We have certainly seen a trend over the last one to two years where Google is focusing on more personalized search and an increasing focus on providing local results. As you know, a searcher does not even have to be burdened with entering a local modifier anymore.

Google will gladly figure out, for you, whether or not your search has local intent. :)

Google's Investment into Local

Late last year Google moved one of their prized executives over to local services, Marissa Mayer. Moving Mayer, fresh off Google Instant and a variety of other high profile areas of Google's search development, to head up local is a real strong reinforcement of how much attention Google is putting on local and local result quality (or perceived quality).

If you are a business owner who operates locally, say a real estate agent or insurance agent or really any other consumer-based service, then this presents a huge opportunity for you if you can harness the targeting and tracking ability available online.

Merging Offline Marketing with Online Marketing

A lot of small businesses or larger businesses that operate locally still rely quite a bit on offline advertising. It use to be that business owners had to rely on staff nailing down exactly how a lead came to them (newspaper ad? radio ad? special discount ad? and so on).

While it is still good practice to do that, relying solely on that to help gauge the ROI of your advertising campaign introduces a good amount of slippage and is not all that accurate (especially if you sell something online).

As local businesses start to see the light with SEO and PPC campaigns versus dropping 5 figures on phonebook advertising, a big selling point as a service provider or an in-house marketing staff member will be to sell the targeting of online campaigns as well as the tracking of those results.

If your a business owner, it's equally important that you understand what's available to you as an online marketer.

Types of Offline Advertising to Track

Locally, you are essentially looking at a few different types of advertising options to work into your new found zest for tracking results:

• Radio
• Television
• Print
• Billboards

Print is probably the most wide-ranging in terms of branches of advertising collateral because you can get into newspapers, magazines, flyers, brochures, banners, yellow pages, and so on.

While your approach may be different to each marketing type, the core tracking options are basically the same. You can track in your analytics program via:

• Separate Domains
• Custom URL's
• Custom Phone Numbers

The beauty of web analytics, specifically a free service like Google Analytics, is that it puts the power of tracking into the hands of a business owner at no cost outside of perhaps a custom set up and implementation by a competent webmaster. All of these tracking methods can be tracked in Google Analytics as well as other robust analytic packages (Clicky.Com as an example, is a reasonably priced product which can do this as well, save for maybe the phone tracking).

Structuring Your Campaigns

With the amount of offline advertising many businesses do, it is easy to get carried away with separate domains, custom URL's, custom phone numbers, and the like.

What I usually like to do is use a good old fashioned spreadsheet to track the specific advertisements that are running, the dates they are running, and the advertising medium they are using. I also include a column or three for the tracking method(s) used (custom URL, separate domain, special phone number).

In addition to this, Google Analytics offers annotations which you can use to note those advertising dates in your traffic graph area to help get an even better idea of the net traffic effect of a particular ad campaign.

How to Track It

Armed with your spreadsheet of ads to track and notes on how you are going to track them, you're ready to set up the technical side of things.

The tracking is designed to track the hits on your site via the methods mentioned, once they get there you'll want to get that traffic assigned to a campaign or a conversion funnel to determine how many of the people actually convert (if you are able to sell or convert the visitor online).

Custom URL's

A custom URL is going to be something like:

yoursite.com/save20 for an advert you might be offering 20% savings on
yoursite.com/summer for an advert you could offer a summer special on

You may or may not want to use redirection. You can use a redirect method if you are using something like a static site versus a CMS like Wordpress. With Wordpress, you could create those url's as specific pages and just no-index them and ensure they are not linked to internally so you keep them out of the search engine and the normal flow of navigation. This way you know any visit to that page is clearly related to that offline campaign.

A redirect would be helpful where the above is not possible and you need to use Google's URL builder to help track the campaign and not lose referral parameters on the 301.

So you could use the URL builder to get the following parameters if you were promoting a custom URL like yoursite.com/save20:

http://www.yoursite.com/savings.php?utm_source=save20&utm_medium=mail&utm_campaign=bigsave

Then you can head into your .htaccess file (Apache) and insert this code:

(should be contained on 1 line in your .htaccess file)

RewriteRule ^save20$ /savings.php?utm_source=save20&utm_medium=mail&utm_campaign=bigsave [L,R=301]

When you test, you should see those URL builder parameters on the landing page and then you know you are good to go :)

If you are worried about multiple duplicate pages getting indexed in the search results (with slightly different tracking codes) you can also leverage the rel=canonical tag on your landing page

<link rel="canonical" href="http://site.com/folder/page/"/>

Separate Domains

Some companies use separate domains to track different campaigns. The idea is the same as is the basic code implementation with exception that you apply any redirect to the domain rather than a sub-page or directory off the domain as we did in the prior example.

So you sell snapping turtles (snappingturtles.com) and maybe you sell turtle insurance so you buy turtleinsurance.com and you want to use that as a part of a large campaign to promote this new and innovative product. You could get this from the url builder:

http://www.snappingturtles.com/?utm_source=national&utm_medium=all&utm_campaign=turtleinsurance

The .htaccess on turtleinsurance.com would look like:

(should be contained on 1 line in your .htaccess file)

RewriteRule .* http://www.snappingturtles.com/?utm_source=national&utm_medium=all&utm_campaign=turtleinsurance [L,R=301]

This would redirect you to the home page of your main site and you can update your .htaccess with a sub-page if you had such a page catering to that specific market.

Custom Phone Numbers

There are quite a few ways to get cheap virtual numbers these days and Phone.com is reliable service where you can get a number for roughly $4.88 per month.

I know companies that implemented custom numbers for a bunch of print ads and it was pretty eye-opening in terms of which as performed better than others and how much money is wasted on untargeted print campaigns.

There certainly is a somewhat intangible brand equity building component to offline ads but it is still interesting to see ads which carry their weight with traffic and response rates, as well as being really helpful when it comes time to reshape the budget.

Here are a couple handfuls of providers which offer phone tracking inside of Google Analytics. Most of these providers will require the purchase of a number from them to tie into a specific URL on your site or just right into the domain + help track those calls alongside the pageviews generated.

Some campaigns are wide-ranging enough to where you may want to target them with a custom number or two and a custom URL or domain. Using a spreadsheet to track these measures along with using Google Analytics annotations to gauge traffic spikes and drops offers business owners deep view into the use of their marketing dollars.

Custom Coupon Codes

If you run a coupon code through Groupon you of course know where it came from. But other channels are also becoming easier to track. Microsoft Office makes it easy to create & track custom coupon codes. There are even technologies to allow you to insert tracking details directly into coupon codes on your own website (similar to online tracking phone numbers via services like IfByPhone or Google's call tracking). Some online coupons offer sophisticated tracking options, and Google wants to get into mobile payments to offer another layer of customer tracking (including coupons).

