Since the mid nineties, I’ve owned a web hosting company. Although I rarely promote it, it is a terrific complement to my SEO business.
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. Click to continue »
Every day I seem to meet one. Or get an email from one. Or a phone call.
No matter how we cross paths, the result is always the same. Nothing happens.
Who am I meeting? Business owners that – by outward appearance – seem to want to grow their business. I find them all over. Chamber meetings, conferences, classes, meetups, you name it. They are there to learn about growing their business.
But they don’t take the steps to actually grow it.
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This story was inspired by a recent broadcast on WMR with Dave Naylor, one of the industry’s well known and most vocal SEOs. My good friend Russ told me about it, and after hearing it I just had to write a parable based on Dave’s comments.
Once upon a time there was a man who lost his job. Because of the economy and his go-getter attitude, Joe decided to start his own company. Joe was eager to get his new business going, and a big component of it would be online. So Joe went to his favorite search engine and typed in something like ‘buy my .com‘ and minutes later he had registered his business name’s .com address. During the checkout process, he was offered a few other things, including .net, .org and .info extensions for his business. He figured the .com was the only one worth having, so he didn’t get the others.
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There’s a new change out to the SERPs today which I really like. When you’re searching for a generic product, say a dryer, you’ll now see that added to the SERP pages is a link to several related brands.
I’ve got some clients who are not really serious about their niche. They dabble around with a few hundred bucks a month and think that they’re going to get big gigs from it. Month after month they trudge along but never really get anywhere.
Then I’ve got other clients who are afraid to grow. Their niche in the Saint Louis are is WIDE OPEN, and they see what Internet Marketing can do for their business, and they are afraid. They aren’t afraid to spend the money, they’re afraid that their business will grow and they’ll have to “do more things” like hire people, etc.
And then I’ve got a few clients who own their niche. They are excited about where their website is taking them. They are attending industry conferences and shows, constantly prowling for the next vendor that shows signs of Internet awareness (so they can partner up and dominate even more). These clients are online day and night, learning about their industry, teaching themselves SEO basics (so they can spot opportunity) and they aren’t afraid to email me with questions and bounce ideas off of me.
Those are the clients we all love to have. They aren’t here to joke around. They are here to do business, make money, and dominate their niche. They see the potential in their business online. They see new niches that branch off and strengthen their core, and they dominate them too.
Check out what Gary Vaynerchuk has to say about using the Internet as your business platform and then let me know how I can help you get there.
We’ve all seen the emails, promising us high rankings if we’d just reply. Personally I’ve deleted hundreds of them, ignoring their great offers of near-world peace.
For some reason though, today I thought I’d just check one out. The email was just like the others.
From: Jerry Dennison
Subject: your website
Date: January 21, 2009
We can put your site at the top of a search engines listings. If this is something you might be interested in, send me a reply with the web addresses you want to promote and the best way to contact you with some options.
Sincerely,
Jerry Dennison
Big Block Search
So I thought I’d do a little research on Jerry’s website, and his claims to get me to the top of the search engines. Which is cool, because I really want to rank for the term ‘SEO’. I’m sure if anyone can do it, Jerry can.
First stop, BigBlockSearch.com. It’s a pretty generic website, most likely it is the same landing page as all the other SEO-spam emails I get. There’s a form that I can fill out to find out more information. No information about the company, no other pages. There is a little blurb on the page about Christmas approaching. I guess they mean Christmas ’09. Man, this company is on the leading edge!
There’s two contact us links on the page, both going to linda@. Hey wait, where’s Jerry?
So I fill out the form (Get a free review of your website!) for one of my newer websites, along with the message ‘not sure what you can do but we need more traffic’. I don’t want to leave a phone number, so I leave it blank. Whoops.
Guess I should filled that out. Interestingly, the title bar says Unable to Send E-Mail – CoffeeCup Form Builder. Ah, coffeecup. FrontPage’s cousin.
So I hit the back button, fill out all fields, and hit Submit again. Funny thing, I get the same result. So apparently they aren’t relying on the website to generate many leads, or their site just happens to be down when I visit. Either way, it doesn’t look like my chances are good for my one-word ranking. Darnit.
Next stop: WHOIS. According to them, the site was just registered in December of 2008, its not even a month old. Yet, it says that the site is climbing the Alexa rankings like mad, and that it gets over 3000 visitors a month. Wow, really?
The domain is privately registered, so that’s a dead end. The server is located in China, and when I click through to the 2 other websites hosted on this server, they both come back as Chinese sites. WHOIS gives them an SEO score of 68% (I know it doesn’t mean much, but still, shouldn’t it be 100%?)
Next stop: archive.org. It’s a long shot, but what the heck. Sure enough though, no info.
Last stop: Google. Maybe they’ll have some info for me. I really want these guys to help me rank.
Hey, I’m in luck! My buddy jerry is listed here, linda is mentioned here, and here too. There are some other mentions, but they are all about the same.
Darnit, it looks like my rankings are still far off.
So the big question still lingers, what is the purpose of all of this? They obviously aren’t getting much business from it. 3000+ visitors? I don’t believe that. Especially when their forms don’t work.
My only theory is that they are simply using it as a ruse to gather email addresses for other spam-related mailings. The SEO stuff is just a ruse to get business owners to fill out the form for their email address.
I should also mention here that I could have emailed “Linda” for more info, but I decided that was probably a bad idea. I’m really hoping I’m wrong, and that Jerry (or Linda) will get me to the top of the search engines soon (sarcasm).
What’s your theory?
Check out the latest blog post over at Where Is My Business
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.
There’s nothing more exciting than landing that first client and jumping right into the link building/onpage SEO immediately. But hold on there, sir knight – you’ve got some work to do before you even think about doing actual SEO stuff. Below is a list of preparations I think you should make before putting any time into link building/onpage changes.
Prepare a baseline
Every SEO campaign must show improvement – whether that means more traffic, more leads or higher rankings. If you don’t get a baseline established from the start, you won’t be able to show improvement over time.
Wake Up the Spiders
Now that you’ve got your baseline, you’re going to need to get the spiderfood ready. Since most likely you are going to be dealing with a site that has probably had little or no updates in some time, the bots aren’t exactly knocking down your proverbial website door to get your new content. Since your client may be on as much as a six week visit cycle, you need to help them realize there is movement in your camp.
Assuming you follow most of these suggestions, you are now armored and ready to start actually modifying and changing your clients’ website. Go ye – take thy rankings and climb to victory!
