Either you provide SEO services to other companies or, you ‘do’ SEO for your own. Why are you wasting time, money and effort with something that is so labor intensive, has more chance of getting your site ‘slapped’ and puts you at the mercy of the Mighty Google and a mathematical algorithm?

No question that you have to be found in Google and other search engines but is SEO the way to do it? Not any longer. Penguin 2.0 has just come out and once again people will lose position, even where they’ve not actually tried to ‘spam’ the search engines and have instead, concentrated on so called ‘white hat’ SEO techniques.

What’s wrong with SEO you ask? Actually nothing really except every day it becomes more difficult to actually do with any guarantee that tomorrow not only will the technique you use today not work, it may get you penalized!

I’m not going into the whole Panda, Penguin, Farmer and Freshness Google updates because there are millions of pages out there on that subject and you need only type ‘what is’ plus any of the update labels to get more information than you could possibly want including, opinion, factual, subjective, objective and just plain wrong or weird.

Therein lies the problem, you as a searcher want relevant information. The search engine wants to provide it, so you keep using them and they can make money displaying adverts. As a business owner, you want to be found at the top of the results. As an SEO provider you want to achieve top results for your client.

Those objectives create the problem. Let’s say you have a business doing auto repairs, you provide good customer service, your mechanics are well qualified and your prices are competitive. How then do you stand out from the others? Because that’s what it’s all about, do you as a business offer such a high level of service and expertise that no one else come close? Sadly not many businesses do.

As an SEO provider do you ‘interview’ potential customers to ensure you only work with the best? Or, like most businesses, do you take whoever will pay your fee? Why? Why would you waste your time on a client whose service or product makes your business much more difficult than it should be?

OK, let’s just recap here. I agree that you have to be found at the top of the search engine results. I agree that somehow you have to ensure that outcome, whether as a provider or as a do-it-your-selfer.

I disagree that traditional SEO is going to work long term. Yes, if you want to keep doing a ‘churn and burn’ type of campaign for your own websites (creating the website, doing all the old SEO stuff, white, grey and black before getting ‘punished’ and having to start again) the SEO will still work to a degree. But really, who wants to put that much effort in, only to have to start again?

The reason we have to do SEO is because so many people have abused it and, because there’s so much information out there it’s difficult to stand out.

Imagine this, on WordPress blogs alone 41.5 million new posts are published EVERY MONTH these figures are supplied by WordPress themselves http://en.wordpress.com/stats/ even more staggering is the fact that over 368 million people view more than 4.1 billion pages each month. How do you ensure your page is viewed and read?

That doesn’t take into account the number of other platforms including places like Tumblr, LiveJournal, Weebly, Joomla and old fashioned html. So we can agree I hope that being found is difficult, difficult but imperative.

Royal Pingdom state that 51 million websites were added last year alone and that the number of websites as of December 2012 was 634 million.   http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/01/16/internet-2012-in-numbers/

The figure becomes even more staggering if you estimate that each site has only 5 pages, what is 634 million multiplied by 5? 3,170 million is the answer.

How do you do it then? How do you get yourself found online?

One way is sheer brute force, if you have the money you advertise, even though the return on investment is so much less than organic results (non-advertised results). If your pockets are deep enough you can overwhelm simply by advertising everywhere. Of course, if your service or products suck, then this may eventually bankrupt the company!

Another brute force tactic is sheer number of links, as long as those links are somewhere that someone will eventually click on, a million of them spread across the net, only need one click a year to bring a million visitors to your site. So your site had better be the best converting site in existence because only a small percentage of those clicks may be from a potential customer.

Well, I don’t know about you but I’d rather find an easier way than that. I don’t have the money to advertise and I don’t have the time to build a million links. The question then becomes, what is the better way?

Social Marketing

Oh yes, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, YouTube the list goes on. These are the places where people gather to chat, brag, moan, praise, snoop, romance, ask questions and make recommendations. They’ll moan about everything from the government to the state of their underwear. They’ll talk about the idiot who cut them off on the freeway, the hot guy (or gal) they saw in the coffee shop, the auto repair shop that wouldn’t fit an oil change in and they’ll do it all, almost immediately.

You can’t stop them, they’ll talk about you whether you want them to or not, they don’t need your permission and they certainly won’t ask you if you mind. They’ll do it from their tablet, book reader, phone, laptop, game console as well as their computer. Even cameras are internet enabled so photos can be taken and shared immediately.

It’s a tsunami you can’t halt and which will drown you if you don’t learn how to surf the wave.

With the almost infinite number of places people can and do talk about things you can drown trying to reach them all, so the answer is don’t.

With all the ‘noise’ out there you don’t really want to weaken your efforts by spreading yourself and your content too thin. Yes, if you’re a Nike or Coca Cola, Disney or Warner Bros, Microsoft or Google then you have the resources to reach people across many platforms but let’s face it, most businesses are not.

You need a plan, an integrated plan, one that incorporates all your marketing efforts.

 

 

A cautionary tale.

I have a client who’s just opened a new auto repair shop in Houston. He was told not to do anything without including us in the ‘need to know’ communications. He decided to get some flyers printed, then he was going to give them out to stimulate interest in his new business. The flyer had a free offer and you’d think people would be happy to at least take advantage of it.

Not so, locally a news item came out about RFID tracking chips being embedded in paper flyers. People got the wrong idea and the campaign fell flat. $2,500 wasted on a campaign I knew nothing about so couldn’t even talk about it online. I asked the client why he’d not told me about this (even though we’d had long conversations about marketing integration), his reply was “Well it was just a flyer and it wasn’t online.”

Now of course, he wishes he’d not only listened but actually paid attention!

No matter whether you’re a business doing your own SEO/on line marketing or a company that provides the service. GET A PLAN

A note to providers of SEO Services

If you’re concentrating on getting your clients ranked, or getting them visitors or any other metric you may have negotiated payment for, unless you get them business, they will be problematic and they will leave for what they perceive are greener pastures. Put another way, a smooth talking competitor who offers them an increase in business will steal your clients.

Which Social Media?

Once you decide to enter the social media waters, it’s tempting to think you can and should post on all of them. If you’re a national or multinational conglomerate, this may well work for you. You will after all have the resources to task individuals with managing your social media profiles and building a following as well as promoting the brand.

For small and most medium businesses though it’s insanity to try and do that. The sheer volume of unique, interesting and above all engaging content that must be produced is overwhelming. If you only spend an hour a day doing all that you must do to grow and get business from your social media accounts, it means that with only four (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest) you’ll need to spend four hours a day ‘doing’ social media. In that time who is taking care of actually running the business?

A short course in social media.

Create a profile, fill it out making sure it’s optimized for your broadest keywords and has a compelling bio. Upload images to personalise your profile pages. Upload content.

Now comes the hard work because now, you have to build a following. No good following Kevin Costner in the film ‘Field of Dreams’ and think that a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality will work, it won’t.

Firstly, no one is going to pay attention to your content unless they know it’s there.

Secondly, no one is going to pay attention to your content unless you give them a reason to.

Thirdly, without the first two, you’re not going to get business from your efforts and unless all you want to do is listen to your own voice, that’s why you’re doing social media, to grow your business.

Growing you connections on social media takes time and effort, you need to find people you want to connect with, preferably someone in your industry who already has a following. Connecting with them and posting something that they will share will put you in front of consumers with the added implied recommendation of a trusted source.

Now multiply that by the number of networks you decide to use and you can see that very quickly you’d have no time to actually run your business.

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