Finding a Reputable Provider

If you are a business owner who thinks "wow this is awesome, how the heck do I do it?", well here is some advice. If the field of web analytics is mostly foreign to you I would suggest finding a certified Google Analytics provider or ask if your current web company can do this for you. Certainly there are plenty of competent people and companies that are not part of the Google Analytics partner program.

If you are interested in a Google Analytics partner you can search for them here. There is also quite a bit of information in the self-education section of Google Analytics.

I would recommend learning how to do this over a period of time so you can make minor or major changes yourself at some point. Also, it helps to establish a business relationship with someone competent and trustworthy for future tasks that may come up, which you cannot do on your own.

If you are a service provider, start implementing this for some of your local clients and you'll likely be well on your way to establishing yourself as a sought-after marketer in your area.

Humility

When I graduated high school one of my teachers gave me a card stating how they appreciated my humility. My mom read that and was proud, and I felt a bit embarrassed because I didn't know what the word meant and had to ask. It turns out it is easy to confuse ignorance for humility! :D

Marketing is chuck full of humbling teachable moments. One of the most important concepts is the importance of humility. When Lady Gaga spoke at Google she came off as being totally humble. I don't care for her music, but have a lot more respect for that sort of marketing than the "rapper who has more money than Bernake" sort of approach.

Exploiter Dirtbags

A lot of well known online marketers are the exact opposite of Lady Gaga's approach: anything to be heard & and I am the best, etc. Some people are into that approach, while others find it distasteful. Of course in any market there will be competition with winners and losers as SEO is a zero sum game. But some folks work to build value & monetize, while others aim to exploit & scam.

Because there are eploiter dirtbags working the market, you have to pay attention to what the market is saying about your stuff in real time. Even if you pour 20 hours into creating something that is useful, relevant, engaging, interesting, etc. some people will think it is spam just because it uses a format that spammers have exploited. Notice how in spite of our collateral damage piece being fairly well received across the web some spots that referenced it immediately raised the "spam" concern simply because it is an infographic!

Every Profitable Company is in the Gray Area

Part of the reason you need to track viral stuff in real-time is because people are tuned to think that anything in online marketing that is successful has some layer of deception to it.

In spite of how many marketers love to wear the white hat label, the truth is that almost anyone who is profitable operates somewhere in the gray area. Google has something like $40 billion in the bank, and yet they still have an AdSense category for "get rich quick." They proudly claim how they took down the get rich quick scammers that were trading on the Google brand, but they still have an AdSense category for "get rich quick."

White Hat? Probably a Liar

The problem I have with those who love the white hat label is that many people who claim to adhere to algorithmic best practices are often willing to crap on real people to get ahead. Jason Calacanis claimed to be white hat precisely because he was aware of how dirty and exploitative his Mahalo junk was. You can't really get away with flagrant spamming if you call it what it actually is, so you have to preach righteous virtues while doing it.

That "scammer exploiting a loophole" approach can work for your thin affiliate site that isn't tied to your name & brand, but if you are using that sort of stuff on your client projects or on your own main brand site you build contempt in the marketplace. Which is precisely why so many SEOs were happy to see Mahalo get torched in the content farm update.

The recent "advanced" link building conference brought about 2 teachable moments on that front.

How to Breed Hate & Animosity in Your Marketplace!

Before the conference Will (from Distilled) asked me if I would be ok with him writing a post here. We have tried to be fairly neutral in the marketplace (reviewing tons of competing sites and products and whatnot), so I said sure. He handed me something that I found to be pretty offensive. To which, when he asked for a follow up, I replied:

Generally I felt that suggesting that post was sorta a smack in the face. It was like an ad inside an ad inside an ad. Ad for seminar + ad for your seo services + laundry list of links to client sites.

That you would suggest that made me feel like you think I am stupid or that you were trying to disrespect me. I didn't reply right away because I was a bit angry at the time & didn't want to respond that way. And then all that tech crap happened. Anyhow I think you are savvy and are a great SEO, but a post like that (ad in ad in ad) is better fit for say like John Chow's blog than ours ;)

He responded with how much of a fan he was of mine & that if he knew of anything cool on the news front down the road he would try to help us break it & such.

At the conference he highlighted his "appear authentic, but be driven by a script" type of approach.

Advanced!

But what he *failed* to disclose (until his brother disclosed it during the conference as part of the conference) was...

• that they had been hired by a competing SEO site to try to outrank us for SEO tools
• that they suggested the site they were working on to use 301 redirects to game Google
• that the site they were working for outed our site for using 301 redirects & got it toasted in Google

In other words, where a person who is truly ahead of the market, and does something to create a competitive advantage it must be black hat spam and you should complained to Google to get it torched. Then years later when the people who claimed the technique was spam do the same damn thing it suddenly becomes clean and innovative (cutting edge advanced stuff even).

Then they want the person who was ahead of the curve to be a free conduit for spreading this trash! It is so bad that you couldn't even make this stuff up.

Consider the brand damage they did to themselves & the bad karma they earned in the marketplace with the above stupidity. If they are willing to do that sort of stuff to their own brand, would you want them working on your brand? I wouldn't.

Those who claim to be algorithmically white hat, but are fine with lying, being deceptive, failing to disclose conflicts, etc. are saying that they put the algorithm ahead of how they treat real human beings in their marketplace. It is fine to be exploitative if that is your approach, but be honest about it ... because it is dumb to do it in a way that causes damage to your brand.

Spam vs Junk Trash Garbage That People Hate

Some people also complain about domain names (a clear signal of relevancy) shouldn't count, and yet some of the same folks create software to automate spamming up public communities. Any competitive disadvantage they have is spam, any competitive advantage they have is not spam. ;)

Enter Russ Jones!

On the Virante about page it highlights that "Russ has assisted in the creation of new search marketing technologies. This includes the venerable LinkSleeve Spam Link Verification system, which currently blocks thousands of links spam messages across the web." Yet at the "advanced" link building conference he gave away software to help people spam the crap out of Reddit.

Once the people on Reddit highlighted it he was quick to backpedal, stating: "I don't openly promote spamming. If you think creating highly viral content and submitting it to a social network to let them decide if it is good is spamming, then you have been seriously misled."

Here is the deal though, if the goal of that sofware was to do ANYTHING other than spamming, then it would be promoted to the core audience (so it could reach more people) rather than hunting out old subreddits & spamming them up with links.

Yet again, advanced!

There is nothing new or advanced about that link building "technique." It is just an extension of guestbook or comment spam. The above image links to a Vimeo video which highlights what Matthew Haughey thinks of the SEO industry after he found out someone was selling an info-product on how to spam up Metafilter by dropping links in old posts. Slapping the label "advanced" on old spam techniques makes them neither new nor advanced. The clock moves in one direction. Unfortunately it is not 2003 anymore.

There are a bunch of exploitative douchebags that paint themselves as white hats while destroying the ecosystems we all must work in by undermining basic human decency principals & trust in the marketplace. I don't care if someone wants to be a spammer, but to do so and claim that you are white hat and ethical (and thus that others are somehow inferior) is garbage.

