A New SEMPO in 2011

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Marta Turek

Can SEMPO be to Paid Search and SEO what WAA (Web Analytics Association) is to Analytics?

Perhaps that is a loaded question but SEMPO is certainly trying! With a new website launched in 2011 and a reduced membership rate of $125, SEMPO is taking strides to become more appealing to SEM practitioners.

The question that nags at me is whether today’s search marketers know what SEMPO is and if they do, do they consider it to be relevant in the search marketing industry?

I am a member of SEMPO and believe that the search marketing industry needs a strong leader, much like the role of the Web Analytics Association for analytics professionals. Whether SEMPO will be that leader is yet to be seen.

SEMPO lists a number of benefits of membership; here they are below. At the end of the day, any membership is as good as you make it by actively participating. If SEMPO can energize its existing community, make us, the current members, passionate advocates of SEMPO, that will be a massive stride in the right direction.

Expand Your Knowledge

- Receive 20 percent discounts to SEMPO Institute courses
- Participate in regular roundtables on emerging trends featuring industry leaders
- Access annual state of the market and Industry salary data research
- Access Resource Library (white papers, point of views)
- Participate in a vibrant, interactive online member community

Engage with Industry Leaders

- Attend SEMPO Members Only events at industry conferences
- Participate in committees
- Attend local Arizona events
- Participate in special interest groups
- Participate in vibrant, interactive online member community
- Network with peers on LinkedIn and Facebook

Maximize Your Career Growth

- Access salary and industry research data
- Post resume to the Career Center Marketplace
- Attend Careers in Search webinars

Grow Your Business

- Get noticed in the online Member Directory
- Participate in Speakers Bureau program
- Post open positions on the SEMPO Job Board
- Get leads through the Request Services program

Save Money

- Receive discounts to subscriptions, tools
- Receive 20-30 percent discounts to industry conferences and training programs
- Free membership in a SEMPO chapter
- Free registration at chapter events

Search Engine Marketing: The Value Conundrum

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Marta Turek

Attorneys are notorious for the high billable hourly rate charged to clients. A number of factors come into play to determine the exact rate, from the size of the firm, to experience, reputation and demand for the lawyer in question. At the elite range, you could easily be paying 4 figures but even at the mid-range, you’ll be forking out anywhere between $250 to $400 per hour.

What about search marketing, how do you value an hour with your Search Marketing Consultant? When a particular tactic is being executed upon, such as rewriting the ad copy throughout the account in order to test a new approach, do you measure value by simply looking at the end result or do you take into account the expertise and number of hours that have gone into the work?

Measuring Value

It is virtually impossible to compare search marketing solutions between vendors largely because as Rand Fiskin put it in a post 3 years ago:

‘Knowledge of how the industry operates and how to judge vendors is knowledge that’s nearly as hard to come by as the search marketing techniques themselves’

It’s nearly impossible to measure two vendors side by side. Even two vendors who appear to offer a very similar service may provide a rather different experience in execution, value and cost. Though difficult to accurately compare search marketing solutions, you can draw upon the experiences you have had with vendors.

How do you value the work that a vendor does for your business? Do you measure output or the time dedicated to your account? If you are looking at the end task result only and not taking into account the man-hours that have gone into the work, you may be undervaluing the solution.

Valuing search marketing services is just one of many challenges that still face this, relatively speaking, fledgling industry. Compared to the legal system, which has hundreds of years on search marketing, we are still far away from developing standards that could assist in setting a minimum bar. If we had standards in this industry, tangible, measurable standards, you could then more easily valuate what is worth $50 per hour vs. $250 per hour.

However, how a client views your search marketing offering depends in large part on how you present and sell the solution. If you are flogging search marketing like a commodity, the client will expect a great deal more for less. Though very different from the legal model, search marketing holds a position in the services industry. It is yet unclear whether clients value the work enough to consider it ‘tertiary level, professional services’ – however, if they do not, this is in large part a fault of the industry itself with the rogue & cowboy manner in which it has presented itself in the past.

