It’s been quite a while since my last post – time to dust off the keyboard and get to writing. First off, I’d like to announce I’ve totally revamped my SEO case studies page to show some actual screenshots of real results Web Contempo has been providing for clients across the US. Check out the updated case studies here. These are only a fraction of the actual projects we’ve got going on and great results, but it should provide a better idea of what we’ve been up to over the past year.

Creating the new case studies page made me think a lot about SEO, and how it is marketed to businesses, and the kinds of services many companies provide, so I thought I would shed a little more light on the subject and dissect the way WE do things a little more, and why I think it’s the best approach.

SEO is one of those things where if you don’t know anything about it, you REALLY don’t know anything about it. That leaves a lot of room for Internet Marketers to really take advantage of their clients, since their clients really have no idea what service they’re paying for, and no real way to check it. Here are 2 stories showing 2 real stories showing 2 different ways SEO companies can use unethical business practices to deceive clients, and what I do in contrast.

Here’s the first example: I started working on SEO for a company a year or so ago. The previous SEO company they had been working with was charging several hundred dollars a month. I was never able to actually find out what it was, specifically, that they were doing, because all they would do is send a report at the end of each month showing what keywords the site ranked for. Just a big jumbled list of keywords my client was ranking for. Now they thought it was great, but funny thing, none of the keywords the SEO company told my client they were ranking for were actually sending any traffic to the site – they were just nonsense keywords that nobody would ever type into a Google search to begin with. I confirmed this by checking the Google AdWords keyword tool. So basically, my client spent hundreds – possibly thousands of dollars with this other SEO firm and literally received nothing in return but a nonsensical list at the end of each month.  Not only that, but several times throughout the first 6 months I was working on the project, this company had the audacity to contact my client and tell them they had lost their search engine rankings. They didn’t actually provide any data – just an email saying they had lost their search engine rankings and should consider sigining back up for SEO. Luckily, I had plenty of analytics available to show that they were in fact ranking MUCH higher for just about everything since I started working on the job so that was pretty much the end of that.

So when I took over SEO for this client, the first thing I did was ask them for a list of keywords they wanted to rank for. Then I parsed the list, selected the keywords I thought would send the most traffic and make my client the most money, and then ran them through the Google AdWords keyword tool to get an accurate estimate of the actual monthly traffic the keyword sends. Based on that, I selected between 5 and 10 competitive, nationally targeted keywords and got to work. Within just a few months, I had achieved first page Google rankings for most of the keywords including the main 2, and their traffic from search engines had more than doubled. This is confirmed through Google analytics. It has now been over a year, and they are still seeing a monthly increase in traffic every month, at least doubling what it had been in the same month 1 year before.

The point of this story is that, the first SEO company had been doing nothing but sending a jumbled email of crappy keywords my client was ranking for at the end of each month and at the end, they really had nothing to show for it. In contrast, I selected keywords that I knew would be difficult to rank for right away, but over time would provide a great ROI and cement my client as a true authority in their niche. I was able to back up what I was doing by showing the comparison in traffic stats each month. Even if my client and I were to part ways today on this project, they would receive a huge long term benefit and ROI from the work I’ve done over the past year or so.

Second story: I have a friend who also owns a web design company here in Minnesota and we got to talking about SEO. He started telling me this story about another guy, I think who is from Minnesota also, and also does SEO. He was very interested in the way his SEO services worked. Apparently what this other Minnesota SEO Company does (this might not be 100% accurate, but pretty close) is do an analysis of your website for free, then tell you where he thinks he can rank you for certain keywords. Then he adds a whole bunch of links to your site and you have to pay him monthly based on where you are ranking.  Then – the kicker – if you decide to stop working with him, he removes all the links he placed to your site and you’re back to square 1 again. Now if you don’t know anything about SEO, you probably don’t see the problem here, and that is clearly how this guy makes his money, but all he is really doing is charging for advertising. You see, if he is able to “remove the links” once a client decides they don’t want to pony up for another month, that means that probably all he is doing is putting up a bunch of links on a private network of sites he owns. Now this is all speculation, but I’m pretty sure that’s the deal. So basically you’re paying X amount of money for that #1 ranking each month, but your only renting the ranking – not actually investing in it. BIG DIFFERENCE. Great for this guy, but really really bad for his clients.

In contrast, the way I do things here at Web Contempo is a lot different. Most importantly, I focus on building permanent links. That means that even if a client kicks me to the curb, all the work I’ve done for them will remain indefinitely and they’ll continue to reap the benefit – often for a long period of time. This is so important because it makes SEO an investment for your company, not something you’re renting. That’s how you get a big time ROI and establish your company in the search engines as an authority in your niche. I have quite a few companies that I worked with 2 or 3 years ago and haven’t touched their SEO since that still have 90% of the rankings I originally got for them. The key is permanent links.

Hopefully that sheds some light on SEO and some things to look for from a consumer point of view. Remember, you don’t want your SEO telling you what keywords you rank for at the end of the month, you want them to tell you what keywords THEY are going to rank you for at the BEGINNING of the month. And also, make sure you are making SEO an investment and not something you’re simply renting.