Even Ghetto Rappers Stand for Something

The most important lesson in marketing is consistency. Make promises that you can consistently deliver on.

Rappers are successful. So are folks like Thom Yorke. But they pick their markets & their approach and stick to it. Bouncing back and forth just makes a person look like a dishonest douchebag who stands for nothing.

It's not standing for much, but least the rappers have their drugs, booze and hoes.

What do these internet marketers stand for?

It seems the folks teaching "advanced" internet marketing still need a bit of work on "basic" social interactions & common sense. But I guess those are harder to sell. ;)

We would all like to sell more, be it SEO services, leads, or goods and services. Here are a few ideas for prospering in a down market, by increasing sales.

Review Your Pricing

When times are tough, everyone is under pressure to cut spending. Most of your customers will likely fall into this camp. What do you do if your customers are using price as a means to pick your competitors over you?

One way is to cut your pricing, too.

Whilst this may work in the short term, it is likely to be a poor long term strategy for a small business. It's a poor long term strategy because there will always be someone else prepared to undercut you. Your margins shrink, and only the most ruthlessly efficient or largest operator, who can scale on tight margins, is going to survive.

Another way of looking at this problem is to increase value. Think about ways you can offer your customers more whilst retaining your cost structure. If the customer is made aware of your extra value, then you price may look cheap compared to your competitors, even though you haven't been forced to drop it.

Deliver

Delivery is everything. Say what you'll do, then do it, then tell them you've done it. It's probably one of the most effective sales methods there is, as it invariably leads to repeat business. Getting repeat business is much cheaper than getting new business, as you already have an open line of communication.

By delivering what you said you would do, your value to the customer has increased. They no longer have to spend time comparing and contrasting the offers made by your competitors. Even if they do, the customer still faces the risk of dealing with someone with an unknown track record. That risk is an added cost.

Partner Up

To extend your customer base, you often have to advertise and market. Expensive, obviously.

However, you could "acquire" someone else's customer base simply by partnering up. For example, if you sell SEO Services, it might be a good idea to partner with web designer agencies. You get access to their client base, and they get access to to an add-on service they can sell. They may even sell your services for you, giving you more time to focus on SEO, rather than selling.

Hire Sales People

Are you good at sales? Good at closing deals? Personally, I hate doing it.

Sales is a bit of an art. The people who are good at it tend to have a mix of qualities that take a long time to develop. They have built up a reputation, a network and trust. They work on deals all the time, knowing how to handle objections, and make the deal.

Given we're in a down-market, there will be a lot of good salespeople looking for work.

Why not look into hiring one? Are there sales people available who will work on commission for you?

Network

The next best thing is to build your own personal network.

Someone knows someone who needs what you've got. It's easier to sell to them if they are already aware of you. Hustle. Social media, conferences, speaking at conferences, meeting up with people, attending events indirectly related to your field of business, etc.

All good.

Good business people also tend to be good networkers. Business really is mostly about who, not what, you know.

Guarantee It

A friend of mine uses the following guarantee.

He says if the customer is not happy with what he does, they can walk. At any point, no questions asked. They don't owe him anything.

This may sound generous, until you realize this is merely a reflection of what would happen anyway. He operates a small business, and he works with large government clients. If the clients think his work is unsuitable, after they've signed, they would likely view it as a breach of contract, and put their lawyers onto him. He knows he would be unlikely to win such a legal fight, nor could he afford it.

His guarantee sounds very reassuring to the client, however. It sounds to the client like there is no risk for them.

This is why guarantees work wonders. At the back of every clients mind is the fear they'll be ripped off, or fear they will look foolish if they buy from you. A guarantee helps eliminate this universal objection, and close the sale.

Firefox 4 was just released. It is much smoother & faster than prior versions of the browser. And the persistent memory leaking issue seems to have been tamed, even with many extensions installed. Overall an awesome upgrade. I can see this once again becoming my main web browser while also remaining my primary SEO research browser.

With the upgrade I only had 2 major issues

• I needed to install the newest version of Roboform
• By default there is no status bar in Firefox 4. So if you want to use Rank Checker or SEO for Firefox you would need to do so through the Firefox menu system (a bit slowish + lame IMHO), OR you can download the Status 4 Evar plug-in to get your status bar back again ;)

In time we will likely think about moving the icons for Rank Checker and SEO for Firefox out of the status bar & into the upper menu, as it is not great for us to create extensions that are reliant on another extension which is then reliant on a browser that changes too ... too many moving parts.

But for now stuff works well enough again if you download the Status 4 Evar plug-in, something over 10,000 people a day are doing!

We also just updated the documentation on the plug-in download & upgrade pages for our extensions such that those who do not read our blog still know what they need to do in order to keep everything going smoothly. It also prevents us from having to read too many support tickets like these gems a crazy gave us today, which helps us maintain at least a bit of hope for humanity. :)

In moderation such messages are humorous...but you just hope that the person isn't crazy enough to hunt you down and shoot you because they think Yahoo! is a superior browser to Firefox. Not for the least of reasons because Yahoo! isn't a web browser! :D

This infographic highlights how Google's cat and mouse approach to SEO has evolved over the past decade.

One of the best ways to understand where Google is headed is to look at where they have been and how they have changed.

Click on it for ginormous version.

If you would like us to make more of them then please spread this one. We listen to the market & invest in what it values ;)

Feel free to leave comments below if you have any suggestions or feedback on it :)

Do You Really Want That Indexed?

On-demand indexing was a great value added feature for Google site search, but now it carries more risks than ever. Why? Google decides how many documents make their primary index. And if too many of your documents are arbitrarily considered "low quality" then you get hit with a sitewide penalty. You did nothing but decide to trust Google & use Google products. In response Google goes out of its way to destroy your business. Awesome!

Keep in mind that Google was directly responsible for the creation of AdSense farms. And rather than addressing them directly, Google had to roll everything through an arbitrary algorithmic approach.

< meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" />

Part of the prescribed solution to the Panda Update is to noindex content that Google deems to be of low quality. But if you are telling GoogleBot to noindex some of your content, then if you are also using them for site search, you destroy the usability of their site search feature by making your content effectively invisible to your customers. For Google Site Search customers this algorithmic change is even more value destructive than the arbitrary price jack Google Site Search recently did.

We currently use Google Site Search on our site here, but given Google's arbitrary switcheroo styled stuff, I would be the first person to dump it if they hit our site with their stupid "low quality" stuff that somehow missed eHow & sites which wrap repurposed tweets in a page. :D

Cloaking vs rel=noindex, rel=canonical, etc. etc. etc.

Google tells us that cloaking is bad & that we should build our sites for users instead of search engines, but now Google's algorithms are so complex that you literally have to break some of Google's products to be able to work with other Google products. How stupid! But a healthy reminder for those considering deeply integrating Google into your on-site customer experience. Who knows when their model will arbitrarily change again? But we do know that when it does they won't warn partners in advance. ;)

I could be wrong in the above, but if I am, it is not easy to find any helpful Google documentation. There is no site-search bot on their list of crawlers, questions about if they share the same user agent have gone unanswered, and even a blog post like this probably won't get a response.