Search marketing has to have a serious offering on the table to be treated seriously by clients. The overwhelming presence of poor quality solutions that pervade the market serve only to devalue the market value of search marketing solutions. Only when clear benchmarks are set will search marketing be able to draw a clearer line in the sand, defining its value, even by hourly rate.

The ‘Google Customer Service’ Oxymoron

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Marta Turek

A recent experience with a Google customer service rep left me appalled at the shockingly poor customer service. Google is not known for its customer service finesse – the number of complaints online abound. The other major search engines do not set much of a standard to overcome and with Google’s virtual monopoly on online dollars, the company appears to be entrenched in the old business model which Robin Sharma very accurately describes in his newest book, The Leader Who Had No Title’. Succinctly, it’s take the money and run. If you lose one customer there’s plenty more out there. Unfortunately Google’s monopolistic reign is heightened by the fact that most customers really need Google to run a profitable business. Ironically, it is the searcher who decides which search engine to use, and Google’s focus is on the searcher, not the advertiser.

Allow me to elucidate my experience…

The Problem

I emailed the Google rep explaining the dilemma and requested some assistance in the form of specific reports I was hoping to receive from Google, which I knew Google was very capable of generating. This is how the conversation started:

…. I have another request for an Impression Share report for a client

If there is any average CPC trending you could provide for the industry that would be great too. In May, we lost out on positioning heavily for this account and I would like to be able to see what the market is looking like.

A week later, after some to and fro to clarify the request, I was informed that I would be provided with useful information of market leader averages.

I was sent a category assessment based on leading advertisers, showing me the average Q1 spend of the category leader vs. the client in question. It was like comparing David to Goliath as the client is a relatively small player in the market.

The report compared standard metrics between the category leader and the client for the period Q1, first in search and then the content network.

Apart from further validating that the client holds a relatively small share in the market, there were two things that were very wrong with the report that was provided:

It was for the period Q1 – whereas the problem identified had started in May in Q2
The client does not advertise in the content network

No time was taken to listen and understand the problem, to provide an appropriate solution.

The Pain Continues

I indicated that the report did not address the problems the client had been experiencing and reiterated my original request:

What I was hoping for is an impression share report as I originally
indicated or some type of report showing the trending of CPCs over the last few months.

Following this request, I was then sent a CPC vs. CTR trending report for Q1 for the top converting keywords. This was sent by another rep that had seemingly taken over my enquiry.

Yet again, after clearly indicating the type of information I was seeking, I received client specific information, that was retrievable through the account itself. Again, it was for the period Q1. The problems started occurring in May and here I am being sent a report from January to March.

I then addressed the new rep and explained the problem in detail, again I requested an impression share report and finally, after a third attempt I did receive some insights into CPC trending and impression share data.

What’s Wrong with this Picture?

Perhaps Google makes such easy money that it does not concern itself with ‘working for its money’ by providing quality customer service. I am not going to get into a philosophical monologue about this issue. If there was ever an opportunity to snatch market share from Google, this would be it. As the Yahoo! / Bing PPC transition begins to roll out in North America, they should most certainly pay attention to customer service. People are dying for a search engine that gives a damn and does not take dinosaur years and multiple explanations to provide a smidgen of value.

SEMPO Needs to Get Sexy

Posted on May 13, 2010 by Marta Turek

When I started in the search engine marketing game I put SEMPO on a pedestal because some of the industry’s greats were behind the organisation, from Kevin Lee to Bruce Clay and Gord Hotchkiss, to name a few. To young search marketers these are the rock stars of the industry, they were there in the trenches when it all started with Alta Vista and Geocities websites and they have continued to lead us into the next era of online marketing.

In discovering SEMPO and seeing that these were the people that pioneered the organisation, I thought, this is where you need to be to dive into the industry, meet other search marketers and grow professionally. So, that’s what I did – I started to explore the companies that were members of the organisation, I read the blogs and articles featured on the SEMPO website and I decided to invest in one of the courses, Advanced Search Advertising (now appears to be discontinued).

