SoloSEO

SEO – Vital to Small Business

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on August 7th, 2007

To small business owners, SEO cannot be seen as the “end all – be all” to their potential success, but it rightfully should be considered a “must do” in order to maximize their full business potential. Based on our own situation, and finally deciding ourselves we needed to spend time on SEO, we now understand that getting started in SEO can be a bit intimidating, and very confusing without the right information. The SEO world tends to speak in their own tongue, and their language wasn’t developed, or taught in any business classes I attended. These new terms, whether it was meant to be this way or not, seem to have created a bit of a “barrier to entry,” to use a term we are more familiar with. Essentially the SEO industry created an illusion of “if we don’t know the terminology, it will be difficult to understand or perform SEO, and even tougher to do it well.” I felt the same way at first, but that perception is simply not true. SEO done the right way, without all the tricks and tinkering (which isn’t all that effective anymore anyway), is actually pretty straight forward. Just as simple as learning about credits and debits in Accounting or how supply and demand affect pricing in Economics. Not too tough to understand with a little reading and some hands-on exercises.

So if SEO is important, and we can learn it, how much time should we spend on SEO as a small business owner? It is an excellent question, and ultimately depends on how much business a firm hopes to bring in through their online efforts. For example, if a firm has in mind that in 12 months they would like to have 50% of their sales coming from online sources, and they currently only enjoy 5% of total sales from the site, then they should probably spend a considerable amount of time working on the site, making sure all the pieces are in place, so not only will the site’s visibility improve, but potential clients will be happy with what they find. Conversely, if this firm wants only 50% of their sales from online sources, but they now enjoy 60% of total being online generated, then they should focus more attention on more traditional forms of marketing and advertising until this ratio changes.

To get started in SEO, I would recommend just setting aside an hour a day to dive in. At first start just by learning about SEO, either from some pretty good books on the topic here and here, or through a number of blogs we recommend to our readership, namely: Michael Gray (GrayWolf), Todd Malicoat (StuntDubl), Lee Odden (Online Marketing Blog), Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), and Brian Clark (CopyBlogger). These books and blogs will provide good insight and instruction on the ins and outs of all aspects of SEO.

Once one has a basic grasp of SEO, they really should get themselves an account with SoloSEO, in order to put this knowledge to use, using the most comprehensive set of SEO tool on the web. Much like exercises in Accounting and Economics, actually using the tools, and seeing the results of your work, drives home the SEO concepts, and puts the finishing touches on the learning process. Through working with SoloSEO’s tools, a solid understanding of the pillars of SEO, namely keywords, links and content will form, and SEO will then seem not only doable, but pretty simple.

So once we understand what SEO “is,” then it is time to really understand our industry online, and review what our competitor’s are up to. This online Competitive Analysis can also be done using some of SoloSEO’s tools and reports. We must remember we are competing within a different marketplace, with new competitors, and how they have positioned their sites online, could and should influence how we position and optimize our sites today and in the future. There is not a pre-determined set of guidelines at this point for SEO, no matter what some might say, much of what we need to do to compete most effectively online will be determined by what our competitors have done and will do in the future. While the process of SEO is standardized, the focus of our specific SEO strategy will need to be flexible to face the challenges put forth by our online competitors. If we watch what they do, and manage our online SEO accordingly, then we can keep pace or outpace what they are attempting to do, and better our online exposure.

In my mind there isn’t a business out there today which cannot benefit from an online presence, especially a site that is well prepared, and skillfully promoted. Small business owners need to take every advantage, use every possible tool and strategy available, to insure their eventual, or continued success. I can think of nothing more vital, more accessible and more easily implemented (not to mention more affordable) than SEO. A site which runs well, and effectively targets the right potential clients, promotes a firm’s image in a positive way, while making sales, even while we sleep, or while we play golf (not that anyone would do this during business hours). Take the time to get to know SEO and you will quickly understand just how big your little company can become, and that realization can be quite jolt.

2 comments Visited 4397 times August 7th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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If You Want Customers, Don’t Scare Them Away

Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 21st, 2007

Many of us in the Internet Marketing world may not use mass physical mailings very often, but they are a very traditional form of marketing. Note the back of this mailing I received the other day. You might first notice it has a rip in it. Yes, that was my first instinct after seeing what you may not notice with this small image. Yes, the envelope flap is actually PRINTED onto the envelope to make it look like an envelope with a flap.

