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We can make more money by creating Google AdWords campaigns for clients and never touching their websites. And we could make the most money by performing classic “search engine optimization” services: tweaking the page titles, headlines and body content of client websites with keyword phrases.
There’s just one problem:
We do not define success as simply increasing traffic to your website.
We define success by how many form submissions, phone calls and new orders we are able to generate for you. In other words, how much we are able to increase your business. And this means, nine times out of ten, that we need to make significant changes to your website. What sorts of changes?
Now, the more cynical among you may view this as simply a way to increase our revenues. And it does tend to increase our revenue per client. On the other hand, though, our approach to website development is much more labor-intensive—and thus a less efficient use of our time and resources—than for many of our competitors. More on this below.
But we believe our approach will produce better results for you.
We believe you will achieve the best results with an information-rich website.
Product and service marketers (that’s you) have a tendency to focus on the features that differentiate their offerings from competitors. Which is important. We, on the other hand, understand that the web is about trust. So we also pay attention to making you look and sound like a market leader. One way to do this is to provide useful, in-depth information about topics related to your field.
Remember that your website is not a newspaper or TV ad. It should be viewed more as a place for interested prospects to learn more about who you are and what you do. And become comfortable with you in the process.
Rich content brands you as a trusted authority.
Most website design firms create a visual design template for your website. And that’s it.
And most clients don’t fully appreciate how much editorial content a “category leadership” website requires. Printed company sales literature usually doesn’t have useful links to other resources, glossaries of industry terms, frequent questions and answers and so on. Even if this information does exist in print form, it is usually more abbreviated than is desirable on the web.
What often happens is that the web design firm gets their design template finished and uploaded to the web, where it often sits empty for weeks or months. This happens because you and your people are busy. You don’t have the time to create rich in-depth information about your company, your people, your products and services and your industry.
With us, you need not concern yourself with this issue. We’ll take care of the content.
Naturally, we have to learn about your organization, your products and services and your industry if we are going to create persuasive and useful content for your website. So we perform exhaustive research for the first couple weeks of any client engagement. This process includes identifying your competition and benchmarking and analyzing their websites.
We do not guarantee top positions within organic (free) search engine results. Ah, we see your eyebrows are raised. Let us explain.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is generally defined as any effort to improve a website’s ranking in free search engine results pages. The concept is sound: Roughly two thirds of search engine users view only the first page page of results for their search queries, so any steps you can take to get your website positioned higher in the results is a good thing.
One thing you won’t see too many SEO companies talk about is the idea that search engine traffic related to your business falls into two general groups: queries by people who are trying to locate information about your specific company or organization, and queries by people who are just searching for information about your product or service category.
This distinction is important if the SEO company is making performance promises like “getting you ranked in a high position on the first page of Google®” search results. Why? Well, the home page for most organizations will usually appear as the first search result when searchers use the company name as the search query phrase, so long as the title tag in the HTML code for the page contains the company name and the title isn’t too long. Even if two or three companies share the same name, all should appear within the first screen of search results. This may take a couple of months to resolve for a new website, but it takes the SEO company about 30 minutes to make the necessary change to your home page.
Naturally, this is a very important task to accomplish for that first group of searchers who are trying to find information about your specific company. Just know that an organic (free) ranking guarantee that is satisfied by getting your company positioned within the first few results in searches for your company’s name is really no big deal. Important. But not difficult or time-consuming to achieve.
On the other hand, no SEO company can guarantee even a first screen organic (free) ranking in Google® for more generic keyword searches related to your product or service category, unless your business or organization is lucky enough to belong to one of the following categories:
It is important to understand that if an SEO company’s “Case Studies” or “Results” examples fall into the above categories, your mileage may vary.
We will not acknowledge a client relationship unless the client publicly discloses the relationship first. While competitors can certainly monitor your website content and your pay per click advertising, they have no way of discovering how successful your Internet advertising and marketing really is. On the other hand, they may be more likely to copy certain visible components of your campaigns (e.g. ad copywriting) if they know we are involved.
Also, we will not disclose any confidential information that we may discover about a client’s operations or sales performance to a third party, even if our relationship with the client ends. The only exception to this promise is the sharing of advertising campaign performance data among an affiliated group of companies (for example, a product manufacturer’s dealer network). “Confidential information” generally means any information that is not publicly available and might reasonably be considered a trade secret.
We will not manage a Google® AdWords campaign or other similar Internet-based advertising campaign that directly competes, within an overlapping geographic territory, with any product or service we are advertising or marketing for a client. And we will respect this promise for a period of at least six months after we stop advertising the product or service.
Why does it take three months to determine what works best?
Search engine traffic is affected by the same factors that influence interest in your products and services: local, national and world events, severe weather and unusual weather patterns, holidays, the general state of the economy and the seasonality of your product or service. Longer time periods tend to better identify distortions in your campaign results that may be attributable to these factors.
Also, it take about three months to test different advertising copy.
Don’t you have an incentive to increase client per click bid amounts if your compensation includes a percentage of our advertising expenditures?
No. Our compensation is based upon your overall monthly advertising budget and not on per click bids. For any given budget you set, our primary incentive is to retain you as a long-term client by maximizing the efficiency of your spending. In other words, regardless of the keyword bid amounts we set, we want to deliver the highest measurable return on your investment.