Ten years from now, old-timer SEO pros will look back to the 2000 to 2020 years–the late infancy of the web–with relief that the labyrinthine complexity of technical SEO is a thing of the past. We will focus more on using persuasive words and designs that pertain to searchers’ wishes. Read more…
In explaining and proposing services, most SEO firms lie by omission—and they probably should. My firm’s neuro-marketing wizard, Jennifer Williams, has admonished me for including in proposals too many options worth considering in the near future. Long before that advice, I learned the hard way to include in the core Read more…
When shopping for SEO consulting, you want to know the cost. When search marketing firms sell SEO, they don’t want to spend too much time writing proposals. These two marketplace motivations make set-priced SEO packages convenient and attractive. But do such packages mislead both buyers and sellers? Some of the Read more…
Good keyword research produces the linguistic DNA by which your business is found, and it should be used in everything from product databases through URLs to social media posts. So why do I tell you to stop paying for it? Because almost everyone selling keyword research uses tools that provide Read more…
In my college Internet Marketing class, I teach students to understand the huge forces of bias in articles about web marketing. Public relations campaigns, the need to scream controversial headlines (like the dunderheaded “SEO is Dead”) to get social buzz, poor pay for journalists, fear or complexity, and just plain Read more…
Inlinks (or backlinks or inbound links), which are links to your website from other websites, comprise roughly 50% of what determines your website’s ranking in the search engines. Most websites have inlinks to pages that no longer exist on your website. Discovering these inlinks and reconnecting them to pages in Read more…
Two or three years ago there was big news that many of the sleazy sales people who sold the bad mortgages that led to the financial crisis are now selling SEO for firms with great looking websites. These sales people are very convincing–way better than the many obvious scammers out Read more…
Most businesses know they need a website and search marketing, so many just do it. But there’s a huge range in how much you can invest. Seeing the likely profit scenarios will enable you to invest wisely. The fact is that, with professional help, you can predict the ROI of Read more…
Short answer: like you do for everything else–create an annual budget. Search marketing channels and tactics proliferate so that only the largest companies can do it all in one year. Prioritizing and then estimating labor time and vendor costs will produce your annual budget, but that requires rare breadth and Read more…
This post summarizes and reflects further on Rob Laporte’s “The Hard Freakonomics of Search Marketing for Small Business,” published in the Winter 2012-13 edition of Visibility Magazine. Hard Freakonomic consequences follow from the fact that display systems and the brain deal with only a few search results per search. The Read more…