Was there something important inside? I will never know. I don’t know who it was from or what the contents were, but once I saw the fake envelope flap I knew it was worthless.

We can easily scare people away from becoming a customer, or even potentially being a customer (i.e. me reading the document inside this letter), in many different ways. Here are a few to think about:

1) Not delivering the expected content. Example: A PPC ad that says “Dining Room Furniture” but after you click you go to a super furniture warehouse, where you then have to find the dining room furniture. Another example, your ad says you have a certain product but you don’t at all.

2) Worthless content. Having content that doesn’t even make sense, or just as worse has poor grammar/spelling, or is scraped from some other website and claimed to be your own.

3) A long ad page for what appears to be a decent product but that uses lame marketing gimmicks to attempt to convince me that my money is worth it, all the while making me shake my head in disgust that people actually believe and buy this kind of stuff.

Seth Godin wrote a book called All Marketers Are Liars that is a fantastic read for anyone who owns their own company, runs a business, or is working on branding themself or their blog. He talks about telling authentic stories, even if they end up making the customer tell themselves a lie. I highly suggest you read the book, or get the audio book. This mass mailing was not authentic from the start, it was a total fake. At least make me open it to find out it is a scam.

What are some other things that scare you away immediately? What is something you are doing on your sites that scares your customers away?

1 comment Visited 5069 times June 21st, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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The Perfect Solution to Paid Link Disclosure

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 16th, 2007

There is a big brouhaha over Matt Cutt’s recent postings (yes, 3 of them) about the disclosure of paid links (big one here, another here, and one more here). There’s been a lot of postings about it, with a great summary here by GrayWolf at SEOclass.com, some here by GrayWolf at Wolf-Howl.com, more here from Todd Malicoat of StuntDubl.com, more here from Matt McGee of SmallBusinessSEM.com, and another here from Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim.com.

Essentially, Google wants you to disclose paid links to both users and to search engines. Google wants to know which links are “paid” instead of “natural” so they can discount their weight.

My feeling about it is this: Paid links are advertisements, and as such should be distinguished in some way from other links that are not advertisements. The disclosure should not be deceptive to users or to search engines. Disclosure can be subtle and is okay to be undetectable (not deceptively) to search engines/machines.

Google’s own webmaster guidelines specifically discusses that we should not do things specifically for search engines, but focus on the users:

Make pages for users, not for search engines … Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

If we look at other forms of marketing and advertising, there must be disclosure for advertisements. If you read a newspaper, it reads “This is a Paid Advertisement” somewhere on/near the ad. If you watch infomercials, it says “This is a Paid Advertisement”. If you listen to the radio and hear a political ad, it is disclosed as a political ad. If you look at Adwords and other text ads by search engines it has some form of disclosure, like “Ads by Google”. If you see a banner ad, well it either screams “I’m an ad” because it’s an image and it looks like an ad, or it says “Advertisement” somewhere. These advertising property owners do not make these statements because they are pretty or interesting, but to obey laws for advertising disclosure.

And now, for what you all have been waiting for…

The Perfect Solution to Paid Link Disclosure

So, I have the perfect solution for you to disclose your paid links to users and not search engines, that anyone can implement quickly and easily. This method makes it virtually impossible for a machine to implement an algorithm based on this code, but makes it fully disclosed to users.

To see the paid link disclosure in action, click on the following link (the next page has the link examples):

SEE EXAMPLE PAID LINK DISCLOSURE HERE

How to implement Paid Link Disclosure

Step 1

Copy the CSS code below and paste it in your existing CSS file for your site. (or create one, or put it in the template of your site so it shows up on each page).

a:hover.linkx {
    background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);
    background-repeat:no-repeat;
    padding-left:10px;
}
a:hover.linky {}

Step 2

Change the name “linkx” to something else and don’t include words like paid or ad or affiliate. This keeps variability from site to site and gives it no semantic meaning. “linky” can be changed to something else also, but essentially all that is doing is giving your other links a class so that all links have a class assigned to it and cannot be “filtered” based on having a class attribute.

Step 3

Create an image that in some way reflects that the link is paid. Don’t just copy my $ image here, use a unique image and rename the filename to something else (keep it ambiguous). You may want to use a star, an asterisk, an exclamation point, or a turtle. It should be unique to you so again there is no regularity for the search engines, but at the same time it gives appropriate disclosure to your users. Place this image file behind the folder you created in step 4.