SEMPO: Taken Off My Pedestal

I found that even though many large players in the industry associate themselves with the organisation and are even circle members, the SEMPO fan base appears to be shrinking rather than growing. I’ve met more than one company who has decided to drop membership level because they do not feel the value justifies the membership cost. I realised that even though there is a niche group of people who are intimately familiar with SEMPO, there is an greater number of search marketers who have never heard of SEMPO and others who do not understand its value.

In exploring the resources on the SEMPO website, they seemed to be lacking and out of date, with the most recent media center articles frozen in 2005. I was dismayed at the results and so found myself using SEMPO as a resource less frequently.

In the midst of all this, I was undertaking a SEMPO course that dubbed itself ‘advanced’ so I had high hopes for the skills that I could develop. The basics were covered well but the examples and industry references were out of date, referencing as far back as 2004 with no follow up references. I began to wonder how frequently these courses are updated. Working in an industry that thrives on change, SEMPO courses could certainly do with an infusion of some heavily overdue changes.

Where to From Here?

On Twitter, sempoglobal has 573 followers and is itself following 25 people. Need I say more?

How hard is SEMPO trying to engage with search marketers or make itself known?

SEMPO needs to decide what it wants to be and for whom? If it wants to serve search marketers, the approach needs to be more sophisticated and valuable – remember, these are people who pore through blogs, webinars, conferences, books, networking, you name it. Where does SEMPO fit into this educational picture? Its courses need to be cutting edge for it to even make sense for agencies and companies to invest in the material.

What is SEMPO really? Where’s the direction? The passion? Search marketing is not an industry of half measures; people love what they do. If search marketers could see where SEMPO wants to go, they would certainly be more willing to help it get there. We need to kickstart SEMPO’s engine, because in this industry, if you stand still, you start moving backwards and then it’s game over.

SEMPO – From Greatness to Mediocrity?

Posted on October 31, 2009 by Marta Turek

Valiant Arbiter Did you know that within the search marketing industry, there exists a professional non-profit organization built to provide a foundation for industry growth through fostering awareness, providing education, promoting the industry, generating research and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing?

No? Well, there is: SEMPO – Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization.

Maybe as a first phase, SEMPO should focus on ‘fostering awareness’ of its own existence and promoting itself in the search industry.

In 2003 perhaps, when the search marketing industry was fledgling, barely in existence and Google started to gain some traction, SEMPO came galloping in, the valiant arbiter in a lawless, unchartered online world.

Suddenly there was a professional institution that stood for the search marketer – creating credibility where mostly business was done in dark waters. In the world of black hat, cloaking and doorway pages, there was little to define the ‘white hat’ marketer.

The SEMPO logo was the sign of a professional elite that stood for ethical search marketing and upholding the integrity of the field. Brandishing the SEMPO logo was a sign of a safe haven for hundreds of businesses that tried in vain to navigate these murky online SEO waters.

What happened to SEMPO as a professional organization? For an organization that calls itself ‘international’, its 700 strong membership base is modest at most if not rather embarrassing.

What went wrong?

This is not something that an impartial observer can hope to answer, but it certainly seems that in the tempestuous evolution that has swept the search marketing industry in the last few years, SEMPO lost sight of what it wanted to be. In this struggle, without a clear goal or direction, the organization has continued to trudge along, but perhaps rather aimlessly.

Even the SEMPO website looks rather tired and outdated. One could say that SEMPO has completely missed the boat on Web2.0 and could do with a significant revamp of the site. Even the case studies section seems to have hit a standstill with the archive only going as far back at October 2005!

What about a blog? Twitter? Real-time updates? Interactivity?

It all just feels a little bit stale, which is sad, depressing in a way. How is it that the organization purporting to be the official representative of one of the most exciting, fast moving and evolving industries in the world, can be getting it so wrong?