That is a reflection of only one more layer of hypocrisy, in which Google states that if you don't provide great customer service then your business is awful, while going to the dentist is more fun than trying to get any customer service from Google. :D

I was talking to a friend about this stuff and I think he summed it up perfectly: "The layers of complexity make everyone a spammer since they ultimately conflict, giving them the ability to boot anyone at will."

If Microsoft used their primary product to bundle other free products they were giving away to gain market leverage Google would hoot and/or holler. Google demanded that Chrome be shown as an option in Europe when Microsoft was required to market their competitors via BrowserChoice.eu.

Yet if you visit YouTube with an old browser you can see that Google claims it isn't an advertisement, yet somehow Internet Explorer didn't make the short list.

IE9 launched as a solid product with great reviews and enhanced privacy features.

A new version of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer to be released Tuesday will be the first major Web browser to include a do-not-track tool that helps people keep their online habits from being monitored.

Microsoft's decision to include the tool in Internet Explorer 9 means Google Inc. and Apple Inc. are the only big providers of browsers that haven't yet declared their support for a do-no-track system in their products.

I have long been a fan of using multiple web browsers for different tasks. Perhaps the single best reason to use IE9 is that a large segment of your customer base will be using it. Check out how search is integrated into the browser and use it as a keyword research tool.

The second best reason to use it is that sending some usage data to Microsoft will allow them to improve their search relevancy to better compete with Google. As a publisher I don't care who wins in search, so much as I want the marketshare to be split more evenly, such that if Panda II comes through there is less risk to webmasters. Stable ecosystems allow aggressive investment in growth, whereas unstable ones retard it.

Speaking of Google, Michael Gray recently wrote: "They are the virtual drug dealers of the 21st century, selling ads wrapped around other people’s content, creating information polluted ghettos, and they will become the advertising equivalent of a drug lord poised to rule the web."

The problem with Google's ecosystem was not only that it was running fast and loose (hence the need for the content farm update, a problem Google created, and a solution which had major collateral damage along with some unintended consequences, while missing the folks who were public enemy #1).

Beyond that, Google recently announced the ability for you to report counterfeit products advertised in AdWords. Their profit margins are pretty fat. Why did the problem go ignored so long? Why does the solution require you to work for Google for free?

In the following video, Matt winces, as though he might have an issue with what he is saying. "We take our advertising business very seriously as well. Both our commitment to delivering the best possible audience for advertisers, and to only show ads that you really want to see." - Matt Cutts

How does this relate to Internet Explorer 9? Well let's look at what sort of ads Google is running:

I am not sure if that is legal. But even if it is, it is low brow & sleazier than Google tries to portray their brand as being.

If Microsoft did the same thing you know Google would cry. Ultimately I think Google's downfall will be them giving Microsoft carte blanche to duplicate their efforts. Microsoft has deep pockets, fat margins, and is rapidly buying search marketshare. If Microsoft can use their browser as a storefront (like Google does) they have much greater marketshare than Chrome has.

Cory Doctorow's excellent essay "Beware the spyware model of technology – its flaws are built in" is a great read & warns where the above approach leads.

I have long documented Google's preference toward brands, while Google has always stated that they don't really think of brand.

While not thinking of brands, someone on the Google UI team later added navigational aids to the search results promoting popular brands - highlighting the list of brands with the label "brands" before the list of links.

Take a look at what Matt Cutts shares in the following video, where he tries to compare brand domain names vs keyword domain names. He highlights brand over and over again, and then when he talks about exact match domains getting a bonus or benefit, he highlights that Google may well dial that down soon.

Now if you are still on the fence, let me just give you a bit of color. that we have looked at the rankings and the weights that we give to keyword domains, & some people have complained that we are giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. So we have been thinking about at adjusting that mix a bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm, so that given 2 different domains it wouldn't necessarily help you as much to have a domain name with a bunch of keywords in it. - Matt Cutts

For years the Google algorithm moved in one direction, and that was placing increased emphasis on brand and domain authority. That created the content farm problem, but with the content farm update they figured out how to dial down a lot of junk hollow authority sites. They were able to replace "on-topic-ness" with "good-ness," according to the search quality engineer who goes by the nickname moultano. As part of that content farm update, they dialed up brands to the point where now doorway pages are ranking well (so long as they are hosted on brand websites).

Google keeps creating more signals from social media and how people interact with the search results. A lot of those types of signals are going to end up favoring established brands which have large labor forces & offline marketing + distribution channels. Google owns about 97% of the mobile search market, so more and more of that signal will eventually end up bleeding into the online world.

In addition to learning from the firehose of mobile search data, Google is also talking about selling hotel ads on a price per booking. Google can get a taste of any transaction simply by offering free traffic in exchange for giving them the data needed to make a marketplace & then requiring access to the best deals & discounts:

It is believed that Google requires participating hotels to provide Google Maps with the lowest publicly available rates, for stays of one to seven nights, double occupancy, with arrival days up to 90 days ahead.

In a world where Google has business volume data, clientele demographics, pricing data, and customer satisfaction data for most offline businesses they don't really need to place too much weight on links or domain names. Businesses can be seen as being great simply by being great.*

(*and encouraging people to stuff the ballot box for them with discounts :D)

Classical SEO signals (on-page optimization, link anchor text, domain names, etc.) have value up until a point, but if Google is going to keep mixing in more and more signals from other data sources then the value of any single signal drops. I haven't bought any great domain names in a while, and with Google's continued brand push and Google coming over the top with more ad units (in markets like credit cards and mortgage) I am seeing more and more reason to think harder about brand. It seems that is where Google is headed. The link graph is rotted out by nepotism & paid links. Domain names are seen as a tool for speculation & a short cut. It is not surprising Google is looking for more signals.

How have you adjusted your strategies of late? What happens to the value of domain names if EMD bonus goes away & Google keeps adding other data sources?

When Google did the Panda update they highlighted that not only did some "low quality" sites get hammered, but that some "high quality" sites got a boost. Matt Cutts said: "we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side."

Here is the problem with that sort of classification system: doorway pages.

The following Ikea page was ranking page 1 in the search results for a fairly competitive keyword.

Once you strip away the site's navigation there are literally only 20 words on that page. And the main body area "content" for that page is a link to a bizarre, confusing, and poor-functioning flash tour which takes a while to load.

If you were trying to design the worst possible user experience & wanted to push the "minimum viable product" page into the search results then you really couldn't possibly do much worse that that Ikea page is (at least not without delivering malware and such).

I am not accusing Ikea of doing anything spammy. They just have terrible usability on that page. Their backlinks to that page are few in number & look just about as organic as they could possibly come. But not that long ago companies like JC Penny and Overstock were demoted by Google for building targeted deep links (that they needed in order to rank, but were allegedly harming search relevancy & Google user experience). Less than a month later Google arbitrarily changed their algorithm to where other branded sites simply didn't need many (or in some cases any) deep links to get in the game, even if their pages were pure crap.