Step 4

Create a folder (give it any name, just be creative) and disallow search engines from access to this folder (learn how to do this in your Robots.txt file). No this is not deceptive, you just don’t want them to go there. This is for step 5.

Step 5

Create a file in the directory you just created and include a disclosure about paid links, describing that you disclose paid links by using an image icon next to links when a user mouses over them. I wouldn’t even include the icon on the page, just describe it with text, like “A dollar sign icon will appear when you mouse over a paid link”.

Step 6

Add the class attribute that you renamed in Step 2 above to the anchor tag of your paid links and any new paid links.

This solution would be incredibly difficult, and I would go as far as to say “impossible”, for Google and others to detect on a wide scale basis (which is what they face). Their problem is that this code is ambiguous, and could be doing any number of things besides attributing a paid link, and so they cannot fully determine that it is actually a paid link based on the CSS itself. But you’re still being ethical because users are aware before they click on the link that it is a paid link.

If you want to disclose paid links without having to hover, just modify the CSS code above and take out the “hover” part (see live page here of it in action):

a.linkx {
    background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);
    background-repeat:no-repeat;
    padding-left:10px;
}
a.linky {}

If you have any improvements or other suggestions, add them to the comments below.

UPDATE: Matt McGee gives his idea for a solution, which is quite novel too.

13 comments Visited 7501 times April 16th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Deliver on your Page and Ad Titles

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 9th, 2007

A radio ad I heard this morning starts out “Another how-to half minute from the Home Depot…”. Now, before you read on, what are you expecting to get out of the next 25 seconds or so left of this radio spot? A “how-to half minute” makes me ready to learn something about landscaping or home repair or even picking out appliances. Teach me something!!

Well….the ad continues with 2 guys, the first talking about how he loves his old tools. The second guy mentions an instant discount on tools going on now at the store. The conversation switches instantly back to the first guy who then says he hates his old tools.

So what did you learn?

Zilch. Me too.

Teach me something if you say you are going to. If you say you’re going to teach me something, then just give me a blurp about your sale, I’m going to turn off (I might even blog about how much I dislike your ad).

On the web there are many places where we only get one small sentence or “intro” to get a click, mainly page titles and text PPC ads. Your visitor expects you to deliver on the page or ad title, and if you don’t…your reader will quickly use that back button. If you have something lackluster to deliver, you may want to think twice about overpromising on the page or ad title.

Underpromise, over deliver is the old adage of sales. This holds partly true, except for when marketing you need to dazzle them, lure them in, pique their interest. You will lose customers if you then under deliver on the landing page, but if you deliver and then some you might just have yourself a sale (or a reader, or a friend, or a …. ).

A recent article featured on CopyBlogger.com also discusses the importance of not going overboard with your title to the point that what you promise to deliver isn’t even believable.

Why Your Best Headline Could Be Too Powerful

Essentially, your headline itself can be so unbelievable you don’t even get a click in the first place. Headlines not only need to deliver the content they promise, but they need to be believable so you at least get the first click.

Add comment Visited 5319 times April 9th, 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 4484 times March 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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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

10 comments Visited 29047 times March 15th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Keywords – More Than Meets the Eye

Posted by Michael D Jensen on February 16th, 2007

When you were a kid, did you ever have one of these transformers? I had several transformers and even loved watching the cartoon. A transformer, like Optimus Prime, would be a semi-truck at first, but then you could move the pieces around and make it into a robot machine. The tagline for Transformers was, “Transformers, More than Meets the Eye”. Your keywords, just like the toy, contain more than meets the eye.

Often we approach our keywords simply as a pool of words that people use just to find our product or services. We get caught up in using keyword tools that will find any version of our keyword ever typed in, jumping at a new phrase that we might find, and then plugging it into a PPC campaign or a new page of content. But are you overlooking the “intention” of why your potential customer is using that keyword? The range of intentions of your customers are vast, but perhaps we can break them down into three categories:

1. Ready to Buy. I know what I want, I just need to get it.
2. Comparison shopping. I am trying to compare services/products, including features, price, warranty, etc.
3. Just curious. I found your product and am just looking to see what it was, but I’m not buying it right now.

