Online Marketing and SEO- The New Scam?
By Alicia Moura Inside found at Tucson Business, on Friday, October 05, 2007
Let’s face it, it’s quickly becoming unheard of for a business to operate without at least some measure of a website. Whether it’s a basic landing site with a few pages and contact information or a massive e-commerce operation, the fact remains that businesses of all sizes ? even in Tucson ? have come to realize you’ve got to be online.
Many businesses are now looking beyond the initial Web development stage. They want to know how to market their site and use it as a fundamental part of their business to attract clients and actually make some money.
This is where online marketing and search engine optimization come in. Search engines are one of the primary vehicles for Internet users to find businesses, products or services on the worldwide web. It is estimated that 90 percent of Internet users who approach search engines with specific queries find what they are looking for, meaning, they end up buying a product, reading articles, gathering resources, making business contacts and a host of other applications the Internet can provide for recreation purposes and business solutions.
As a marketing tool, with online marketing you are looking at a much clearer picture about the type of return on investment you can get. It is important to understand that with internet marketing, it is possible to determine what people are searching for in relation to your products and services, and how many searches are made for those and similar products and services in the local Tucson and wider national market. Unlike traditional advertising, where the best you are going to get beforehand is a demographic overview of how many and what type of readers, listeners or viewers a particular medium has, with search engine optimization (SEO), you can see exactly how many people are actively searching each month for terms that relate to your business. This makes it a much more concrete choice on whether or not SEO is worth your investment before you even begin.
It is important to keep in mind that an optimized website is just that: optimized, as in past tense. While having a top SEO ranking in Tucson may be less competitive than other markets, SEO is not something that you do once. This would be the equivalent of running a one-time ad in a newspaper and expecting to see your sales skyrocket.
Unfortunately, while SEO can be a great tool with a lot of clear advantages for your business, it can also mean a world of trouble, frustration and a lot of wasted money.
Search Engine Optimization in Tucson is still a relatively new frontier ? smaller businesses haven’t heard of it, local advertising agencies don’t generally do it and the vast majority of web developers only think they do. And as with any new frontier, you’ve got a fair number of outlaws out there waiting to sucker you into wasting your money.
The challenge is finding the right SEO firm to represent you, and it is a real challenge.
“For Tucson businesses interested in SEO, their options are usually going with someone who doesn’t know what they are doing and are very affordable, or going with someone who does and who is not affordable,” said Jeff Nordensson, of the Nordensson Group advertising and marketing firm.
His statement neatly sums up the challenge of finding quality SEO services. Generally, business owners find they are paying a Web developer who says he or she can do SEO. But what they are really getting is the bare minimum, and in some cases bad SEO practices for their website. Either that or they are forced to go outside Tucson ? and sometimes even outside Arizona.
Yes, paying a lot or money for SEO that works and greatly increases your revenue is great. But for most local businesses an SEO campaign costing $40,000 to $80,000 just isn’t an option.
FAQs for
choosing an SEO firm
Generally speaking, quality SEO that yields measurable results is going to take expertise, ongoing training into the current trends and methods, a dedicated team…and hard work. So, it’s a pretty safe bet that any company offering SEO services for, let’s say a few hundred dollars, is probably giving you the runaround ? either knowingly or because they are misguided in their ideas of what SEO really is. Additionally, SEO is a full-time job, not a side service or afterthought.
Make sure you carefully check out any company you are considering for SEO services. The best way to be sure you are getting what you need is to understand a fair amount of SEO methodology yourself. You don’t need to be a programmer or a marketing professional to ask the right questions.
Here are some questions to ask a potential SEO firm:
?n? Do the SEO firm’s employees have a background in marketing?
?n? Are they affiliated with other reputable companies?
?n? Does the firm have detailed case studies to show you verifiable results that they have gotten for their clients?
?n? Do they use comprehensive, quality web analytics to look into your competition’s websites? Good Web analytics should be more than just a report each month detailing what happened with your site.
?n? How does the SEO determine which keywords to use for your site? Will they continuously refine and update these keywords?
?n? What types of traffic expectations for relevant keywords can you expect? In other words, how many people are searching each month for keywords that relate to your business that you can expect to target?
?n? Is the SEO firm committed to ethical search methods, referred to as “white hat”? If a company uses spamming techniques or questionable methods, it is only a matter of time before your site gets penalized or banned from the search engines altogether.
?n? What strategies is the SEO proposing for your website? Keep in mind that although revising meta tags, writing clean code, and submitting your site are all necessary components to SEO, they are just the bare minimum. A comprehensive SEO strategy will include methods like SEO-specific copywriting, link baiting, blogging, and even redesigning your navigation (internal and external) to make it more search engine and visitor friendly.
?n? How much of their online marketing strategy relies on pay-per-click advertising? While pay-per-click is a great short-term way to generate traffic, when you stop paying, the clicks stop coming. For ongoing, long-term search engine visibility, earning natural search engine rankings is a better way to go.
?n? Is the SEO firm offering guaranteed rankings? If so, as Eric Van Meter, creative director of Web and e-media at Tucson-based Nextrio advises, “Run the other way, and quickly!”
?n? How will the SEO firm monitor your traffic and ranking results? What types of reports will you receive and how often will you receive them?
SEO expectations
Many people make the mistake of thinking that with SEO everything can be done fast, cheap and with high quality. Although a very understandable sentiment, this is undoubtedly not the reality. You can certainly get fast and cheap, or fast and high quality, but expecting all three is really going to leave you disappointed.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you are a real estate agent running a decently designed site. You are doing well with your other advertising, but decide that you could be doing something that will generate clients online. So you hire a SEO expert or firm. Assuming you have found a good one, what can you expect?
Most likely, you can expect the firm to optimize your on-page SEO, improve usability and navigability to increase traffic and conversions, create optimized content to get more visitors and increase links, and perform continuous analytics to begin fine-tuning the keywords and responding to competition.
While the first two can be done in a couple of weeks, or a month, depending on the SEO, creating content and generating quality links as well as refining keywords and fending off competition can be done indefinitely. You should certainly notice significant results after 2-3 months but really studying web analytics and tweaking the site for serious ROI can be six months ahead.
However, if you consider what a good SEO can do (a 150 percent increase or more), then the consideration of time, effort and investment should be balanced with that type of ROI potential.
Here are 10 tips for a SEO client to keep in mind:
1. Learn the basics of SEO to help you make an informed decision on a good SEO firm
2. Have reasonable expectations on what SEO can do
3. Be patient with your results: SEO isn’t magic and it takes time
4. Consider SEO as a partner to bring success to your online business
5. SEO isn’t everything
6. SEO is a balance
7. Be prepared to pay for quality work. You will get what you pay for.
8. Do not change what your SEO has done to your website.
9. If you want to redesign, consult an expert to keep your website SEO friendly
10. SEO isn’t a one-time effort
Contact Alicia Moura, founder and part-owner of Moura Marketing Inc., at the company’s website www.mouramarketing.com or call 1-877- 707-7730. Moura Marketing specializes in SEO campaign management, consulting and SEO-specific Web development services in the United States and Brazil.