We are told the recent "content farm" update was to demote low quality content. If that is the case, then how does a skeleton of a page like that rank so high? How did that Ikea page go from ranking on the third page of Google's results to the first one? I think Google's classifier is flashing a new set of exploits for those who know what to look for.

A basic tip? If you see Google ranking an information-less page like that on a site you own, that might be a green light to see how far you can run with it. Give GoogleBot the "quality content" it seeks. Opportunity abound!

You can't learn great SEO from an e-book. Or buying software tools.

Great SEO is built on an understanding.

Reducing SEO To Prescription

One of the problems with reductive, prescribed SEO approaches - i.e. step one: research keywords, step two: put keyword in title etc can be seen in the recent "Content Farm" update.

When Google decide sites are affecting their search quality, they look for a definable, repeated footprint made by the sites they deem to be undesirable. They then design algorithms that flag and punish the sites that use such a footprint.

This is why a lot of legitimate sites get taken out in updates. A collection of sites may not look, to a human, like problem sites, but the algo sees them as being the same thing, because their technical footprint is the same. For instance, a website with a high number of 250-word pages is an example of a footprint. Not necessarily an undesirable one, but a footprint nevertheless. Similar footprints exist amongst ecommerce sites heavy in sitewide templating but light on content unique to the page.

Copying successful sites is a great way to learn, but can also be a trap. If you share a similar footprint, having followed the same SEO prescription, you may go down with them if Google decides their approach is no longer flavor of the month.

The Myth Of White Hat

A lot of sites that get taken out are white hat i.e. sites that follow Google's webmaster guidelines.

It's a reasonably safe approach, but if you understand SEO, you'll soon realize that following a white hat prescription offers no guarantees of ranking, nor does it offer any guarantees you won't be taken out.

The primary reason there aren't any guarantees comes down to numbers. Google knows that when it makes a change, many sites will lose. They also know that many sites will win i.e. replace the sites that lost. If your site drops out, Google aren't bothered. There will be plenty of other sites to take your place. Google are only concerned that their users perceive the search results to be of sufficient quality.

The exception is if your site really is a one-of-a-kind. The kind of site that would embarrass Google if users couldn't find it. BMW, for example, in response to the query "BMW".

It's not fair, but we understand that's just how life is.

An Understanding

For those readers new to SEO, in order to really grasp SEO, you need to see things from the search engines point of view.

Firstly, understand the search engines business case. The search engine can only make money if advertisers pay for search traffic. If it were too easy for those sites who are likely to use PPC to rank highly in the natural results, then the search engines business model is undermined. Therefore, it is in the search engines interest to "encourage" purely commercial entities to use PPC, not SEO. One way they do this is to make the natural results volatile and unpredictable. There are exceptions, covered in my second point.

Secondly, search engines must provide sufficient information quality to their users. This is an SEO opportunity, because without webmasters producing free-to-crawl, quality content, there can be no search engine business model. The search engines must nurture this ecosystem.

If you provide genuine utility to end users, the search engines have a vested interest in your survival, perhaps not as an individual, but certainly as a group i.e. "quality web publishers". Traffic is the lifeblood of the web, and if quality web publishers aren't fed traffic, they die. The problem, for webmasters, is that the search engines don't care about any one "quality publisher", as there are plenty of quality publishers. The exception is if you're the type of quality publisher who has a well recognized brand, and would therefore give the impression to users that Google was useless if you didn't appear.

Thirdly, for all their cryptic black box genius, search engines aren't all that sophisticated. Yes, the people who run them are brilliant. The problems they solve are very difficult. They have built what, only decades ago, would have been considered magic. But, at the end of the day, it's just a bit of maths trying to figure out a set of signals. If you can work out what that set of signals are, the maths will - unblinkingly - reward you. It is often said that in the search engine wars, the black hats will be the last SEOs standing.

Fourthly, the search engines don't really like you. They identified you as a business risk in their statement to investors. You can, potentially, make them look bad. You can undermine their business case. You may compete with their own channels for traffic. They tolerate you because they need publishers making their stuff easy to crawl, and not locking their content away behind paywalls. Just don't expect a Christmas card.

SEO Strategy Built On Understanding

Develop strategies based on how a search engine sees the world.

For example, if you're a known brand, your approach will be different to a little known, generic publisher. There isn't really much risk you won't appear, as you could embarrass Google if users can't find you. This is the reason BMW were reinstated so quickly after falling foul of Google's guidelines, but the same doesn't necessarily apply to lesser known publishers.

If you like puzzles, then testing the algorithms can give you an unfair advantage. It's a lot harder than it used to be, but where there is difficulty, there is a barrier to entry to those who come later. Avoid listening to SEO echo chambers where advice may be well-meaning, but isn't based on rigorous testing.

If you're a publisher, not much into SEO wizardry, and you create content that is very similar to content created by others, you should focus on differentiation. If there are 100's of publishers just like you, then Google doesn't care if you disappear. Google do need to find a way to reward quality, especially in niches that aren't well covered. Be better than the rest, but if you're not, slice your niche finer and finer, until you're the top dog in your niche. You should focus on building brand, so you can own a search stream. For example, this site owns the search stream "SEO Book", a stream Aaron created and built up.

Remember, search engines don't care about you, unless there's something in it for them.

It looks like Money.co.uk was right on the money:

BeatThatQuote.com today was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK. Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products. We think

What is screwed up about this is that Google is engaging in *major* channel conflict. Not only is there some gray area background stuff:

BeatThatQuote.com's ad prompted 101 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority, with 65 objecting that the commercial "trivialised, condoned or encouraged bullying in the workplace".

But now they have to consider SEO as well. I highlighted how it was a bit unjust when Google arbitrarily chose to whack one site while letting another get away with worse just because the founder was good at public relations, but how can Google police Google's guidelines when Google is the one breaking them?

Doorway Pages / Gateway Sites

Remember how Overstock.com was recently penalized for offering discounts in exchange for links? BeatThatQuote partnered with Oxfam to create CompareForGood.com. The homepage consists of a bunch of links into BeatThatQuote.com. If you look at those links using our server header checker you will see some 301 redirects. Of course doorway pages are considered spam & we know that Google has torched some other affiliate programs for using 301 redirects.

Such links are doing 301 redirects

Sure that is fairly vanilla...a bit gray area. Certainly not straight up black hat.

....unlike...

Buying Links That Pass PageRank

Raise your hand if you have read a post by Matt Cutts on the dangers of buying links that flow PageRank?

Ok. Now keep your hand up if you have read a dozen of them.

Remember how Matt Cutts stated that some bloggers got torched for selling a single link? Remember the long NYT article about how Google is cracking down on link buying & they penalized JC Penny for it?