Then within these categories, your customers are going to be concerned with any of the following, or in any combination thereof:

- Cost
- Quality
- Benefits
- Features
- Warranty/Guarantee
- Are other people using it? Do they like it?

Understanding your keywords and what the overall intention of the keyword is can help you direct your PPC advertising as well as your search and content optimization. If you know the intention of a keyword, why not write your content (on your keyword’s ranked/targeted page) focused on its intention?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say a customer is looking for some content for her website, and you have a content company. The customer could do several searches, depending on her needs. Let’s keep it down to three:

1. content for my website
2. seo content
3. cheap content

The trick is that each of these keywords can mean different things to different people. What you want to do is to identify the most common intention, the reason why most people would use this keyword.

content for my website
This one is pretty general. If it was my company and I was running an ad or trying to write a page focused on this phrase, I would consider the intention not to be at a “ready to buy” point, but not just curious either. The customer doesn’t necessarily tell you they are looking for unique content, fresh content, seo content, free content, etc. So I would tell them about different types of content, what kind of content is best for different needs, and what you an provide to them.

seo content
Already you know your customer knows what SEO is, and that they see the importance of content. They are probably more ready to buy than just curious, and they are probably also comparing content companies (otherwise they might have typed in the name of a company, group, or writer). Your content should focus on the SEO part, about “optimized content” and keeping your content fresh and updated on your site. Maybe include (or link out to other articles on your site) about how to optimize title and header tags. Make your pitch match the intention of the keyword.

cheap content
This keyword obviously tells you your customer is looking for something economical. Focus your content on not only the affordability of your content, but also the long term benefits of content for a site (good content can easily pay for itself quickly for many products/services). You could also warn your customer about what to watch out for when comparing with other content companies and detail the problems with using free content and articles.

How disappointing it would be (instant back button) to search for a phrase and find something so generic that it doesn’t fill any needs or fill any knowledge gaps. Your customers are expecting to find what they are looking for, why not give it to them?

Take some time to look at your keywords in more depth, and even categorize them by their intentions. Then match up your content with your keywords and see if the content covers the needs of the intention of the keyword. The benefits of this is that your customer will have filled her present needs, and this has a positive impact on her feelings toward your business/website.

And don’t forget that SoloSEO has tools to organize your keyword lists by category or topic, and to assign keywords to your content pages, making this a much easier process. Try a 2-week free trial of SoloSEO.

1 comment Visited 6434 times February 16th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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PPC Advice – Good or Bad… or VERY BAD

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on February 15th, 2007

Today, I took a few moments to take in a bit of the current online marketing blogscape. I eventually came across a post entitled “17 most common PPC mistakes web marketers make” by Igor Mor. It was posted on SEOMoz as part of their YOUMoz program where they “claim” posts from others they deem appropriate. Since my last post was about the ongoing feud between some PPC gurus and SEO pros, I was interested in the topic. As I read I was quite pleased with the content and the expertise Mr. Mor obviously has obtained through his experience with previous PPC campaigns. Unfortunately my positive mood did not hold out until the end, in fact I now wished this post had been named “16 most common PPC mistakes web marketers make,” because the 17th point is not very good advice at all.

In points 8, 9 and 16 Mr. Mor makes it a point to discuss the importance of protecting your firm’s name from your affiliates, and from your competition. This advice, although obvious to most business people, is very sound. Your firm’s name and the proper branding of that name are of paramount importance in the marketing world, online or otherwise. If your competition is using unethical marketing tactics to steal clients and benefit from your firm’s brand, or if they attempt to purposefully damage your firm’s reputation or brand image without cause, then by all means firms need to do all they can do, including taking legal action, to stop these competitive threats. I have no problem with this advice.

However, point 17 is so misguided and potentially dangerous, it severely reduced the quality of the post. Here is the problem, in his last point Mr. Mor suggests firms bid on the brand name of their competitors, because “anyone searching for your competitor could easily be your customer instead” (ghastly logic) and “Most of the time the ROI on those keywords is excellent” (Ah, we make more money, so the practice is acceptable, the good ole “Ends justify the Means argument”). What makes the whole suggestion even more preposterous is Mr. Mor explains earlier in point 8 that his firm frequently sends out “legal letters” to their competitors to stop them from continuing this type of unethical behavior. So I guess we have an acceptable double standard here, we are instructed to engage in bidding on our competitor’s brand name as a good PPC strategy, and we should make it a point to legally threaten our competitors if they attempt to do the same thing to our brands. Doesn’t sound so good to me, even with my lower than average cognitive skills. In Mr. Mor’s closing sentence, he advises “If you get a “legal letter” from the competitors and it holds water, I’d suggest comply with it.” If we get a letter, and if it holds water? I’m sorry folks, that isn’t a letter I want waiting for me in the mail box, the innumerable bills and credit card applications already in wait make the trip to the mail box miserable enough.

