Those of you who read some of the earlier posts know that one very serious issue came up a couple of months ago, following a certain blogger rant on SEO’s and the way they do things. To make a long story short, eventually it did make sense to me, many web pro’s out there view SEO as a kind of bottom feeding semi fraud trade, with most of the people who call themselves SEO experts targeted as lazy and very simple minded internet marketing people.
Without saying if I agree to this or not, I did find a lot of the arguments very convincing and also thought long and hard about the feature of web promotion. The final conclusion was that to have a real position in the internet world one would do best to distance him or herself as far away as possible from the term SEO, and educate himself fiercely on as many marketing hardcore facts as possible, as well as go into every small detail of code that could effect rankings and user interface. Needless to say the study of conversion and on line sales methods should be very clear to anyone who wishes to engage clients for now could be called Site Optimizing Expert.
Step one is to have a simple conversation with a site owner, find out what he or she needs and wants and examine the situation as it is (the site, what condition its in, how does it do in the ranking world, traffic and conversion), and it is step one that will determine not only the scale of the work but also the real first milestones and goals. And this is where the problem usually appears.
Lets ignore big companies for the moment and focus on small businesses, these small business could significantly grow out of a successful internet promotion, a plumber could get up to 15 leads per month only by having a good geo targeted page on his site, a lawyer could get business from the internet if he manages to position himself as a local expert on some legal area. These people know this, and they go out and buy a site, not a domain, a site.
By buying a site I mean they go to a web designer and give this person 100% control over everything, and so we find ourselves in step two (trying to figure out the promotion needed for the site to rank and succeed), slowly realizing that the domain has been purchased by the designer, the hosting service was picked by the designer (or worst, the designer is hosting the site on his server), the template used, the keywords, tags, number of pages, titles and headers, colors and scripts all decided by one person – the designer.
Now it is possible that once every 100 cases the designer actually did a good job at all of this, however they charged the small business $9,000 for the whole thing, practically leaving nothing else in budget for the day after the launch. So you find yourself in front of a very happy site owner (“all my friends say the site is beautiful”) that wants to work commission based (“why should I pay you if I did not make a single sale from your work?”) – without a tracking system in place, without any clear keyword strategy, without any budget to test different page design.
And that’s when you need to start changing their minds. Because web design is important, but if it robs a business of all its budget, than its like buying a Ferrari with all the money you got, without money for gas, you aint gonna move that car out of the dealers lot.
