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Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.
- Antisthenes (Greek philosopher of Athens, disciple of Socrates, 445-365bc)

Last night I was driving home from the grocery store when I heard a commercial on the radio for “FreeScore123.com“.  I listened to the 30-second spot carefully, as I know these people are making some decent money referring these ‘free’ credit report-type websites.  During the commercial, they repeated the ‘freescore123.com’ part several times, which is good.

Problem was, they never spelled it.  “Free” on the radio sometimes sounds like “three”.  Ironically, the commercial mentioned several times that they checked the scores of all three credit bureaus.

Taking this information, I went home and pulled up the ‘ol laptop.  I looked up 3score123.com and threescore123.com, both of which were available (and purchased immediately).

Both of these domains have been forwarded to an affiliate account for one of the free credit score companies, at around $18/referral. Just since last night, I’ve had 7 clicks, one conversion.

All because I paid attention.

Will affiliate marketing, competition, domain names, offline advertising, offline marketing

We’ve got a small newspaper in our town.  By small, I mean they probably have a circulation of around 25,000.  It has been around for years, it comes to your mailbox free, and its chock-full of community information.

Many, many people are used to the newspaper, its information, and its consistence.  So its no wonder when I peruse through it each week that it’s full of ads from local companies.  The ads aren’t cheap, either.  $75 for a business card-sized ad, per week, with a 6 month agreement.

Not cheap, particularly for very local small businesses.  Yet with (what small business owners must consider) a modest circulation, they must believe that its worth it.  But I think there’s a problem.

Every week when I look through the paper to check out the ads, I’m amazed at the types of businesses that advertise in there.  Game stores, towing companies, payday loan companies and more.  I’d estimate that 60-75% of the ads are for businesses that should be targeting the 40 and under crowd.

Do you see the problem?

Will local marketing, offline advertising

It’s a question I’m wondering as I receive more and more calls from various businesses, both small and large, who are suddenly finding themselves in need of some marketing.  People aren’t buying like they have been in years past, and some businesses are smart enough to realize that the future of marketing is on the Internet.

So as I continue to receive these calls, the industries are starting to overlap.  A landscaper calls, a lawn maintenance company calls, a pool builder calls.  While these industries are different in their respective ways, they are also the same.

So it got me wondering - are other SEOs receiving more calls, and if so, are they able to be more picky and/or command a higher price for their services than they were say a year or two ago?

I should preface this by saying that my company personally will not take on more than one client per industry.  If a landscaper hires me, and another calls, I have to turn them down.  The biggest reason is ethical - I can’t get both businesses to rank #1 for competing keywords.  Perhaps other SEOs will take on more than one client per industry, but I don’t see how they could do it and still sleep well at night.

Now, if a landscaper and a lawn maintenance company hire me, they are similar but aren’t really competing over the same rankings, so I wouldn’t have a problem with it.  Even better, they could cross-promote each other and make a bit more money/get more referrals that way.  It’s a win-win.

So back to my question - which I guess is actually two quesitons.

1. As an SEO, are you finding that you can be more particular about which clients you take on?  Are there more than one business per industry considering your services?
2. And if so, are you raising your rates because of this demand?  Or, are you finding that there is more competition (since there are more customers) and you are having to lower your prices to stay competitive?

Will Marketing, SEO, competition, small business

Today Google released a new tool called SearchWiki, which allows users to modify the organic results they see for some phrases. The users, when logged in, can now ‘vote up’ or ‘vote down’ results when they do a search on the popular search engine’s website.

How will this affect SEO?

Personally I think it’ll have a bigger effect on very large and high-volume websites such as travel sites, news sites, etc. Smaller-trafficked websites probably won’t see much of a change IMO.

Look at it this way. If you are creating quality content for your customers, and you are doing it all honestly, not spamming, not keyword stuffing, not cloaking, etc, you’ll probably be fine. People will come to your website, see what they were looking for, and have no reason to vote you down.

If, on the other hand, you’re running an affiliate poker or viagra website, be prepared to see your rankings tumble for these custom users. That is, unless you’re providing quality content. Have I mentioned quality content yet?

Keep in mind that at this time, Google is not using these modifications for their ‘normal’ search that John Doe off the street would use. This only changes the results if you are logged into your Google account, and you do a search. Voting up your favorite websites won’t affect the overall organic results (at this time, according to G), so don’t waste time voting up your own website to the top of every possible keyword. You’ll just have skewed results that you can then fool yourself into believing are really organic.

While some people are saying this will have a major impact on search overall, I don’t see it happening yet. Now, will Google at some point take this data and use it towards their algorithm? Very possible. We’ll have to wait and see.

Will Google updates, content, site ranking, trending