Today I stumbled upon a press release about a local real estate company that hired a lead generation company to help them generate more customers (in theory).  The lead generation company’s website gives four easy steps to generating leads:

How Lead Generation Sites Work

1. Customer searches for your service in Google/Yahoo!/Bing.
2. Customer finds your microsite.
3. Customer learns about your business and decides to buy.
4. Customer contacts you directly and you make the sale!

Well, put bluntly, I have a problem with this formula – in particular step #2.

In theory, the idea is great.  You get a call from a lead generation company like this and they promise great traffic.  They’ll simply send traffic to ‘your’ website and a portion of the visitors will either fill out a form on your site or give you a call.  A decent portion of those leads will turn into customers, and you’ll be happy.

More customers means more revenue, right?  It sure does.  But there’s a problem with the process.

The Trap

One of the things I often preach to my kids is that you need to invest in something today that will make some future day more enjoyable.  Don’t think short term – and that’s what this process does.

When a business owner hires one of these companies, the company purchases a keyword-rich domain name and then creates an exact duplicate of your website on that domain name.  They then purchase your keywords in one of many various PPC websites, sending traffic to your website clone (not your website).

If they’re any good at SEO, they may even rank their clone website above yours in the organic rankings – thus sending more customers to you, but through their system. They may say they are doing SEO, but you are paying them to do it for their site, not yours.

And just like PPC, if you decide to stop paying them, your leads disappear, your traffic disappears, and your revenue dries up.  Yet you’ve given them all of your good converting keyword data, which they can then use to woo in one of your competitors.

The Fix

The fix is easy – don’t do it.  Invest that same amount of money into something long term like a good quality website, a content strategy or SEO, and you won’t be slave to some company’s website clone or short term PPC tactics.  Invest in building your website as the authority for your keywords.  Start writing content on your site and building backlinks.  Months from now you’ll reap from these things and so will your bank account.

But I Need Customers RIGHT NOW

I understand – you are getting ready to close up shop if something doesn’t change today.  You’re not interested in a long term investment for your business – you just need the phone to ring NOW.  Got it.  With that in mind, here are a few questions I recommend you ask the lead gen company.

1. Are you going to duplicate my website, or send traffic directly to my URL?
   If the answer to this question is that they’ll duplicate your site, or a portion of it, or they’ll create a ‘landing page’ on their own URL, I recommend you stop right there.
2. Do you offer any sort of call tracking that will help me differentiate my calls from the ones you’ve generated?
   If they are sending traffic right to your URL, then you’ll want a way to tell which calls are coming from traffic that they’ve generated vs traffic that you’ve acquired ‘naturally’ – through your organic rankings, handing out business cards, etc.
3. Do I have access to your data?
   Will they provide some sort of way to track website visitors that they generate vs those that you’ve acquired naturally?  Will they be able to show where your money is going?
4. Do you offer this same service to my competitors?
   Ethically, how can they help generate you traffic and your competition as well?  They can’t.  Just like I can’t ethically do SEO for two businesses in the same industry.  I couldn’t sleep at night if I knew I was taking money from two businesses while making the exact same promise to both – position #1.

By now you’ve probably lost the salesman or they’ve given up on selling to you.  I recommend you go back and read the part of this article under The Fix and apply it to your business.  You’ll see that the long term approach is the better way to your business’s online success.

What are some lead generation companies?

• ReachLocal
• Prospect Genius
• eLocal
• Service Magic
• Yellow Pages

St. Louis Business Expo – Oct 18
The biggest business expo of the year.  An entire day of terrific speakers (including myself) on a wide variety of topics.  Also, a speed banking opportunity and tons of vendors!

How to Build Your Credit Profile – Oct 18
The Saint Louis Small Business Meetup Group is awesome.  This month’s speaker is Willie Smith from WCS Credit Sense.  Learn how to identify and repair credit report errors and find money to run your business.

