I decided to finally start my Twitter account back up and also my Linkedin profile as well.
Catch me on either at:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/smallbusinessinternetmarketing
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SEO
So your an up and coming business, or an established business that is needing a web presence and you think to yourself, “Who should I get to design my web site?”.
It is a common question and one that should not be taken lightly.
When you decide to hire locally, your hit with a ton of advertising from radio, billboards, cold calls, and even the search engine result pages. The only problem is, most of the providers here in Kentucky are just plain charlatans.
I have a friend that runs a successful online ecommerce store and I can not even count on my hand how many web design companies he has been with in the last 8 years. I know he has spent tens of thousands of dollars on his site just in rework alone from where other local Louisville and Kentucky web design companies have really done a number to his site. His company is about to spend another 6 figures just to fix what these web design companies have previously done.
The most common problem I see is just plain incompetence. Sure, they do their song and dance to get you in the door and win you over with their complete attention of your project before you sign that 12 month contract, but once you get locked in it seems like your just another number in their billing department to suck a couple grand from you every 30 days with little to no work on your project.
I have seen it myself first hand as well. Not only have some of my friends and business partners been faced with it, but I also have partnered with companies in the past where I was their primary “online marketing” guy. These companies would land a client and promise the moon to them, then scramble to hire outsourced workers to complete the different tasks of the job, and then start collecting payments from you while not having 1 clue to what they were actually doing with your project. Needless to say, I no longer partner with those companies once I find out how they really are.
The simple fact is, there is almost no barrier to entry to starting a Louisville web design company. All you have to do is have a little sales knowledge, study some lingo, and get yourself a solid contract and your in business. Once you land a couple clients, you outsource all the work to a couple 3rd party developers and manage the project and skim a healthy % off the top of the budget for yourself. When clients call and ask questions just keep them on hold for a few days, don’t answer your emails or pretend to be on vacation, and always blame someone else until you can reach that next 30 day billing mark and collect a few grand more. Even better, when the client doesn’t like what you produce, you tell them you will fix it for XX hours more billing!
The best of these setups even hire their family as their employees. Unless your the Jacksons, the Osmonds, or maybe Will Smith’s family, the people in your family generally are not going to be experts in whatever business you set up. We see right through it, your just hiring your family to give them a job and help make your fly by night web design business a lot bigger then what it really is. Is it really in your customers best interest to have your uncle do their web design, your brother to do their paid online marketing, your dad to handle their back end programming and your step mom to handle their web copy?
A lot of these companies are just 1-2 man operations where the “partners” basically have no web experience and just want to cash in on what they think is a money train. Their prior experience actually resembles something close to selling cheap patio furniture or frozen meat from the back of a truck and generally almost always has nothing to do with anything online.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no hate for small Kentucky Web Designers or Louisville Web Design companies. I am only trying to warn you of those that pretend to be these huge operations with tons of “combined” experience that I loathe. When was the last time 70 years of combined online web design experience helped anyone? The web as we generally know it has only been around less then 2 decades.
Just do your homework before you hire out a local Kentucky or Louisville web design firm:
1. Browse their site and read over their marketing messages.
2. Browse their site on the “Way Back Machine” and see how they have evolved over the years.
3. Check up on their customers. No, not the list they give you, but look online for queries like “Web Design by ( insert company here )” or view sites such as ripoffreport.com for their business name.
4. Demand your contract have solutions that favor you when they do not finish your project on time, to your specs, or if they drag their feet on questions you have that need answers. Make them accountable.
Hopefully this article will shed some light on what goes on behind the scenes with local web development companies here in our state and how you can protect yourself.
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I had an interesting conversation the other day with the CMO of a local company over lunch and they were raving to me about a new online marketing company they picked up to handle their web advertising.
Since I know just about everyone in the local Internet marketing space ( this is what happens when you pioneer a service in your hometown for well over a decade ), I inquired about the company they picked up and to my surprise, their name didn’t ring any bells with me. As I dug deeper into the conversation, what alarmed me was that this “new company” might actually be some kind of fly by night service about to pull the wool over my potential client.
I asked questions about this company:
1. What kind of clients do they handle now?
2. What kind of budgets do they handle for those clients?
3. Did they provide you references?
4. How qualified do you think they are to actually handle your account?
The CMO didn’t have what I would call “great” answers to those questions and a little more background checking should have been in order to find out more. It never ceases to amaze me how companies can jump head first into a partnership without doing their due diligence just because they got a “hot tip” or because someone at their office knows someone who knows someone.
What happens when you partner with someone that you barely know anything about and you want to grow past their limitations? Are you going to let them “learn” or educate themselves on your dime when that hurdle comes up? Wouldn’t you rather partner up with someone that not only has years of direct experience, but routinely handles clients that have million dollar budgets in the field you need help in?
The CMO was looking for help with Facebook advertising, something I have been doing since Facebook first opened their doors with their self serve system. If I were him, I would much rather take advice and get help from someone who can prove what they do with million dollar budgets and can help me scale my success, then hire someone that barely has a couple hundred dollars in unproven experience.
