However, on the weekends, when I am on the go most the time, most my searches are on my mobile phone. I don’t know if that is common with others, but it is standard operating procedure for me. Not to mention, by the weekend, I am so sick of being tethered to the computer, the very thought of opening it up and logging on turns my stomach a bit, I need my no computer cave time.

Just as a quick “for fun” test I performed a search for the term “golf clubs” on both my lap top, and on my mobile phone. I was first of all happy to see that the top 10 organic results were exactly the same on both devices. However, while my lap top browser was able to show me a complete page of 10 organic results, it also displayed 2 Ads at the top, and 8 other ads along the right sidebar, then 8 additional related search terms at the bottom. That is quite a bit of information on one page.

It is obviously a different story on my phone, where only the first organic search result was shown, and I had to scroll down to see the other 9.

This is quite an interesting situation all by itself… With only one search result being displayed, how does that affect what we choose to do once the results are served? Will we scroll down because we feel we need to see more results like we are used to seeing on our desktops, or will we be more inclined to just grab the first one that looks good? Does the speed of the connection affect if we scroll or not, or if we go to page 2 or not? I personally do scroll down for a quick look at the first 10, and I often go to the second page when I don’t find what I need, but this is only because my phone’s network (Sprint) is broadband now. Previously, with a slower connection, I would have never gone to page 2 of a search, because I didn’t want to wait for the next page to finally process and load. What influence do the faster connections have on the effectiveness of mobile search, and our willingness to use our phones as a search device?

What also is noticeably missing on the mobile phone results page are the Ads, both the top and the sidebar are absent. Oddly, I also noticed on my lap top I only am returned 1 - 10 from “about 14,000,000″ results, where on my phone I was returned 1-10 from “about 19,200,000 results. Not sure what the difference is here, but 5,200,000 more results using the mobile phone seems a bit, well… off. Not sure what caused the difference there.

So, I guess the next question needs to be, how long are the Google mobile search results going to stay ad free? With the iPhone and predictably other cool mobile phones coming out, I think it would be safe to say we are going to be able to do more, and probably want to do more with our more advanced mobile phones. If that is the case, are Google ad clients going to demand more access to potential mobile search revenue and pressure Google to include paid search results in mobile search results? I sure hope not, but realistically I think we have to expect it. This then begs the question, how will it be done? As there are only 10 search results returned presently, will the top two be PPC ads, and the remaining 8 organic? Or will Google just make the SERPs page longer to accommodate the top page and side bar ads? And with only one search result being shown on a phone, will PPC clients need to pay more than they do now for the ad on the mobile search top spot? Matt any insight?

There are many out there who have been predicting for years how mobile phones were going to change the way we access the Internet, but I don’t think the cell phone manufactures/service providers did a very good job of delivering phones which allowed this transformation to really take place. Apple’s iPhone might just be the catalyst to change all that, and finally force the industry to provide us with the mobile phones we both want and frankly need to be truly mobile. And if we do start doing more on our phones, then mobile search will surely evolve, and those best prepared to capitalize on these mobile advances might find a new competitive advantage in their SEM strategies. Cool stuff to think about, but very important stuff to learn about.

NOTE:
As full disclosure, I also ran the same test above on Yahoo, and while the lap top search was fine, doing the search on my mobile phone in Yahoo stunk, and the results were useless. Google automatically determined my phone was a mobile device and adjusted the served search page to better “fit” with my phone’s small screen, but Yahoo did not. So I was left to navigate around a full-sized page to find the search text box to enter my search terms, and when the results were returned, I had to navigate through a long blue column of paid search ads, to finally get to the first organic search result. Unfortunately, it too was displayed in a long, annoying column of text. Net result (pardon the pun)… I won’t be using Yahoo for any future mobile phone searches.

4 comments Visited 2238 times March 26th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Contest Begins Again

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 22nd, 2007

Andy Beal announced today the launch of the second Search Engine Marketing Scholarship. This is a fantastic opportunity ($10,000 worth of prizes) for any of you Solo SEOs looking to get out and be known with your expertise. Sharpen your copywriting skills and impress the SEO world with your insight into Search Marketing as well as your actual SEO skills! As one of the prizes, SoloSEO is giving out a free year of the SoloSEO.com tools. I’m also honored to be on the judging panel!