Using Video to Increase Your Website Traffic & Sales – Oct 20
Another great meetup, this one dedicated to helping business owners get on top of Google, Yahoo! and Bing searches for their industry.  This month’s class is all about video & how to use it to get to the top of the search engines.  Speaker: Mason Duchatschek

Show Me the Blog – Oct 21-22
The second annual SMTB conference will feature speakers from various Internet Marketing and Social Media outlets.  Topics will include new media, social media, SEO, blogging and technology.

St Louis isn’t a huge town.  It’s not like New York or LA where limos are seen every day.  If you see one here, chances are it was rented for some sort of event, not because a famous person is cruising by.  And this isn’t Vegas, where they’re waiting by the hundreds at the airport.

I imagine that owning a limo rental company can be a bit stressful.  Those rides aren’t cheap, they have a somewhat high need for maintenance (especially cleaning) and need to be on the road more often than not.  So keeping the limos booked is a huge priority.  The following is a few things I’d do if I owned such a company.

First and foremost, I’d get a website. I’d fill it with pictures of people having fun, enjoying a night on the town.  I’d have a wedding specials section with pictures of brides laughing with their girlfriends, toasting with champagne.  Pricing would be easy to find, and pictures of each limo would be available.  I’d create special pages for certain events.  Weddings is the obvious one, but so are birthdays, bachelor and bachelorette parties, Girl’s Night Out and even Father-Daughter dances.

I’d also make the limo pages easy to share.  When people are thinking about getting one, often they email their friends and tell them to take a look.  Or choose between a few different ones.  “Should we get the Hummer or the Cadillac?”  Share buttons on these pages would be mandatory.  The buttons could be one-click posts.  When they click on the Facebook button, it automatically creates a post to the brides facebook page and has a thumbnail and link back to the site.  A really smart limo company could even build a ‘Help Me Choose’ page that compared two limos on a page, listing all of their benefits, accessories and prices.  Then that page could be shared amongst friends.

A search for limos in St Louis brings back only 5 organic results – and only two of those are actual limo companies in St. Louis.  One is a pagerank 2, the other a 0.  That means a nicely SEO’d website could climb to a page one ranking fairly quickly.

We can’t forget to add the site to the Google LBC, either.  This is pretty crucial nowadays.  Fill in the profile completely and create a few special categories.  Be careful not to put geographic-related words in those categories, though, as it is against Google’s guidelines and will surely get your submission rejected.  Don’t forget to geotag any pictures you upload, and get your listing verified as quickly as possible.

Video is another great tool you could take advantage of.  Make a few video interviews of your (still sober) guests at the end of the night and post them on a ‘memories page’ (at an additional cost, perhaps).  Use some of the good videos on your LBC page as well.

You could also give video tours of each limo, highlighting the special things about each.

A limo driver blog would be a great linkbait and content tool.  Post funny stories about things that you’ve seen as a driver, interesting facts about driving such a long vehicle, and use the blog to post content around the job in general.  A well written and consistent blog specifically about driving a limo would start to get comments from other drivers, thus increasing your overall content.  Be careful of local competitors who’d try to spam comment your blog, but let them comment if they don’t link out in every post.

Lead Generation

Now let’s talk about getting those limos full every night.  Beyond having an SEO’d website, there definitely needs to be plenty of ‘Call to Action’ buttons on the site.  Have them big and obvious.  Reserve this Limo Now or Compare this Limo.

Consider advertising on websites that have your same target audience, for instance St. Louis Weddings.  The rates aren’t that bad and they’ve already got a captive audience.

Team up with local florists and have them give out your cards, perhaps with a $25 discount attached.  Do the same for DJ places and funeral homes.

Target Facebook ads to groups related to brides, grooms and weddings in general.  Offer a Facebook Discount that they can only get by Liking your page.  Have a monthly contest for a free 4 hour limo ride (driver’s tip not included).

Find some local What to Do in St Louis type websites and get a listing there.  See the Arch from a limo might attract some families with an adventurous side (and it’d have your limos running during daytime hours).

The web is ripe in St. Louis for a limo company that’s ready to pounce.  There’s little to no online competition, and a well executed online marketing plan could net some serious money for one that’s willing to jump in headfirst.