With that in mind, can anyone explain why Google's newest purchase buying links like

Not so much a categorized listing with an editorial review...just a paid link for the sake of buying links to flow PageRank.

That one is only totally flagrant.

A bit off color. Like comment spamming.

Sorta like the link exchanges in German.

But some are even more outrageous. Consider that BeatThatQuote is buying links from pages with ad sections like

Paid Blog Reviews

Remember those "evil" paid reviews Matt Cutts wrote of? Plenty of those to go around ;)

In fact, some of the paid blog links were in place so long that BeatThatQuote got thank you's for advertising for over a year straight.

I don't have a decade of spam fighting experience like Google does. But is it too much to suggest that before Google buys *any* website they should do a basic compliance audit to verify that the site is operating within Google's TOS. I am an independent SEO and it took me all of 2 minutes to find numerous FLAGRANT violations.

What sort of message does Google send the market with the above behavior?

How Can Google Police Anyone?

Google has on multiple occasions penalized other UK based finance sites for SEO issues & link buying. But now that Google owns one of the horses in the race, and that horse has been found to be using anabolic steroids, can they legitimately penalize any of their new competitors?

If I had a UK finance site I would go on a link buying binge right now. Google can't penalize you for it because they are doing the same damn thing. And if they do penalize it for DOING THE EXACT SAME THING GOOGLE IS DOING then you know you have a legitimate gripe for the media, and I have no doubt Microsoft would be willing to help pick up the legal tab.

Google Eats Microsoft's Lunch Again!

Ultimately this is a body blow to Microsoft. Microsoft started to gain momentum in search through verticalization, but has since backed off. Meanwhile Google took Microsoft's ball and ran it in for a touchdown (acquiring MetaWebs, trying to buy ITA Software, and buying BeatThatQuote). And now one of MSN's portal ad partners is owned by Google:

Head of partnerships at MSN, Phil Coxon said, “At Microsoft Advertising, we’re passionate about collaborating with brands to create compelling advertising campaigns. By providing new and exclusive content that appeals to consumers, this partnership both enhances the overall MSN user experience as well as providing a great platform for BeatThatQuote to engage with their target audience on a meaningful level. This deal builds on our previous partnership with BeatThatQuote, which led to a 400% increase in revenue generated from insurance products. We’re delighted to continue to build on this relationship with this new campaign.”

Oooops.

Update

After a Googler read this blog post, it appears that Beat That Quote has been penalized.

The cloud is all the rage these days and with good reason, it certainly can make life easier for a roving SEO, freelancer, or anyone really. I am a big fan of the cloud and consistently utilize services like:

Dropbox
Evernote
37Signals suite of products
SEO tools like the ones here at SEO Book, toolsets like Raven & SEO Moz as well

Most of the mission critical data for a web marketer would be stuff like:

Keyword information
Link building info
Rankings
Analytics
Marketing plans for a site
And so on....

HOSTED SOLUTIONS AND EASE OF USE

Many hosted solutions in the SEO & PPC toolspace offer you the ability to conduct those areas of your business on their servers. I'm leaving out Google Apps, Gmail, and Google docs because I don't really use them much these days and because they are kind of the angry elephants in the room.

For an increasingly mobile worker, access to data at all times is a big benefit to being able to run a smooth and effective business. Not only are workers more mobile in the space these days but many folks also have multiple computers and devices to work off of.

Some folks have the slew of Apple devices (maybe an Air, an iMac, an iPhone, and an iPad) while some have a mashed up set of devices based on their personal preferences or their company's requirements.

Trying to sync desktop stuff to so many different platforms is a real PIA as you know, so more and more folks are begin to use cloud based solutions for everything.

WHO HAS YOUR DATA

Sit back and think about who has your data and where it is. You probably see these folks at conferences, watch webinars, follow them on Twitter, etc. You've probably gotten recommendations from people you trust with respect to using that company's services.

It's not about trusting one person or a couple people you know at the company, you have to be able to trust the company. Sometimes it can be a difficult thing to think about because you feel a personal connection to a particular group and you might feel like you are attacking their personal character by questioning whether you can trust the safekeeping of your data.

In any event, you have a right to question whether or not having your mission critical data hosted by anyone (not to mention another SEO company) is a good idea.

IS THERE A RECORD OF TRUST

Some of these products are newer but there's no evidence of any wrongdoing or snooping going on behind the scenes. To be fair though, how would you know :)

The value is probably in the aggregation of such data (oh wow those links work, oh look at how well these keywords convert...etc) rather than something specific to a single campaign.

You really have to ask yourself if hosting SEO or PPC data with a company that operates in that space is a good business practice. Personally speaking, I have accounts at the two spots I mentioned above (Raven and SeoMoz). So I feel comfortable with those accounts mostly, but I still think it's important to revisit the thought process from time to time.

I like to peruse the privacy policy of these places prior to stockpiling data with them. Here's an excerpt from SEO Moz's privacy policy

**SEOmoz offers a variety of online tools and software. These include, but are not limited to, our free SEO tools, our paid SEO tools, our API, and our tools on OpenSiteExplorer.org. These tools require you to enter a variety of information, such as URLs, domains, keywords, or other items relevant to Internet marketing and link research. We associate this information with your account in order to provide useful features, identify and terminate accounts that violate our Terms of Service, to improve our products, and to provide customer service. We never use this information for the provision of SEO consulting services so you do not need to worry that entering your information will be used against you or your clients by SEOmoz.

We take appropriate physical, electronic, and other security measures to help safeguard personal information from unauthorized access, alteration, or disclosure.***

DATA IS THE NEW GOLD

Knowledge is power and as SEO becomes more and more difficult, or at least more and more gray, your data becomes exponentially more important. What do you think your competitor(s) would give to know exactly what keywords were bringing you traffic and conversions, as well as which links you noted were more valuable than others?

Some of this data can (roughly) be gleaned from the use of competitive research tools but the pieces of information you are storing on other companies (sometimes other SEO businesses) servers are full of hard, actual data rather than estimated or scraped data.

Occasionally I'll hear about people storing all sorts of sensitive SEO data in Google products, I personally think that is a bit cavalier (yes, yes I know that risk reward is not in Google's favor at all there, at least on an individual basis..but the cynic in me puts nothing past them :D )

Most places use heavy-duty security to lock down your accounts and restrict access to key employees but if you've ever worked in an office setting you know that it usually isn't terribly difficult to take a peek at a key account or two.

How often do you ever hear the phrase worst practices? Probably never.

Everything is a best practice approach, right up until things change.

Consider AdSense websites.

Hey Look, a Case Study!

When you look at some of the biggest losers in the Google content farm update, many of them happened to be premium AdSense publishers which were even used by Google as case studies! For instance, Hub Pages or EzineArticles.

Everyone thinks that their content is the cream of the crop & that they will bounce back:

We are confident that over time the proven quality of our writers' content will be attractive to users. We have faith in Google's ability to tune results post major updates and are optimistic that the cream will rise back to the top in the coming weeks, which has been our experience with past updates - Paul Edmondson

The problem is that for many businesses there will be no bounce back. Some are simply over. The web has evolved & the algorithm has moved beyond them.