The irony lies in the fact that it is some of the best of the best in search, who came together to start SEMPO. Has all this amalgamated greatness resulted in a formula that produces mediocrity?

Going Off Track, Hurts You & Your Clients

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Marta Turek

Going Off Track Sitting at the first Manic Street Preachers concert in Vancouver in 10 years, I began musing about all the people who came to the show so many years on, to show their continuing support of the band. We waited in line for the doors to open, then we waited for another two hours until 10pm for the band to get on stage, but when they started playing, it was a new flavour and it took many a song before any of the 90s classics were sung. This got me thinking.

Over the 10 year absence on the Vancouver stage, the band would not doubt have gone through an evolution. This is to be expected, but if their performance was so foreign to what they used to be, is that not forgetting about the people who supported them all those years ago? How many people walked out of that concert feeling bittersweet, going home to play some of those old records because their expectations were not met?

One for All, All for Me?

Remember those first few major clients that catapulted your company in the right direction with that major case study that featured your strengths or the solid reviews that drove more business?

How often in business are those first clients put into the legacy client pile and considered ‘small’, whereas once they were ‘the client to please’? I guess the key question here becomes whether your company is to your legacy clients what it once was or are they scratching their heads wondering whatever happened to that company they supported in the early days?

The same can be said for employees. Companies that uphold core values that have been developed upon fundamental principles are rare. Having said that, employees that work towards a common goal in which they believe, are arguably just as rare. Today it seems that to an increasingly large number of people, a job is just that, a job, work, a daily grind.

Are you recognising the people in your organisation that continue to oil the cogs and keep the machine running smoothly? Too quickly do we forget how intricately our success is interwoven with the support of our clients; the demand for our service offering and the service delivered by the people who deal directly with our clients. This can be said of a rock band that relies on its fans, as much as it applies to a company whose offering is built on the collective intellectual property of the people who work there.

So, no matter how much your company evolves and grows over the years, do not lose sight of the type of company you strove to be to your clients and your employees in those early days, when you had everything to lose. Financial success has this tendency to take the ‘we’ out of the achievement and focus solely on the ‘I’. Well, you didn’t get to the top alone and the faster you recognise this, the sooner you will be a better company, boss or colleague to the people around you.

Oh, That’s Right, We Don’t Need SEO Standards

Posted on August 10, 2009 by Marta Turek

What is SEO?

“Suppose it’s got something to do with when doing a search, getting the most and best hits back, i.e. no crap.”

“A practise that improves performance and relevance of result sets for search engines. Never heard of it as a service.”

“No understanding at all…is it something that makes Google work better?”

“My guess is that you pay for a good position on the search engine.”

That is how 4 of 33 respondents in a closed study defined SEO. This very basic study was conducted among tertiary qualified professionals to provide a snapshot of the ‘general public’s ’ understanding of search engine optimization. All respondents were asked not to perform any research prior to answering the questions.

Interestingly, quite a few people (30%) considered SEO to be a practice performed by the search engines themselves, such as changing the algorithm to improve performance and deliver more relevant results.

In addition, a surprisingly high number of respondents (42%) had a basic idea of the practice of SEO, citing that changes would need to be made to a target website to improve its ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Putting a PRICE on the SEO service was a problem

SEOCostExpectations

There was a very wide gap in pricing expectations:

46% of respondents had ‘no idea’ how much they could expect to pay for search engine optimization services

A collective 21% expected SEO to be either FREE (9%) or to cost less than $1,000 (12%).

21% proposed a performance fee structure based on increase in bottom line generated through the SEO. Notably these were professionals from tertiary service industries such as banking, public relations and consulting.

Observation 1: If most people have no idea what to pay for the SEO service while a proportion would hand over potentially $1,000s in percentage based fees this indicates a significant gap in client expectations.

A website offering services at $200 is as believable as one providing the service for $2,000, because people literally do not know what to expect.