I get frustrated with the disconnect between the online world and the non-online business world at times. There is this maverick/old-west mentality online that continues to percolate, where obviously unethical and potentially illegal marketing strategies are employed by some with impunity. Interestingly enough, the resulting vitriol from those who are caught in their back alley practices is impossible for me to comprehend. These unscrupulous marketers know what they are doing is sinister, but they risk it anyway for a few extra bucks. How can they be so upset when they are shut down? Here is another thought… I know I personally do not want the FTC, or any other government entity, to form some sort of Internet Marketing Oversight group to start governing our every online marketing move. But if this sort of poor online marketing advice is continually doled out, and routinely implemented, then I think we should expect the involvement of the government in the future. And they will do it in the name of consumer protection, and fair trade enforcement, whether that truly be the case or not.

Just for fun, I took a second and went out and Googled “Dell Computers” and interestingly found no PPC ads for Apple or HP. I then searched for “Apple iPod” and found no PPC ads from Microsoft taking us to their Zune site. This isn’t by accident, corporate reputations are priceless. Clients aren’t fools and they will know when firms have attempted to hijack a competitor’s brand name. Yeah, you still might get a sell, and yeah, that will improve your ROI, but what has this ploy done to your company’s image? It is hard to quantify in dollar terms, but it should be considered, it is considered by image conscience Fortune 500 companies.

My advice, don’t bid on your competitors brand name in your PPC campaigns, earn your money the old fashioned way, work harder, work smarter, have a better product, offer superior customer service, run PPC ads on the long tail keywords, have fresh content on a site benefiting from solid SEO techniques. Simply put, do it the right way, stay above the murky waters of black-hat marketing tactics. You will sleep better knowing you will not be receiving a cease and desist letter from your competitor’s legal representatives for unethical behavior. Instead, if you do it the right way, you may very well get an offer from a competitor to just buy you out, because they are sick of being hammered by your squeaky-clean, brilliantly employed marketing efforts, and interestingly enough, your pristine brand will actually be worth your ridiculously high asking price.

5 comments Visited 8408 times February 15th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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SEO vs. Paid Search Marketing Clash

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on February 13th, 2007

If you have not gone over and read about the tussle between Dave Pasternack and SEO pros, you must take a minute to review it, it has been quite entertaining. Our friend Michael Gray has jumped in with both feet, and his post called Dave Pasternack of Did-it.com – How to Fix Your Problem is an excellent place to get a good overview of the feud. Essentially Dave Pasternack has come out saying SEO isn’t “rocket science,” and it has caused a bit of a stir among the SEO ranks. Pasternack claims he gave up SEO years ago, and now considers himself a PPC expert, and co-founded a company that consults and assists firms with their paid search campaigns. It is his opinion that SEO is a “Fix-it-Once” Task, not an Ongoing Service. It is this statement where Mr. Pasternack loses credibility. It would be nice for all of us small business owners if SEO really was a quick, one-time fix, but instead it is an ongoing and unrelenting pursuit. Not only to keep our sites optimized to do well in SERPs, but also to stay ahead of our competitors, competing for the same keywords in the same marketplace. I think this point gets glossed over by many discussing SEO. As a business person first, I personally don’t care if I show up as #1 on a SERP, I just want to show up above my nearest competitor for the same or similar products and services. Some markets will be more volatile than others, but keeping an eye on competitors, and their movements in the SERPs will always be important, and most likely a moving target. The importance of competitor watchdogging will continue to increase as more firms figure out the benefits of online marketing, and begin to implement SEO and Paid Search techniques.

