SEO Services: The Good And The Bad
To hire an SEO company, or not? That is the question. If you’ve already done the two most important SEO items — optimized your content and optimized your site design — then it’s really hard to see much value in hiring a stand-alone SEO specialist. To be sure, a good SEO expert will do more than just those two items. He’ll actively submit you to search engines, optimize your robots.txt file and your HTTP error pages, and engage in various other technical arcana. But these things are far less important than the first two items above, so unless he’s offering some additional value, such as doing on-line business development or managing your social networking presence, you’ll really want to be sure of what you’re going to get for your money. For that matter, if you already have a marketing agency or web designer, then the more esoteric aspects of SEO might already have been handled by them behind the scenes (or, you might be able to get them to do them for a fee, but at least then you’d be working with a company you already know).
The reason for that last parenthetical aside is fairly eloquently put by Google themselves in their webmaster tools help section on SEO:
Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation.
Unfortunately, SEO is so popular, and so ill understood, that a number of unscrupulous firms have appeared in the SEO community. These firms are to be assiduously avoided. At best, they might temporarily get your web page at the top of the search engine for a brief period, but there’s also a chance that they will get your traffic diverted to your competitors, or, worse, get your site actively removed from the search engines. Here are a few dead giveaways of malicious SEO practitioners:
- Companies that promise a certain page rank;
- Companies that you can’t find on google (i.e., that have themselves been removed);
- Companies that request that you link to them; and,
- Companies that have complaints lodged against them with the FTC.
All of that said, there certainly are reputable SEO firms as well. And, in particular, if you haven’t or don’t want to do item number 2 yourself, they may be of great value to you.
Search Engine Marketing
Now on to the other half of the search engine equation: search engine marketing. I’ll often hear clients wonder aloud why they should bother with SEM (specifically, with PPC advertising), if their SEO will get them above the fold and then they don’t have to pay for the results. The answer to this lies in one of the key points in the Introduction to On-Line Marketing that prefaced this article: namely, the speed of results.
SEO is not an instantaneous process. And once you have optimized your site for the search engines, making changes so that it’s optimized for some other set of keywords is often painstakingly slow. SEM, on the other hand (and depending on your budget) is nearly instantaneous — and instantaneous in a way that directly impacts the effectiveness of your SEOcampaign.
One of the most important lessons to learn about SEM is that it’s (at least initially) not nearly so much about getting prospects to your web site as it is about learning what brings prospects to your website, and how to turn those prospects into customers. The “O” in SEO rather implies that you already know the answers to these questions, and that you’re optimizing around those known answers. But what are the answers? That’s what SEM teaches us.
Let’s go back to our earlier example of a paddle-sports company. Let’s say the owner had optimized his lessons page to focus on “paddling lessons”. Let’s further say that 90 days later, his SEO techniques have been a success: whenever someone searches for paddling lessons, his page shows up among the top three results on Google. Job done, right? Well, maybe, but maybe not. Let’s say that instead of spending time on SEO, our hypothetical entrepreneur had run three concurrent SEM campaigns: one for “paddling lessons”, one for “canoeing lessons” and one for “kayaking lessons”. Let’s further assume that he did as suggested in the introduction to this series, and had his web-site set up to track conversions as people who clicked on a request for additional information form, and submitted their email address. Now, I’m making these numbers up, but I’ve had real clients have results even more extreme than these. One possible result might have been the following:
paddling lessons12,0321,479103
| Campaign | Impressions | Clicks | Conversions |
|---|---|---|---|
| canoeing lessons | 342,096 | 11,973 | 359 |
| kayaking lessons | 201,473 | 7,051 | 211 |
Now, looking at these numbers side-by-side, very few business owners are going to choose to take 103 customers instead of 359. But if the company had just focused on paddle sports, they may never have looked farther — because the results are shockingly good. Twelve point two percent of their impressions resulted in click-through, and seven percent of those converted. With numbers like that, the owner would likely have been completely satisfied … and never would have known that he could have tripled his business by deciding to focus on canoeing lessons instead of paddling lessons.