For SEO to be considered among other professional fields such as law or medicine, the SEO industry has to deliver its services at a certain benchmark standard in order for those services to be valued at a particular price.

Searching for SEO
Overwhelmingly, most respondents would use Google (64%) or a search engine (15%) to find out more information about SEO.
So, if people are using Google to research SEO, what do they find?

Sample of some of first page SERP results on Google.ca for phrase ‘search engine optimization’:

- Guaranteed Page 1 or Pay Nothing, Page 1 in Seven Days $69.95/Month
- Search engine optimization is the way to pull massive amounts of free traffic
- Get listed on 200+ search engines in 8 hours!
- 300+ Top 10 And Top 3 Rankings In Every Search Engine For $179.95

Observation 2: Guarantees! Promises! Refunds! First page Google rankings for a $100 per month! Free search engine submission to hundreds of search engines!

Search for a lawyer or dentist online and you will not see this type of price undercutting. The focus is on quality, expertise, value and years of experience.

The SEO industry is diluting the value of its own service with this type of advertising. Searchers form the opinion that SEO is a cheap; easy-to-implement service offering that any SEO business listed on the SERPs can perform.

Cognitive dissonance begins to form between client expectations and perceived value of the service. Clients expect top rankings to be delivered at a low price point.

Final Thoughts
Though the basic study that has been discussed was small and from a statistical perspective has limitations, the insight that just 33 respondents provided is significant:

- If most people would search on Google for SEO, where can searchers find quality information that will assist them in developing their expectations of SEO services?

- SEMPO does feature in the SERPs for some search terms and though the website is a valuable resource, does it adequately help shape a searcher’s understanding of why they would pay $100 for one SEO service and $10,000 for another?

- A standard definition of SEO would help the public understand what to expect from SEO and more effectively find services that suit their business requirements and budget.

- SEO standards would assist in setting a minimum benchmark for SEO service delivery, which would ultimately increase the client value perception of these services, and so many SEOs would no longer have to feel like they are working for FREE!

In the words of Ian McAnerin: ‘Standards? We don’t need no stinkin’ standards. But the public does. I think it’s time we grew up and took responsibility for our own profession, before someone does it for us.’

Originally published as an entry in Marketing Pilgrim’s 4th Annual SEM Scholarship Contest

How Accountable is Your SEO Agency?

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Marta Turek

Most SEO companies still talk about rankings as the first measure of SEO success, but is this really the best measure of their clients’ success?

Surely, clients would rather receive a monthly report that highlights the ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) of the SEO investment, instead of a ranking report with arrows pointing out whether organic rankings have dropped or increased?

According to a 2007 iProspect and JupiterResearch study, 58% of search marketers’ job performance was evaluated on the amount of traffic driven to a client website. This was the leading metric used to evaluate how successfully search marketers were doing their job, on the traffic generated to a site. Similarly, in 2005 the same metric was the lead indicator of success.

Two years later, it would be interesting to see comparative figures for 2009, but even without this, it still appears that many SEO agencies shy away from solid monetary business metrics in the evaluation of SEO campaigns. Perhaps this trend would be more prevalent among smaller businesses and agencies targeting the SME market, because the top tier agencies have bigger client budgets, larger campaigns and more demanding corporate metrics on which to deliver, but it remains a serious problem.

Poor measurement and reporting of key metrics is a concern because the majority of businesses fall into the SME category, which means that apart from multinationals that have the budgets to commission top tier agencies, most businesses are being fed these non-monetary metrics, that do not offer any accountability, as measures of SEO success.

A ranking report and traffic volume chart do not tell a meaningful story unless they are backed up by conversion metrics, sales figures, customer acquisition costs, return on ad spend calculations and ROI percentages from the search marketing efforts.

Keeping the Waters Murky
It would appear that most companies are reluctant to make web traffic and search engine ranking secondary measures of success because this would make them far more accountable for the work they do. The SERP positioning for a particular keyword does not actually mean anything. A keyword’s positioning only begins to have meaning when incorporating further metrics relative to this positioning.