There are tons of ideas for an industry like this – what are some I missed?

Back in May, I spoke to the St. Louis Small Business Meetup Group about getting traffic, climbing the search engine rankings and beyond.  It was a great meetup in a small restaurant in Kirkwood – a terrific atmosphere and I think you’ll enjoy this video.  In it you’ll learn:

• Why Shotgun Marketing is a think of the past
• Why You need a CMS
• What Google Thinks About Your Site
• How to Spy on Your Competitors
• Plenty More Tips

One of the great things about having my own servers is that I can control many of the things that a typical hosting company won’t let you do.  One of those is IP addresses.

A Really Dumbed-Down Explanation of How the Internet Works

When you’re sitting at home, and you decide to order pizza online, you pull up your browser on your computer.  Then you type in a URL, such as pizzahut.com.  Your computer then sends a message to your DNS, normally your local ISP (the company you pay for your Internet connection) asking for a translation of pizzahut.com to an IP address.  An IP address is simply a block of numbers (like a physical home address) that identifies where the pizzahut.com information exists on the web.

Your ISP then identifies that address online and requests the default HTML file related to that particular address (the pizza hut home page).  Once received, that file’s contents are sent back to your browser, and your browser translates that code into the web page you see before you.

All of that happens in a matter of seconds.  As soon as you type something else in, or click a link, the process starts over again.

Shared Hosting

Most small businesses are hosting their websites on a shared host.  That means that there’s a server with hundreds (maybe thousands) of websites, all housed on the same hard drive.  Every one of those websites share the same IP address.  Shared hosting is a terrific, cheap way to host your website.

But there’s a problem.  A few, actually.

1. You have no control over what else is housed on your server.
   If there’s a porn site (or hundreds) on the server, the server could be blocked or banned by companies like Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
2. Your load speed could be affected.
   If there are some popular sites on your server, its possible that the server can’t handle the load.  This means some websites could not be displayed, or the websites will take a long time to load.  Not good.
3. Spammers can screw up your day
   If someone on your server decides to send out an unsolicited email blast, your server and emails could be blocked by companies like Barracuda.  This means a ton of your clients may not receive the emails you’re sending out.
4. You’re just another website in the mix
   Being on a shared host could mean that you’re one of ten, fifty or hundreds of other similar businesses.  You aren’t set apart.  You’re just part of the mix.

Fixing the Problem

The easiest way to fix this problem is to get a dedicated server.  A dedicated server is just what it sounds like – a server that only houses your website.  Problem is, they’re darned expensive! Hundreds of dollars per month.  Since most businesses don’t need a complete server, there must be another way.

There is – a static IP address.

A static IP gives you your own ‘address’ on the Internet, not shared with anyone else.  Basically putting your website on an island, you’ll no longer share the same reputation as the many other websites probably hosted on your server.

Some hosting companies will let you purchase a static IP address, others will not.  The average price for a static IP is around $4/month.  It’s one of the best low-priced things you can do to set yourself apart, and the SEO benefits are worth $50 bucks a year.  Well worth it.

By the way, if your hosting company doesn’t do static IPs, you’re free to switch over to Lighthouse Technologies

Will, we’ve heard what you say about blogging being a great way to increase your overall search presence, but we’re not sure where to start.  Blogger, WordPress.com and others offer free blogging platforms – is that a good way to get started?

- Mike

This is a great question, Mike.  I get this question in nearly every presentation I do.

In short, my answer is no, don’t use a free blogging service.  The entire reason that I preach blogging as such a great tool for SEO is that it generates content for your website – for your domain.  Ultimately you want to build your domain (website) up as the authority for your industry.

By using a free blogging service, you’re basically giving that content over to another company (another domain).  By blogging with them, you are ultimately ranking their domain for your keyphrases.  You are helping another business get traffic, not your own.

Don’t be confused, WordPress(.org) is a great blogging tool that you can download and install on your domain. That’s the way you should go.

Keep the great content, tips and how-to’s on your site. Grow it big and kick butt.