Where is the Much Needed Disclaimer?

What makes this worse is that when Google gives a site their premium AdSense feed & sets something up as a case study others will see that as an explicit endorsement.

THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD DO IT.

Even after Google torches the companies that follow Google suggested best practices those case studies live on, offering what now amounts to maps to Google hell.

Adding Insult to Injury

What makes such filters/penalties even more infuriating is that in some cases when your site is slapped with a negative karma penalty, others who steal your content & wrap it in AdSense will outrank you, since their site does not yet have a negative karma penalty against it. :)

Individually the splog sites may not live long, but collectively they can keep outranking you to ensure you are invisible for your own words, even if you poured years of your life into creating something beautiful & important.

As Cult of Mac reports:

As we noted yesterday, Cult of Mac was collateral damage in Google’s war on crappy content farms. For some inexplicable reason, we got downgraded when Google tweaked its algorithms last Thursday.

But today we’re back in. We’re on Google News (a very important source of daily traffic) as well as Google’s general search results. However, we still get outranked by some of the scraper sites that steal our content, so not everything’s perfect.

That part in bold is the most outrageous part of this new "algorithmic" approach. When Google whacks your site then someone who steals your content will outrank you. And most sites stealing content *are* monetized via Google's DoubleClick & AdSense ads.

That whooshing sound you just heard was MFA sploggers making a mad dash to steal content from the list of currently penalized sites.

Cult of Mac is lucky they had enough pull with the press to get reconsidered. Most webmasters who got hit did not & anyone who has contracts based on set traffic levels or tight margins which just turned negative are in a pretty crappy situation. Yet another example of the importance of not fueling growth with debt & the importance of profit margins and a cash-on-hand safety net.

Who Are the Opportunistic Maximizers?

The problem with such an approach of maximizing everything you do to suck peak revenue out of the pageview is that things can change on a whim. I have seen some of Google's 1 on 1 AdSense optimization advice they sent to a friend of mine. I told my friend that the optimization advise was at best short-term opportunism that would end up crushing them in the long run if they actually implemented it.

Google doesn't care if following their advice torches your site if it makes them a bit more money, because ultimately there is another person standing in line waiting to follow.

My friend is lucky that they realized my advice was more trustworthy than the advice they were getting direct from Google. If they listened to Google back then their business might be destroyed today.

Google likes to position SEOs as exploiters out for the quick buck, but what honest analysis shows is that it is Google which is pushing the boundaries in terms of:

• monopolitistic bundling
• fair use / copyright
• trademark
• pushing deceptive ads

Google AdSense has a "get rich quick" ad category. That is something you won't find on our website (and one of the reasons we will never put AdSense ads on this site)!

AdSense Heatmaps? Look Out Below!

One of the worst hit sites in the AdSense farm update was WiseGeek. Sure WiseGeek must have had something like a 20% ad clickthrough rate. But with traffic falling 75%, maybe they would have been better off building a cleaner experience with a 5% CTR.

That said, they were simply following Google AdSense best practices:

Collateral Damage

What was the most profitable best practices based approach suddenly falls short. And the results are not always predictable. When Google decided to attack content farms who honestly knew that:

1. somehow eHow.com would survive
2. yet somehow Google's "algorithmic" approach would punt 10,000's of smaller websites that have far higher content quality

In advance of the solution I was fairly certain eHow would survive, but what I underestimated was the Google engineers. Or rather the ignorance of same. I simply couldn't imagine such a content farm algorithm going live that missed eHow and decimated the lives of so many independent webmasters.

I guess we can simply view this as an extension of Google's you can have any web you want so long as it is corporate TM policy. I think Brett Tabke said it best in a recent AdSense thread:

When the rules and the enforcements are made up by monopolies in a make believe world - there is no cheating.

The only "cheatings" is when it gets outside the lines of the law. - Brett Tabke

After the farmer update layoffs are already happening. Not only for monolithic useless content mill websites, but even in organizations where the content is pure as the driven snow.

AskTheBuilder is yet another Google AdSense case study. In spite of being a niche player well regarded in his community, Sistrix data shows the site off 87% after the most recent Google update!

Who Caused the Content Farm Problem?

Everyone likes to vilify the content farms and scrapers (and they deserve it) but the real villain behind all of this is CPC/CPM based advertising.

Can you imagine a world where your attention was sold off based on how long you stayed on a page rather then how often you switched pages? If google wants to fix their search results, they should focus on fixing adsense. The technology to more accurately measure a viewer's exposure to an ad are there, it just needs a trustworthy player to bring it to market. Someone trusted by both users and advertisers.

Google made click/impression-based advertising appealing to both groups and it made them what they are now. It's time to get away from it. - po

Smokescreen & Misdirection

I have long highlighted that Google's algorithmic-centric approach was blindingly hypocritical & that I felt the approach was nothing more than a scammy cover though which they can selectively exercise editorial discretion while claiming that "the algorithm did it."

Consider the following scenario:

• roll in an algorithm that aggressively penalizes tons of borderline edge cases
• see who complains to the media & has connections with the media
• fix the rankings of those who you like & those with sway, while ignoring the rest

Can You Trust Google?

All of this leads to the obvious question: can you trust Google?

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is you can *always* expect Google to do what is in the best interest of Google. As they plow into field after field (payments, local, mobile, ecommerce, mortgage, credit cards, travel, weddings, fashion, etc.) & use their search dominance to manipulate other markets one would have to be blind to view Google as anything other than a competitor.

Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But some day they will come. And it is never fun when it happens to you. :(

Until that day may come, if you always follow their best practices, just remember ... ;)

Don't say you were not warned!

I’m going to tell you why an SEO Book subscription, for many small businesses, is a much better investment than just hiring a firm or a freelancer.

We, as business owners, all realize that we need an online presence and the backbone of that presence is a top-notch SEO campaign.

Whether it be straight out SEO services, or help with Google Places, or help with reputation management, most small business owners realize they need to be “there” but aren’t quite sure how to do that properly.

You’re a small business owner, so am I and so are many members of our community & industry. Our work lives as small business owners are typically filled with parts of various roles like:

• CEO
• customer service representative
• accountant
• IT manager
• marketing manager
• janitor

The problem is that SEO can be an abstract thing or idea for small business owners outside of the web marketing industry to grasp, learn, and implement correctly.

This problem leads to small businesses getting taken to the cleaners by either woefully inadequate (and expensive!) SEO firms, competing business models (like YellowPages & YellowBook) selling their version of SEO services due to the significant decrease in revenue from the phonebook model, or just plain snake oil salespeople.

There are many qualified SEO providers out there, tons actually. There's a lot of noise as well and when you don't have a clear understanding of the business it can be hard to discern one from the other.