A number one ranking in the SERPs that does not deliver traffic because the keyword is not searched, is like no ranking at all. The same goes for a keyword that receives traffic but does not convert – whether this is because the page to which searchers are taken does not satisfy search criteria or because of the questionable credibility of the page to which traffic is driven.

By focusing on monetary metrics, companies could more easily justify a higher spend on SEO to their clients, especially if clients could see positive ROAS figures. In this way, SEO agencies could grow client spend from the existing client base rather than aggressively hunting new sales.

Unfortunately, a certain stigma appears to linger in the SEO industry, that the lowest hanging fruit is the easy money. It’s not the smoke and mirrors of the past, in which anxious clients were stalled by the mystical ‘sandbox’ but the SEO relationship still seems to be built on a ‘need to know basis’. This usually translates to keeping the client in the dark because from the reporting that is done, it does not seem that the client needs to know much!

If the client knew how little value those rankings were actually driving, well, that would create more accountability and work for the company, wouldn’t it?

Ironic though that companies choose this path because this creates agencies that become like factory lines, doing the same thing for every client, not pushing the status quo, bringing in more clients but generating minimal growth in the existing client base. The great companies will always rise to the top, but unfortunately, not every business has the budget to work with the top agencies. What this means is that clients need to become more educated and accountable for the types of SEO agencies with which they choose to work.

Next time you receive your monthly SEO reporting, ask yourself what it’s really telling you. Does it share ANY valuable data? If not, it is up to you to do demand the monetary metrics that speak to your business bottom line.

Guarantees in SEO – 100% Hocus Pocus?

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Marta Turek

An interesting commenter dialogue discussing ‘SEO guarantees’ took place on my Marketing Pilgrim guest post. An innocent comment supporting the article’s take on the vast array of grandiose guarantees and claims made in the SEO industry, led to a debate on ‘SEO ranking guarantees’ vs. guarantees based on ‘performance based pricing’.

There is a clear difference between the two. This post will shed some light on the straight SEO rankings guarantee that should be avoided at all costs and the pay for performance (PFP) scenario that can actually cushion the risks of SEO.

SEO Ranking Guarantees – The Big No-No!
When making ‘guarantees’ the ultimate business faux pas in ethical SEO is guaranteeing SEO rankings. This is not because 1st page rankings cannot be achieved but rather the back door tactics that are traditionally implemented when making the guarantee statement.

According to the Oxford dictionary, a ‘guarantee’ is:
“a formal promise or assurance, esp. that an obligation will be fulfilled or that something is of a specified quality and durability”

The intrinsic problem with most SEO guarantees made online is that expected ‘quality’ or ‘formal assurance of fulfilling an obligation’ is devoid in these guarantees. There is absolutely no element of customer value because the guarantee is driven by the notion of making an easy buck through the manipulation of the uninformed rather than fulfilling a value proposition.

Let me illustrate. Below is an example of an SEO ranking guarantee:
‘Submit Express will guarantee at least 20 top 10 rankings within 6 months across the major 15 search engines or your money back.’ (source)

What’s wrong with this you ask? 20 top 10 rankings across 15 search engines, that sounds pretty good! That is exactly the problem, it sounds good, but it’s not!

Let’s break up this statement – where are the loopholes?

‘will guarantee at least 20 top 10 rankings’

•    How do you know how valuable or competitive these keywords will be?
•    Are these long tail keywords for which your site may ALREADY rank?
•    How much valuable traffic will these keywords drive to your site?
•    What is the expected ROI on the traffic from these keywords?

‘across the major 15 search engines’

• First problem – there are ONLY 3 major search engines, they are referred to as the ‘Big 3’ or ‘Tier I’ search engines, they are:
- Google
- Yahoo!
- Bing

4th on the list is Ask.com, this engine actually has its own search engine and feeds other engines. The other search engines such as (AOL.com, iWon.com, EarthLink.com, DogPile.com, MyWay.com etc) feed their search results from the above four engines in some form or other.

