Finally!  An SEO Approach That Makes You Money...

We manage Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM) for clients, including on-page optimization and off-page linking strategies.

While we will draw-up a plan and implement SEO for you, or coach you to learn to do it yourself, SEO is, frankly not the best way to market your business on the internet.  It's usually not the best way to get eyeballs on your  website, not the best way to win new customers.

In fact, what SEO services do, in most cases, is relieve clients of  more money than the traffic from the SEO is actually worth.

So - we'll do it for you, or tell you how to do it yourself, but all recommendations for SEO strategies are prefaced by this:

"If You Believe SEO Traffic To Your Website Is The Answer To Your Marketing Problems, You Are Dead Wrong!"

With such a sweeping statement there will be disagreement of course.  But for most small and local businesses SEO will only result in a trickle of traffic.  Furthermore, the qualities that make your website rank well for "keywords" and "keyphrases"  are not the sorts of words that will do the best job of selling your products and services.

Blame Google. 

The search engines are not designed for you to get free advertising.  SEO is in fact rather tedious, which makes it not free unless you do it yourself and value your time at zero  dollars per hour. 

A wholistic, integrated online marketing strategy for your business will include SEO elements, but it will include a dozen or more other sources of traffic which have nothing to do with Google "Page One" rankings whatsoever.

Google and other search engines are fickle as well.  One day you could rank number one for your prefered keyword, and the next
you could be on page ten and getting ZERO visitors.  It happens all the time.  Because search engine positioning is unpredictable,
it doesn't fit too well in with the notion of scientific advertising as I define it. 

A scientific advertising system is about devising ads and ways to get people looking at your ads that result in you making sales directly attributable to those ads.  This way of doing things allows testing and measuring - which leads to ongoing improvement and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Often business owners hear buzzwords and latch onto the idea that SEO is the way to "get our name out there"...

Well, OK.  So you spend dollars and time doing SEO and "getting  your name out there".

Then what?

Well, for one, once you've got your site ranked for a particular keyphrase you can assess whether doing all the work to rank for it was worth it in revenues.  You may find the traffic you are getting is not from people that want to buy your stuff... and furthermore, because your website is optimized to rank for that keyphrase it's an ineffective mess at turning those visitors into buyers.

Finally! An SEO Approach That Makes You Money...

There needs to be a middle ground - a way to fit SEO strategies  into a responsible marketing plan so you don't waste all kinds of time and money building a feeble website that gets a bunch of lookie-loos but doesn't win new customers for you... which is the
whole big idea about advertising.

You advertise to win customers.  Often the first sale is a break-even, but if you earn profits on it, all the better.  SEO is just one channel of advertising - and one that has lots of unpredictability and quirks in it.

People who don't know better sometimes believe that getting traffic to your website will get people coming to your store and buying stuff... or buying stuff off the website itself. 

Well, it won't - because traffic is only part of the equation.  It's what you do to "convert" that traffic into sales that really matters.

SEO can bring you measurable traffic - but the costs of optimizing your website to bring in the most traffic with SEO usually cripples the selling power of the site itself.   

For this reason internet marketers who know better emphasize creating advertising machines that turn dollars invested into more dollars in revenues, reliably.  That's a scientific way to approach growing your business.