Online Marketing Blog

Believe it or not, there are a few things we do to avoid new project inquiries. But truth be told, I love talking to people about SEO. It’s really interesting to me, learning about the kinds of situations companies are in, their marketing goals and how they’re going about growing their business (or business unit) online. Search marketing is like solving puzzles in a way, except with the SEO industry, the picture on the puzzle changes every so often.

There are all kinds of companies that we get to talk to ranging from large corporations with official buyers of search marketing services to virtual ecommerce companies and also businesses that have been doing search marketing in-house or with another consultant for a few years and need to take it to the next level. With as many different companies there are even more different perspectives about search marketing.

Andy Beal has been around the block and then some when it comes to building SEO-SEM firms. Today he posted his “Top 10 Business Mistakes Search Marketing Firms Make“. Here are Andy’s tips 1-10 and I’ve thrown in my own thoughts and observations after each.

1. Charging a “Set-up” Fee.
We’ve pretty much moved away from this but not 100% as some small projects warrant it. It does help companies spread costs out, but it also has to be managed properly since so much work occurs during the first 60-90 days of a campaign.

For some reason, when I get calls from companies with small SEO projects, I simply draw a blank when trying to think, who locally I should refer them to.

Of course several independant consultants come to mind, but the really good ones are always too busy. I don’t want to refer these projects into a situation where they can’t be helped. There are also a number of local agencies that “also do” SEO, but these projects are likely too small. Or the agencies aren’t very good at SEO.

I avoid at all costs just saying, “We’re not taking on projects, or your budget is too small, good luck and goodbye.” I don’t mind referring them on to someone that can help. However, it must be a give and take situation and it must be respectful.

The good advice over at ISEDB from Scott Buresh regarding how ways clients sabotage the search engine optimization performed on their site has motivated me to write a few of my own along with comments on some of Scott’s suggestions:

• Chase after the “latest SEO tactic” – The fundamentals of good SEO have not changed that much and chasing after the latest trend can compromise months or years of solid SEO work. An example is changing a site’s dynamic urls to keyword-rich urls solely for SEO benefit. Search engines are smarter than ever at crawling urls with variables. Just because a url is database generated does NOT mean it is bad for SEO. Making a sitewide url structure change without considering the effect on current rankings, redirection strategy, site map, 404 handing etc is also problematic.