For a clearer picture of market share, a July 2009 Hitwise report summarises the current market share picture:
Hitwise U.S. Search Market Share

In other words, In June 2009, Google was utilised for 74.04% searches performed by the sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.

The search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com) account for 98.63% of the total searches, leaving all the other search engines with 1.37% share for which to compete!

The final word: The above ‘guarantee’ will rank your site across 15 ‘major’ search engines, 11 of which account for 1.37% search engine market share for keywords whose value impact on ROI are questionable without further information.

For further insight on some of the shady practices used by certain businesses that guarantee rankings, check out this YOUmoz entry.

Guarantees like the one discussed, abound and it is primarily for this reason that reputable SEO firms don’t promise guaranteed search engine rankings.

Pay for Performance Guarantees
Success / performance based pricing or pay for performance (PFP) as this pricing model is often referred to works on the premise that the client will make certain payments based on the rankings / traffic / ROI that has been achieved. The exact model will vary from contract to contract but the premise remains that the client must see real traffic value before making any significant payments.

This model has its benefits for the uncertain client as it provides a safety net and minimises client risk. It is different from the straight ‘SEO ranking guarantee’ because it says: ‘If SEO company achieves X, client pays Y, but if X is not achieved, client does not pay Y.

The focus of the guarantee changes because the SEO provider is no longer guaranteeing SEO rankings (which in effect the SEO company cannot control) but rather guaranteeing its service.

What this says is this: ‘We (SEO company) are confident that you (the client) will be satisfied with our services. We (SEO firm) do not control rankings but we do control our own strategy and we are confident of our abilities. Thus, if we do not achieve the agreed to goals of meeting satisfactory SEO results, you (the client) do not make any payments.’

But what are Satisfactory SEO Results?
We’re back to that hitch! How do you know that the PFP terms & conditions are going to be in your (the client’s) favour? YOU DON’T! It is important to remember that PFP can also be manipulated to the advantage of the SEO firm rather than the client. It is not a panacea to avoiding SEO ranking guarantee scams.

It is for this reason that whatever SEO agreement you sign, you need to be sure that you understand the lingo, jargon, fine print and any other question marks on which you are unclear.

Any reputable SEO firm will explain exactly what the contract states and should, if asked, break down the terminology in such a manner that both parties are completely clear on what the agreement is really saying.

Pay for performance may work for some clients but not every SEO firm will offer these types of agreements. Why? Try saying to your lawyer that you’ll pay them when you’re happy with the level of service they are providing you!

So, stay away from SEO ranking guarantees, consider PFP if that rocks your boat but most of all, do your research, know what you’re signing and don’t be hoodwinked by online scammers!

Surely, if the No.1 Google position for a term like ‘office furniture’ is potentially worth millions of dollars, how on earth can this term be ranked in the top position for a few hundred dollars?

It can’t! Get used to it – reputable SEO is a resource intensive, high value, medium-to-high cost, long term investment! If you want to make millions from your rankings, cough up more than a few hundred bucks to achieve those positions!

Talking Standards at SEM Scholarship Contest 2009

Posted on June 26, 2009 by Marta Turek

This year I have decided to add my voice to the writers who have come before me and put forward a piece in the SEM Scholarship contest which is now in its 4th year!

On Thursday, the first round of entries were posted so the excitement of the competition begins!

My piece, Oh, That’s Right, We Don’t Need SEO Standards focuses on the continued lack of understanding that the ‘general public’ has of SEO. I take some stats from a closed study I did among service professionals to identify where some of the SEO misconceptions lie.

If more industry professionals enter the SEO standards debate, perhaps the industry itself will move forward in setting the benchmark service standards and definitions that we so desperately require.

Jump on, read the article, have your say. Take a moment to peruse the other entries – you may learn something new!

SEM Street Cred

An Objective Perspective

Category Archives: Industry Standards