You have to hand it to Andy, he is one smart cookie. If you wanted (1) lots of content, (2) lots of links, (3) rankings for tons of relevant long tail keywords, and (4) didn’t want to pay anything for it, how would you do it? Why not create a scholarship contest that generates dozens and dozens of long SEO keyword rich articles (search Google for “social media marketing”), host them on your website, with the entrants of the contest then doing everything in their power to get links and traffic to their article on your site, and then give away prizes donated from other companies (they get a slice of promotion that way).

BRILLIANT!

1 comment Visited 1605 times March 22nd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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The Future of SEO in Japan

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 21st, 2007

On my last day in Japan, I can report that there is a huge market for Japanese SEO services. And there are many companies not only with this understanding, but actively pursuing technologies to help them with their own SEO efforts, and to assist their clients better SEO their sites for more search powered success in Japan. SEO is a big buzz word in Japan, but I was surprised to find out that Yahoo! Japan is the dominant search player here. Google Japan has a presence, but at the present time Yahoo! Japan controls about 80% of the Japanese search industry.

Another aspect many may or may not know is over 60% of the connections made to the Internet in Japan are via a cell phone. I had not been to Japan for a few years, so I was looking forward to see just how small the cell phones had become. On previous trips I had been amazed at just how small they were getting. So, I was quite surprised to find that Japanese cell phones have become quite chunky, and surprisingly large. I guess with so much on the Internet being done on the phone, they decided larger screens and keypads were worth the larger phone sizes. Most of the styles we were seeing were of the clamshell variety, like these.

I also found it interesting to see so many ads around Tokyo for Excite Japan. I had thought Excite was long since gone. I even navigated to Excite.com, just to see if the US version was still around…they are!! I used to love Excite, like 7 years ago when setting up your own, “customized” home page was a new and exciting thing to do. I even had weather and movies on my home page. I noticed that search in Excite is powered by Yahoo in the states, and although I couldn’t confirm this, I would suspect the same is true in Japan. Not too far a stretch, with the remaining popularity of Excite in Japan, and Yahoo controlling 80% of the Japanese search market, it is a pretty safe assumption.

Anyway, Japan is ripe and ready for SEO services and solutions. It is a hot market that will continue to grow. There is much to do for US companies to capitalize here…localization, which can be quite tricky. You can’t just have your web pages translated by a native Japanese speaker, it really needs to be done by someone who understand the SEM/SEO market in Japan. Many of the words being used are Japanese versions of English words, as in the case in much of the Japanese technology industry. So translating directly, word for word, isn’t always going to communicate the message intended, especially to those who know Japanese SEO terms. Additionally, we need to determine the difference in the Yahoo US versus Yahoo Japan APIs, etc. That will be a challenge. The idea of doing SEO on your phone, or receiving SEO reports on your phone, or just how to SEO a site to perform well on a phone, those are also issues that need to be further researched and clarified. Obviously with less room on a cell phone to show SERPs, being number 3 just might be as bad as being number 11 on a desktop. Finally, and probably most importantly, finding a good Japanese partner to help a US firm navigate through the differences in doing business in Japan will be of paramount importance. The reasons an excellent Japanese partner is needed are too many to list, but rest assured any mistake made by a foreign company along the way could prove fatal for their aspirations to do well in a very, very Internet savvy, and SEO prepared country.

The Japanese SEO industry will be very interesting to watch over the next coming years. I think we are in for a wild ride, and nothing is better than that.

3 comments Visited 2051 times March 21st, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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A Corporate Blog Makes You Linkable

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 20th, 2007

I was reading a post by Rand Fishkin about the “secret” that’s not really a secret for ranking. Essentially the secret is linkable content.

As I was thinking about this, it’s hard to have truly linkable content for many subjects, like surgical gloves or ice cube trays. But a corporate blog can be very linkable, even for a company selling something unexciting like surgical gloves or ice cube trays. In that corporate blog if you showed all the characters you could create with surgical gloves, or do funny/amazing chemical and volume loading tests with them, you’d have something that would at least be fun to the humorous side of the web. For ice cube trays you could create ice cube tray recipes for frozen treats, or show different crystal designs from freezing certain types of water (like distilled water).

