The Most Important Ingredient For SEO Success: Trust
Like any good relationship, the one between you and your SEO firm needs to be built on trust. At NetSearch Direct we pride ourselves on achieving results for our clients, but we also pride ourselves on our customer service. From kickoff meeting to the start of your SEO strategy, through maintenance and fine tuning, we strive to stay focused on meeting our client’s needs by applying the very best standards of care. Unfortunately, there are many SEO firms who outsource work, use “Black Hat” tactics, and refuse to open a dialogue with their customers. These firms give SEO a bad image and we’re here to warn you against some of their shady practices.
Outsourcing Your Site
Traditional advertising firms commonly outsource advertising work involving the internet. This makes sense on many levels as the lead ad agency working for a client may not have the expertise needed to handle their complex SEO work. The trouble comes when they are outsourcing the work to rogue so-called industry specialists.
When the value that SEO lends to a business was demonstrated, business owners took immediate interest. The SEO industry exploded as need for the highly specialized services grew rapidly. Unfortunately, so did the number of non-qualified SEO experts. Suddenly it seemed that everyone who had ever read an article was an expert in getting your site ranked highly in the search engines. False promises are made and results are not delivered. Who’s left holding the bag? The business owner.
At NetSearch Direct we have years of experience behind our SEO experts and our staff regularly collaborates on industry trends, client strategies, and new developments in the SEO field. Sometimes it makes sense for a business to outsource advertising to someone else who may be more qualified than the lead agency, particularly SEO advertising. Proceed with caution and challenge your SEO “expert” to explain his or her strategies. Ask them to explain, in advance, what results you should expect from your campaign and when. Also can they show you the results of their SEO efforts with other businesses? Not knowing who you’re dealing with and ending up with an unqualified individual can yield disastrous results.
Black Hat Tactics
In the SEO industry you’ll hear phrases like “black hat” and “white hat” tactics. Black hat tactics refer to the business practices and search engine manipulation performed by SEO specialists to achieve high rankings in an unethical manner. White hat tactics are those practices which yield high search results rankings for websites using industry best practices and ethics to achieve results. Many of the practices that make up black hat tactics used to actually be legit forms of SEO; however, over time these practices were abused by SEO firms and are now frowned upon in the industry. Warning - they also carry severe penalties if you are discovered using them. Some specific examples of black hat SEO include: using invisible text on your website in order to stuff as many keywords onto a page as possible, and creating doorway pages, or “fake” pages intended only for search engine robots to read. Employing black hat tactics will give you a search engine results boost very quickly and for that reason it’s tempting. What you may not know, however, is that websites using these practices are penalized heavily and may even banned from showing up in the search engines.
Like we mentioned above, it is critical that you trust the person performing your SEO work and that you know they will use white hat tactics to get your website the rankings results that you desire.
SEO – Client Relationship
After talking with your SEO firm do you feel in the dark? Do you feel insecure about the particular strategy being applied to your website, and do you feel powerless to speak up about it? Many SEO firms are hesitant to explain practices to their clients for fear that educating their clients will end their relationship while website owners attempt to go it alone and perform their own SEO work. On one hand it’s easy to understand – SEO experts work very hard for many years applying the right principals and developing successful strategies and it is difficult to just hand that knowledge over. However, this leads to poor communication between SEO experts and their clients, and this is what jeopardizes relationships and contracts. Be wary of an SEO specialist who simply tells you to trust him or her without explaining their strategy and laying out a plan for you to see and understand.
We find that the more open we are with our clients, better results are achieved and long-lasting relationships are formed. When we discuss aspects of a client’s strategy outlining the challenges and opportunities as well as the successes, we are able to work with our clients and manage their expectations. SEO is a complex, competitive advertising avenue but the right relationship can make all the difference in the quality of your results and the success of growing your business.
The Numbers Don’t Lie – Social Media Marketing Continues to Grow
In September this year Twitter.com, Tagged.com and Ning reported serious year-over-year audience growth at 343%, 330%, and 251%, respectively. Facebook announced 39.0 million unique visitors and a growth rate of 116%, and social networking giant MySpace.com is reported to have 59.4 million unique visitors. If these statistics don’t prove the importance of social networking, consider that in the most recent presidential election Barack Obama had over 2 million supporters on Facebook and over 800 thousand supporters on MySpace. John McCain held over 600 thousand supporters on Facebook and over 200 thousand supporters on MySpace. Politics aside, you can’t argue that social media marketing is critical to utilize when you want to deliver your message.
If your business is trying to cast a wider net and attract new business, social media marketing is the avenue for you. However, you must protect your business and develop your strategy just as you would for PPC or SEO. What is critical to understand when using social media to market your business is that your identity is being established through association. In its simplest form, identity through association means becoming friends with other MySpace or Facebook users. By linking profiles with your existing customers and reaching out to your core client base, you establish who you are and how you bring something different, something special and noteworthy, to your marketplace.
Moreover, social media marketing is relatively cheap when compared to traditional advertising avenues. Aside from the startup time it takes to create a profile, social media marketing allows its members to access information freely. Due to the analytical tools available, advertisers can control advertising spend and even target demographics ensuring that their ads and are reaching the most qualified audience. Traditional marketing, relying on print advertising campaigns and commercials is costly from startup throughout the campaign’s management and often cast their net too wide and campaign success suffers.