Finding a Worthy SEO Provider

So if a small business owner is able to carefully avoid those situations and find a reputable SEO firm, chances are that the price for those services will be out of reach or just not economical from an ROI standpoint for some small businesses (unless the firm is hurting for business or it's a new firm starting out).

There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just simple economics. If a service provider can sell their services for 6 or 5 figure contracts consistently, then it doesn’t behoove their business interest to sell services for 4 or 3 figure contracts.

A Better Option

Even if we stipulate that a business can afford to hire a firm to handle their SEO campaign, where it makes sense for both the provider and the buyer, we’d like to present another option.

That option would be an SEO Book subscription :) Compared to hiring an SEO company, your SEO Book subscription:

• is less expensive, resulting an in much higher ROI for your business
• is more direct and hands on, you get unbiased feedback from hundreds of SEO professionals
• gives the owner the ability to learn the ins and outs so they can manage things themselves
• trains the business owner about the industry and best practices so they can intelligently outsource services themselves if they so choose

SeoBook Subscription Options

There are 2 types of SeoBook subscriptions, with different levels of access. The first option is for access to our (over 100) training modules and our premium SEO tool set. The cost of that option is just $69 per month.

The second option is for access to those same training modules and tools, in addition to our community forums. Our community is the cornerstone of our subscription-based membership service.

Inside the forums you have instant access to the most up-to-date, cutting edge information where you will learn from some of the best minds in SEO.

For the purposes of this post I’m going to focus on the option which includes everything.

How Much Would You Invest in You?

When you started your small business you probably thought (correctly) that it was a good idea to at least have a solid understanding of the key concepts related to your business prior to hiring staff to handle day to day tasks.

You probably learned how to operate and troubleshoot equipment, customer service software, the phone system, the coffee pot :) and so on. You likely know who your target market is and you know what type of message you want to convey via print and web design as well as sales copy.

Those are all things that you had to learn in order to grow your business and for your business to function properly.

You Are Your Business

By investing the time in yourself, and by extension to your business, you were able to confidently hire and train staff as well as put together a traditional marketing campaign with the help of local print vendors and maybe your local web design person.

When it comes to something like SEO, where there is no formal education or “certification” (thank goodness), you might have a tough time hiring something to do something you know very little about.

If you don’t know what works and what doesn’t how will you know if the provider is selling you a bag of smoke versus providing an actual quality service? You won’t know, and with what a good SEO campaign from a reputable provider can cost that can cause significant damage to your business.

You Are No Stranger to Hard Work

Investing time, practicing patience, and being willing to learn will reward you and your business many, many, many times over when it comes to the SEO industry. The fact is many people fail because they are lazy and unwilling to learn in addition to having a poor attitude.

You have probably perservered through that and are running a solid business so why not get even more ahead of your competition, lazy or otherwise.

Breaking Down the Costs

Most SEO campaigns can expect to see results in or around 6 months, so we’ll look at the 12 month costs because you should consider SEO (just like traditional marketing) as an ongoing effort to produce results for your business.

From experience I can tell you that a full-on SEO campaign from an experienced SEO or SEO firm for small businesses will likely start at $5,000 per month here in the states. Probably higher for a firm and that amount can flucuate depending on your needs but anything less than thousands per month is unlikely.

When I say full-on I mean the whole deal:

• keyword research
• competitive analysis
• analytics reviews and implementation for testing, tracking, tweaking
• site structure
• on-page SEO (title tags, page copy, and so on)
• off-page SEO, like link building
• adjusting tactics based on rankings growth or decline (and competitor watching)

If you are new to the SEO space you may not know what some of that means, but you know its important (or else you wouldn't be reading this). You know that your visibility on the web is probably a crucial component of your small business’s long-term success.

Would you really want to outsource that for what it might cost you for an employee or two, without knowing exactly what it is the provider is/should be doing?

Don’t Pay 17x More Than You Need To!

So even being conservative in my estimate, you are talking about around $60k per year and that probably doesn’t include additional money you may need for getting links to your site via branding and such.

Meanwhile, you could be investing just $3,600 per *year* in yourself and your business while learning from quite a few of the thought leaders in the SEO space. Perhaps not the biggest self-promoters in the space but certainly some of the best minds.

My dad always told me to be very wary of someone constantly telling you they are the best at XYZ, usually they aren’t. The ones who are the best are doing the job everyday and doing it well, not telling YOU how great THEY are.

It’s important to keep in mind that an SEO book subscription is going to give you the tools you need, the training you need, and more importantly the knowledge you need to be successful. Have a question?

Just ask it in the community forums and we’ll answer it. In fact, many people will answer it and you’ll get wide range of tips from folks with loads of experience and success.

Membership Format

Now, the membership doesn’t mean that we’ll execute the plan for you but you’ll have a step by step guide on what to do, how to do it, why you’re doing it, and the tools you need to do it.

Plus, you have 24/7 access to the community forum which has hundreds of members and is quite active at all hours as we have members from all over the world.

But I Can Do it For Le$$....

There’s probably someone out there that will say “hey I can do that and do it well for like $2k a month”...ok, but even at that price point it’s $24k versus $3,600 per year!!

If you know what to do with your campaign you can easily outsource the “grunt” work for much cheaper dollars + become educated in a field that is very important now, and will be for the foreseeable future. I not only write this as an employee of SEO Book, but also as a person who was a customer for about a year before joining the site. During that time I helped get our company website squared away and learned how to automate or outsource many aspects of our business: from content, to promotion, to additional link development. And if you need help with any of that stuff, there is a requests forum where you can work with some of our members.

Heck, let's even say someone would run a full-service SEO campaign for you at the absurdly low price point of $500/mo! (not likely, given that some quality links cost $299 per year each). Even before link development that's still approaching *double* the cost of an SEO Book subscription while giving you insight from only one person versus hundreds, no premium tools or training modules, and no access to the latest information in the field as well as you not learning SEO from independent, unbiased sources.

In our community you can not only find out what is working right now, but you can also find someone who can help you get the job done without paying for the markup associated with high pressure salesmen or large bureaucratic firms where 50 folks are taking home weekly paychecks for the work done by 5 people.

Discounts on SEO-Related Products

Your SEO Book subscription also comes with tons of discounts on everything from link management software, rank checking applications, SEO conferences, Pay Per Click communities like PpcBlog.Com, web directories which can help with getting exposure/links to your site, social media monitoring services, and many more solid services.

There’s literally *thousands* of dollars in discounts available to our members.

Time is Money, Money is Time

The benefit in outsourcing anything is the time saved and/or the low cost. However, there are typically significant costs (and sometimes irreparable harm) associated with outsourcing any important part of your business to unqualified providers.

Without having the knowledge of what it is you are actually hiring for, you cannot be certain what exactly you are paying for.

Save yourself a lot of money and headaches, learn from the best, and beat your competition in the search engines.

When and if the time comes to hire an SEO firm, you will be fully prepared to make the right decision for your small business. What else could you ask for?