A corporate blog can make you linkable, even if your products aren’t linkable on their own.

Thanks to Hans for the great balloon character.

Add comment Visited 1246 times March 20th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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SEO around the globe

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 19th, 2007

SoloSEO has been quite a surprise. When we launched last November, we had no idea the draw a stand alone SEO system would have, nor the level of interest it would generate. It has been truly a whirlwind. We did some quick figuring the other day and discovered that domains from over 40 different countries are currently using our site to SEO their sites. It is also surprising Germany and Russia are the top two, since the site is only being offered in English, and not localized for any other foreign language. There was no way to predict this amount of international interest. Of course we are thrilled to see so many from all over the globe interested in what we are doing, but we now feel pressure to address the SEO needs of site owners who can’t read English, and provide them with the SoloSEO tools in their own languages.

Personally, international business is a big passion of mine. My graduate work was done at Thunderbird, a graduate business school located in Arizona which focuses only on international business, and is ranked by U.S. News as the top school in that speciality. After graduating I was hired by a firm located in Utah, which sold a mineral in over 50 different countries. I was given the title of Global Marketing Director, and put in charge of overseeing the foreign markets, both in managing the distributors and determining our global marketing strategies. It was a wonderful time, doing what I had gone to school to do, international business. I loved the travel and the many countries I got to visit. In a typical year I would visit half of our distributors in 25 + countries, traveling about half the year. It was horrible on my social life, but I personally learned a ton about the world of international business, and how to ask where to find a bathroom in many foreign languages.

When I eventually decided to go out on my own and do the entrepreneur thing, I had hoped to continue with my international life. I started a consulting company with a partner, and we attempted to assist other companies on how they could expand their business operations into international markets, but this proved to be a tough sell. Many of the companies we met with thought we were too young, with too little international experience (5 years) to be consultants of anything, and especially in international business. Eventually, with my international dreams dashed, I had some technology built by a company I was attempting to represent in Japan, and started an online technology company that transfered digital files overseas for processing. This company became the extent of my global business aspirations and I was severely disappointed. But at least I got to be an entrepreneur, and I began to focus my attention on making a living in other ways. I decided it was time to put food on the table and take care of my families financial needs, but I hoped for an opportunity to “go global” in the future.

Michael and I originally met during the development on the first online company, and we struck a bond/partnership. 7 years later we have now launched other technology companies, all of which are focused on delivering online services to domestic clients. And this was also the original design behind SoloSEO. We just felt is was important for domestic site owners to have all the SEO tools they need, all in one place, so they could make SEO a less painful process. We knew others were probably struggling like we were, and they just wanted to optimize their site, to hopefully attract potential clients who were searching for their products. It was our hope the launch of SoloSEO would address the SEO needs of many domestic site owners, little did we know the international excitement which would grow quickly. Soon we had requests from the UK, Spain, Germany, among others for potential strategic partnerships, and international site owners, from many non-English speakers were signing up for the service. It was quite hard to believe, but here we are, and we are now trying to best capitalize on this interest.

So, as of last Friday, I have been here in Tokyo, Japan meeting with potential partners to hopefully offer our SoloSEO tool set in Japan (which is why my Japanese business card is included as the image above). I truly love Japan, I love being here. I lived here for a few years, over 20 years ago, and I studied Japanese in college, so I have grown to love the Japanese people, the culture, the language, the business methods and the food. Japan is as unique as any country on earth, but much more civilized, and perpetually polite and proper (and safe) than all others, which is also what I like about Japan. If you get a chance to visit Japan, you must take it, you will not regret it.

So in this post, I guess I wanted to say “thank you” to everyone who has made this trip to Japan possible, and I hope there will be many more international trips possible in the future. The growth and success of SoloSEO is remarkable, and we hope future international partnerships will contribute to our growth, which will continue to ensure that SoloSEO is always on the cutting edge in providing the best in SEO online tools. We assuredly continue to provide our clients with the most efficient and effective SEO tools available, no matter which country they are living in, or which language they speak.

Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu.

I’ll be back home Thursday, I hope the weather will be sunny and warm. I need to golf soon.

1 comment Visited 1508 times March 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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How to Get a Double Listing in Google

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 16th, 2007

Step 1 - Pick a topic that you can write a series of posts/articles on.

