Don’t waste your money on search engine optimization.
Since I read Ogilvy on Advertising, I instantly spotted the scam of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By paying lots of money, you can get ranked higher on google. If true, so what?
Well, if true, you’ll get lots of sales. Right? Wrong!
Ogilvy pointed out that lots of exposure does not translate into sales. He turned it around, and demanded - prove the ad gets you sales. Since almost no one could do so, yet Ogilvy always did so, Ogilvy crushed his competition. The TV series Mad Men is inspired by Ogilvy. (His book below.)
Let me say again what I’ve said many times, and I think is extremely important for all to realize: the web is about communicating, not about selling. Never try to build a business on the web. Always use the web to communicate your business.
Sure, being #1 does generate sales, but it is only worth it if getting to number one costs you nothing. To pay for #1 position costs way more than any benefit from being in number one. If you have a 10% net profit, and you pay $10,000 to get to number one, then number one has to generate $100,000 in sales, just to break even. That is to say that $100,000 bump is pointless, and worse. You need to buy the infrastructure to support the higher level of sales, so you invest to handle pointless business. The losses mount.
And the number one in this case is like a heroin high, short lived, so you have to keep going from fix to fix trying to stay there. Countless people have had their businesses crushed paying to get high on google rankings. The fact that there is so much SEO help on offer is a tribute to how much malinvestment in this field there is.
Google has a lot riding on being credible as to offering up #1. To get to number one, and stay there, there are two critical elements, one everyone knows. The one everyone knows is “how many people link to your site?” The less one known is “how well is your site rated by others on third party rating services?” There are many other factors in the rankings, but these two are critical and you are in control of both. In short you need ranking AND reputation. No SEO people can help you with both.
Although there are about 20 academics worldwide, and a very popular accordionist in the UK named john spiers (there is even a wikipedia entry on him!), I come up #1 on a google search. I neither buy ads nor employ SEO. But being number one drives people to my site and sales.
You cannot buy the necessary combination of ranking and reputation, but you can build it. How to do so?
There are three elements to position #1
1. Your website
2. Links to your website from 3rd parties.
3. Feedback on you at 3rd parties, such as yelp and angie’s list.
Your small business exists because you solve a problem no one else addresses.
Here are two different solutions offered by entrepreneurs in the same area in the same industry, and an extremely tough industry at that. Both rank very high in reputation and google. I’ve met and conversed with both.
Neither is what you would expect in that industry, both were badly needed. Each is unique. As Jerry Garcia said, it is not enough to be the best, you must be the only one.
So what to do?
First get your website in your name, and make something simple and direct.
People in the market go to the web to search, looking for rank and reputation. What do you offer? If you were trying to find your solution on the web, what search terms would you use? Go to google insights and put in a term, say start up business
and see what you get. If you look at that page, it alone has about an hours worth of linking and looking you can do. Point is, you start to figure what terms you should include in the content of your website. This helps more people see you.
Next, your website should be wired up for google analytics, so you can know who what where when as to visitors to your site.
Yahoostores has an ecommerce engine as robust as anything amazon offers, for $50 per month. It allows you to work the web with email marketing, couponing, etc. Credit card merchant account capability is ideal, so check with Costco on whether you qualify for this service. If not, then you are limited to paypal, check or money order, and purchase order online sales. But this also allows sales 24/7 online. The key benefit is yahoo supports affiliate programs, which is key in having people link to your site.
Figure out who has an interest in sending customers your way. We’ll call these affiliate people (AP). With affiliate fee, you are able to have the yahoostore create a link from the AP to your website, which tracks all traffic from your AP to your website. You offer the AP 10% on all sales driven from their website to You. Yahoo tracks and reports to you (or both you and the AP) exactly what the traffic is, sales or no sales. In effect, the AP gets a commission on sales in which they were probably unaware, and in any event completely mediated by the web. Extra money for no effort, plus info on with whom they should follow up.
To qualify, qualified AP must put a link (generated by yahoo) from their website to You.
It is unlikely this will result in much of the way of sales. But the two benefits to You are 1. links from third parties to You causes You to rise in the search engine results (at some point to number one) and 2. quarterly reports to the AP are an opportunity to remind the designers that you appreciate their business. The yahoo reports that show traffic from their site to you are interesting to the AP, and you can add your own pitch on those occasions.
The link on the AP site may be a logo with something to the effect of “You, our preferred source”.
Next, feedback ratings are critical, and no ratings are dangerous.Happy people skip away delighted and unhappy people write bad reviews online. You can have 1000 happy customers and one bad review online.
My book on Amazon has over 45 customer reviews. 40 are 5 star, and 4 are one star. People throw out the high and low and then figure what is left (throw out 4 one star and four of the 5 star, and you net about 35 five star.) Time and again I hear people say they bought the book because of the ratings.
How did i get so many 5 star ratings? Every time someone emails me with a compliment on the book, I say “make us both famous by writing a review on amazon.” If I did not do this, my book would have 4 one star ratings on amazon.com, and the sales would be dead.
Learn what rating services people trading in your industry rely upon. (In my experience BBB and JD Powers are ratings people buy, not earn, so be careful as to which services matter.)
Therefore, top to bottom, any time anyone compliments anything you, they should be met with “If you like us, rate us on yelp.” (or angie’s list or favorite ratings service). Yahoo stores automatically solicits customer feedback on all transactions. The more sources and the more feedback the better, but concentrated at yelp.
Caution: people who look to such ratings also note the spacing of the ratings. My 45 + ratings are evenly spaced over ten years. If the ratings are ganged up in one time and place, it looks as though you stuffed the ballot box, and it loses credibility. So this is an ongoing project.
Check out the ratings on your competitors:
Note how few ratings it takes to move up
Note leveraging at yelp, you’ll see where previous viewers went next.
And note who advertises where you search on Yelp.
Going back to google insights,
note google projects that 4th quarter 2012 interest will be about 60% of 1st quarter 2004 interest.
How does that track with business plan projections?
Another source of links would be youtube, where You would establish a channel and offer say a half dozen 60 second youtubes on topics that address the common concerns of your customers, or whatever the top six search questions are. These videos can be very home made, but the audio has to be first rate. These help by creating not only links to you, but well travelled links, a benefit.
Another technique is to encourage people to facebook and blog their experiences with you, say after some encounter or such, with a link. Let them crowd their social media with a pix of you in action. Over time these one time links add up.
Taking first place in competition is a matter of being marginally better. To get ranked higher in each category you need only a few more links than the other. And only a few more higher ratings than the other.
These steps should lead to You becoming the #1 ranked on google, with high ratings and breadth and depth of exposure on the web and a bulletproof reputation. You can even take a bad review once in a while. With this fundamental tactic, any subsequent tactics to increase sales will have the critical step, “sell the company” already in place.
I write black and white to be clear and in hopes of smoking out someone one who in fact is expert at legitimate SEO, knows Ogilvy, and produces results. By the magic of the web I may someday get an email from such a person, at which time I will gladly recommend him. But when I went looking, no such person. In 10 years of challenging SEO people to prove their work, no such luck. So I did it myself, for free. And also learned you must have the combination of ranking and reputation online to be worthwhile. The reputation part takes time, comes from working, and cannot be bought.
I would prefer to pay for this service, since I do not want to do this work (I have better things for me to do) but sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself. I look forward to hearing from someone who can cost effectively help others leverage the web for business promotion.
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