So personally, I have no problem with the use of well researched, and wisely created PPC campaigns, and well managed SEO techniques; there is a place for both practices, and using one without the other doesn’t make much sense. The first step however is to SEO your site and get it optimized for the traffic which the PPC ads will hopefully drive to it. I have noticed Paid Search only gurus occasionally suggest SEO pros use “scare tactics” to encourage long-term service contracts, but unfortunately the Paid Search guys do the same thing, making site owners nervous about doing PPC campaigns themselves, and perhaps blowing their opportunity to do well. PPC isn’t too tough either, don’t let either of the two groups scare you, just realize both take some expertise, and some patience to LEARN. The main reason there is demand for these two services is they both can be overwhelming if you don’t understand them, and they are both work.

As an example, 5 years ago I use to sit down and do my business and personal taxes myself, I even used TurboTax a few times. Even with all the Turbo Tax tools it took quite a bit of time, it wasn’t rocket science, and I got the job done, but frankly I did not enjoy it, even though a sizable refund was my eventual reward. Now with a dozen different business running, and less time, and no patience for our screwed-up tax system, I love the fact I can pay someone, an expert, to do all that work for me. I could do it, but I don’t want to, I have other pressing matters more important to me. There is the SEO and Paid Search services in a nutshell. The tools, advice to do both are out there to learn, but whether someone has the time or desire to learn and do them on their own, is completely another issue. I will also admit there is some increasing art to the SEO process when we consider link baiting, creating a buzz and social marketing aspects into the online equation.

Finally, there will be times when all the SEO and Paid Search in the world isn’t going to get you anywhere, as marketing results will depend on the industry you are marketing within. One of our companies has a very nice site, it is SEOed well, and we have been running solid PPC campaigns for the most appropriate keywords in the industry, but we have gained little traffic and only a few leads a month. We know the industry well, we know our service is widely sought after, we know we are priced nicely, but we still don’t have the business we know we could have. So last week we headed Orlando to exhibit at a large trade show in this industry. The results were amazing, our service was highly sought after and well received. We heard comments like “where have you guys been?” or “we have been looking for something like this for years,” from booth visitors. So the golden question… where were our potential clients looking when they couldn’t find us? The answer… obviously not online. Make sure you know your potential clients, and where they are most likely to be searching to find you, if it isn’t online, then adjust to help them find you some other way.

The world continues to move online, and will continue to do so in an ever increasing pace, but not everyone is there yet. Marketing is the art of getting the firm’s message to potential clients, wherever they may be, even if it is offline. So getting your site’s SEO in line now will pay dividends in the future, but it may not be the end-all, be-all marketing home run you want it to be right now, especially if your future clients just aren’t online yet.

Add comment Visited 5646 times February 13th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Your Customers aren’t Targets

Posted by Michael D Jensen on February 1st, 2007

I heard a great radio ad about radio advertising, which included the following:

Your customers aren’t targets, they’re your friends and neighbors. They want to be talked with, not shot at.

Too often businesses think of customers only as markets, audiences, and targets. The truth is that our customers are individual, real people, real like you and me. They have feelings, families, experiences, challenges, things to do, and lives to live. This got me thinking about SEO and online marketing/advertising in general.

Does our content speak to the individual or does it speak to the demographically ideal subset of our audience? Are we trying to use one piece of content to sell to every single member of our audience in one swoop?

Your content for your site should reflect that you understand who your audience is, even when you have different audiences. Making your content so generic and watered down makes your business so ordinary and not exciting.

I was on ebay the other day, looking for a new car. I looked at the bidding history, and ebay had a small notice that I really enjoyed. See if you can tell which part I liked:

…eBay has decided to change how bid history information is displayed so bad guys cannot target bidders with fake offers using this information…

Now think for a second of another way that ebay COULD have said “bad guys”, if they were not trying to really speak to you as a real person:

…eBay has decided to change how bid history information is displayed so scammers cannot target bidders with fake offers using this information…

There would be no real problem in using “scammers” instead of bad guys. And sure it is just one word. But for me it makes ebay seem so much more real instead of corporate, and it speaks to me personally (especially because I have kids and “bad guys” is an every day term in my house). I like that in a company, and that’s the kind of company that gets my business. Detach yourself from me and my world and I will do business somewhere else.

On a side note…I love radio advertising, and in terms of offline marketing I think it is the best medium for the buck. I’ve learned a ton from the The Wizard of Ads, I highly recommend his (Roy H. Williams) best selling books for anyone in marketing.

2 comments Visited 5506 times February 1st, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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