Step 2 - Start each post with the same topic name.

Step 3 - Give each post its own unique title appended to the topic name.

Step 4 - Name the post using both the topic name and title.

Step 5 - Write useful unique content.

Presto! Well, it worked for me, so with the right phrase it should work for you.

I didn’t intend to get a double listing by starting this series of “Starting your SEO Business”, but it’s a nice bonus. For every search I see it in the top 10 (in Google) we take 2 spots with the double listing. Try this query to see the double listing for yourself:

» start seo business

10 comments Visited 2345 times March 16th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Starting your SEO Business: 10 Ways to Make Your Small SEO Firm Look Big

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 15th, 2007

Nowadays you don’t have to be big to get big clients. After 3 months of starting up (early 2006) our own web content firm (Applied Content), we landed a big deal with a Fortune 500 company (actually in top 30 though!). It’s not that we looked like a giant corporation, but we looked big enough to show that we cared about our business and about our image. Whether you are a business-to-business or business-to-consumer company, looking “bigger” or more professional will help you land bigger clients, and more of them.

Now for my top 10 list of ways to make your small SEO firm look big:

1) Show that you exist

You should exist more than having a website and a contact form. Preferably put up a phone number and an email address. Get a toll free number if you need to and have it forward to your cell phone. Show your office address, a physical location that someone could look up on a map and find. If you work from home, consider getting a PO Box, but get one that has an address instead of a box number (I think UPS is starting to do this).

2) Show that you actually work with clients

In the field of web content our clients don’t want us to tell the world we write their content, so we actually just “hint” at who our clients are (Fortune 500 company, a site listed in Time magazine’s 50 Coolest sites, other SEO firms, local companies, etc). If your clients don’t mind, I’d like to see the list, even a short (best of) list. If you’re doing SEO, what keywords is the client ranking for?

3) Clean Website

I can’t even count how many interested clients for our web content firm have called and said “I like how clean your website is”. It’s not perfect by any means, but yes it is clean and simple. Don’t have your 14-year old nephew design your site and don’t use clipart. You can find all sorts of free web templates, just make sure you customize them a bit so they don’t look “templatey”.

4) Nice Logo

You should have a logo if you don’t already, even if it’s just the name of your site in a nice typeset. We’ve used LogoWorks before, but I’d try a local design shop first if you can.

5) Link out

There’s a reason that Google et al. like it when you link out to authoritative sites, and for me that reason is because I want to know that you know your industry and resources.

6) Multiple author blog

Now not everyone can do this, but if you have someone else on your staff or even someone that remotely helps you out, even if its a Link Ninja, have them blog too. They don’t have to blog all the time (you should, at least once a week) but enough so we know you actually talk with other people.

7) Rank for your Business Name

If I am going to use you for SEO you’d better be ranked #1 when I search for your company name. Remember that Google et al. is not just a search engine, it is also a dictionary, phone book, map, and calculator.

Run a PPC ad for your Business Name

It won’t cost you hardly anything, especially if they use your organic listing (see #7). It tells me you are using pay-per-click like a smart business does, even if I don’t know what other terms you are advertising with.

9) About Us Page

Be personal about your company or yourself. How did you start, what makes your business strong, what are your strongest points, what makes you you? You can do this on a Contact Us page if you want. You don’t need to tell me about your family and your dog, but I do need to know you are real. I need to trust you.

10) Call me on the phone

Don’t email me, call me. When some contacts you, call them back before you try to send an email. Then send a follow-up email and do all your contact through email if you want. A phone call makes you real, that you are interested in providing your services to me, and you care about my needs. I think human nature now is email because it is easy, convenient, and you can actually think and re-think before the message is delivered. This also means, if you’re having potential customers fill out a form you want to ask for their phone number (maybe even require it).

I hope these tips will help you to be better, look more professional, and land more clients. Your potential clients do care what you look and act like, so you had better give it to them.

This is part 3 in our series about “Starting your SEO Business”. In case you missed them, here are the others:

Starting your SEO business: 5 Steps to Getting New SEO Clients
Starting Your SEO business: Tapping into Local Business with Local Search Tools

5 comments Visited 3788 times March 15th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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