Small sample of a few of my Facebook Adverting accounts:
Account #1
Account #2
Account #3
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I have had many clients in my time, and not all of them have been 110% “happy” with their previous Louisville SEO/Internet marketer.
Some of these unhappy clients just had unrealistic expectations no matter what anyone told them (i.e. wanting to rank for an ultra-competitive term in less than 10 days for less than the price of a nice dinner and a movie). Others just didn’t give their SEO campaign enough time to “set in” and work, and some clients just cannot be pleased.
If you are paying for SEO and not getting the results you want, here are some thoughts on why you might not be…
You are not listening to your SEO consultant:
Lots of times you are being told what we can and cannot do and in what time frame. You, however, insist on it being sooner, better, and easier than what we are telling you. If you know so much more than us (who you are paying), then why not take a crack at it yourself? We as consultants are up against not only all your competitors trying to rank for the same niche, but lots of times your competitors have more than one active SEO consultant, a longer history at being ranked higher than you, and just an outright better website than you. Also, we are trying to convince Google to change THEIR logic to favor your site over another site, all the while constantly tweaking and changing the standards we need to learn and follow at the drop of a dime.
You are not willing to work/help:
I get it. You hired a consultant to do this work and rank you higher. You do not want to do this or do not know how to do what you hired us for. That’s fine, but when we ask you for things we cannot do (maybe things like, changing your site navigation, adding more content, changing the URLs, etc.), we really need you to comply. I have one client I have worked with off and on for years and EVERY single time I ask them to make a change to their site, their answer is always, “Can’t”. You really limit what kind of results I can get you if you have a site that is not editable.
It is also not helpful when I have goals and tasks that are waiting on things for you to complete, but it takes you three to four months to complete them.
You wanted to be cheap:
Trying to cut corners when it comes to paying is always a bad tactic. If I give you multiple options for different packages that I can offer you and you pick the lowest one (which means I give your site less attention/time than if you picked a higher-end package), then you need to expect lower results. Sure, we talked about getting you to X position on Google and getting you X amount of leads, but when I give you the price for those results and the time frame involved and you balk and say you cannot afford that amount and decide to choose the package that is 50 percent less, then you should expect 50% less work from me every month. This also means that since I am working less hours for you per motnh, it will take longer to get the results we originally talked about. When I also present to you that we should purchase some paid links from other sites and you flat out reject the idea, then expect the results you wanted to take longer as well.
When I then see you on Facebook going to Disney World for two weeks, then buying a second million dollar vacation home, and have five new IT hires in your office when I come in to meet with you, I really have a hard time believing your excuse for “being a small company” that cannot afford the original price I gave you.
You forgot what my role was:
I am here to bring you traffic. Unless I agree to personally redesign your site or help you code a new ecommerce cart by hand, do not ask me to do that. If I do agree to help you with those tasks, realize that I will charge you for the new work and that the new work is also taking away time from me getting traffic to your site.
Also, you cannot expect your online marketer to “generate more sales” for you. We are here to get you more traffic and more leads. How you handle that traffic and those leads is entirely up to you. I brought the traffic to you; I filled up your lead cart, but I cannot make your customers love your product and spend three times more money on your product than what your competitor charges just to buy from you. I cannot RUN your business for you, and I cannot make your customers love everything about you. If you need that type of help, then I want to be a 50-percent partner and we can talk shop then.
Just because I got you number one in Google and raised your traffic eightfold, doesn’t mean the people actually like your products or that your business model is financially sound.
You just didn’t give it enough time:
Too many times, you expect results way too soon. Your competitors are trying to maintain the positions they are in, and many of them are trying to outrank you anyways. Google is also constantly changing their methods and ranking factors ( averaging 2x a day ). It is going to take time to correctly rank your site and also help you KEEP that position.
Also, every keyword and every niche is different. What it takes to rank first page for “blue widgets” is totally different than what it takes to rank for “red widgets”. None of us know what it takes off the bat. It takes research, testing, and data to find out what it is going to take to rank you for your keyword.
Finally, you got the result you wanted, and then didn’t want to maintain it:
Yep, I got you there when you wanted and where you wanted, and you thought to yourself, “Great! Thanks for the help, and I will call you if I need anything else,” and ended our relationship. That’s cool, I understand that once you got ranked you thought it was magically just going to stay there forever. I guess you didn’t listen to me when I told you that after you get ranked, you will need help to maintain that ranking so that when Google changes their algo or when your competitors get pissed and hire two or three SEOs to get their rankings back, you do not slip back to the third page of results again.
Your competitors are going to hire help to get their results back, and once you drop off, you are going to want to call me again to get you back to the first page. This time the work will be 10 times harder because I will have an uphill climb trying to now catch up to your competitors that have active SEOs working on their campaigns and building links like mad. Thanks for that!
Conclusion:
Next time you are not getting the results you are wanting from your Internet marketing consultant, think about what problems YOU are causing that are affecting your marketing efforts instead of thinking that your SEO consultant is at fault.
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