The Big Wave Blog

The battle between search marketers and “marketing people” has been going on in meeting rooms across the globe. I have seen great businesses lose out to their competition on the web by listening to bad advice from their Marketing department or PR firm.

Here are the top ten signs that your website might be under the influence of traditional marketing types or ego-driven business owners:

1. The website has become an extension of someone’s ego instead of a source of revenue.
   Your website looks like a page from a fairy tale with animated unicorns and rainbows, but there is no content for the search engines or the website visitors to read. No matter how successful your brand is, you still have to deliver content. Bells and whistles will not deliver converting traffic or grow your business online.
2. You pick a domain based on “coolness” and not keywords.
   If you are launching a new business or product, this is a perfect opportunity for you to pick a strong domain name. Don’t pick something like www.imsocool.com because it’s catchier than www.yourproductnameandcityname.com. Keywords are everything!
3. You are more concerned with color than content.
   Its probably repeated by search marketers a million times that “Content is King.” You don’t have to over-optimize your content, but please step away from the color palette and focus on what the website visitors are really going to care about. You have less than 4 seconds to capture their attention, so stop trying to hypnotize them with color schemes and start writing content!
4. Your team thinks the SEO content is “too wordy.”
   Let’s be very clear here. If you plan to have less than 200-300 words on your web pages and still expect to rank for competitive keywords on the search engines, good luck! Don’t pay for optimization services and then throw the content away because it’s too wordy and not artful enough. SEO content writing is an art based on keyword research. It’s not supposed to sound like a marketing brochure, or the great American novel. Don’t do SEO because it is something all the cool kids are doing. Do it to use it!
5. Your website is very Flashy.
   If your website has an intro, or takes a long time to load, you probably have not taken the advice of an SEO or usability expert.
6. You have music playing on your website.
   If your prospective customer is quietly feeding money into your shopping cart at work, don’t repay her by blasting music that gets her in trouble with her boss!
   
7. Your website is loaded with Flash and JavaScript instead humble HTML.
   Optimizing Flash and JavaScript is possible, but only if you want to pay a lot of extra money. HTML may not be as glamorous, but it gets you a whole lot more bang for your buck.
8. You spent more on photography or print campaign than on your search marketing campaign.
   Don’t think of your search marketing company as a miracle worker, and don’t make them beg for scraps after you’ve paid for the TV commercials, fancy brochures, and high-paid PR design firms. Those high-priced items may give you status, but search marketing offers ROI.
9. Don’t use your gut to select SEO keywords.
   Business owners and marketing executives are the worst source of SEO keywords, because they think BIG. Searchers think SMALL and SPECIFIC.
10. You hear the words: “We don’t care about Google traffic” in your marketing meetings.
    Let’s face it: if you’re not getting Google traffic, your website is useless. Don’t bother making an expensive website if no one can find it.

Please feel free to share your own marketing war stories with me.

Please join us for our next local summit, being held in Indianapolis next Monday. Vikram and I will be presenting internet marketing basics and strategies to local business owners. Topics will include:

• creating a successful website
• implementing powerful search marketing strategies
• measuring your online results
• monitoring your online reputation
• maximizing your online revenue

It will be casual, informative and applicable to any business.

This seminar is the second in our series of local Internet Marketing Summits. Our Jacksonville audience had a great time and appreciated all the information they received. Read Jacksonville seminar reviews and more about the Indy Summit.

WHERE AND WHEN
Monday, June 23 10:00–11:30 am

The Monon Center
Conference Room West
1235 Central Park Drive East
Carmel, Indiana

We still have a few seats left… if you’ll be in town, send an email to suzanna@evisionworldwide.com to reserve a spot.

See you in Indy!

Jason Calacanis is no stranger to controversy or success.

Read about him and his latest project Mahalo, and you can see how well the man has done for himself. Mahalo seems to be going steady with its ambitious “Human Powered Search” approach. At Mahalo, your seach results are hand picked by editors instead of a seach algorithm.

Now let’s talk about the heated controversy he has generated at search engine marketing conferences with the following comments about SEO:

SMX Social 2008, Long Beach, CA: “SEO is a wasted industry. You’re wasting your time fighting off ranking problems instead of creating great content. You’re just spinning your wheels hoping the Google gods won’t kick you out. It’s a bad way to live your life. Using a human service is a better way to go about it.”

SES 2006, Chicago: “SEO is bulls#*t…90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesmen.”

The search marketing industry got all worked up about the comments. SEOs called for banning him from future conferences.The man must be a genius if he twice rattled all the SEO “professionals” to the extent that they wanted to keep him quiet.

Hey, don’t we have this freedom of speech in this country? In this industry? When did Jason Calacanis become a leader of a hate group that should be banned from speaking? The answer is: Never!

The truth is: what he said wasn’t anything I don’t think about myself, though not in exactly the same way. Here are my thoughts.

“SEO is bulls#*t.”

Is that true? Not always, but sometimes it is. Bulls#*t SEO is practiced by more people than you can imagine. Here is some SEO bulls#*t for you to consider:

• Agencies based out of nowhere and everywhere “Guaranteeing #1 placement” on Google for something like $299 per month
• Agencies advertising that they will submit your site to “300+ search engines for $2.39” or provide “100 guaranteed live directory one-way links in 4-5 days for just $25”
• Link farms & shady link building — the # 1 source of web spam now available to everyone with a website (Viagra, Cialis, Britney Spears, Male Enhancement anyone??)
• Agencies claiming to have “cracked,” or worse, to “own” the Google algorithm. Hear this, there is one company claiming to have the Pay Per Click Algorithm! This one just cracks me up. The sins people do in the name of the algorithm.

Why do these businesses even have any cash to market themselves? Simple: lack of education fuels the fire of ignorance! Google has made the rankings algorithm so mysterious and complicated that it is almost too easy to take advantage of all those website owners who have no idea what we’re talking about. In a situation like this, there is always a snake oil salesman ready to make a few dollars.

“SEO is a wasted industry. You’re wasting your time fighting off ranking problems instead of creating great content. You’re just spinning your wheels hoping the Google gods won’t kick you out. It’s a bad way to live your life. Using a human service is a better way to go about it.”

Let’s take a closer look.

• Waste of time — well, yeah! Look at the time and energy it takes to build links (spam & non-spam). What would happen if that time was spent creating more meaningful content instead? A cleaner worldwide web.
• The Google Gods — There is hardly any transparency when it comes to the unicorn named The Google Algorithm. We all (black, white and grey hats) put in a lot of energy to please the algorithm and generate rankings for our clients. Yet nothing can ever be guaranteed. You never know when you or your client may disappear from the front page of Google. Such volatility results in worshipping what Jason aptly called The Google Gods.
• Stress for everyone — The search industry is very stressful due to the SEO element. Sponsored listings are different: all agencies have an account manager in Google who we can call to discuss Pay Per Click. A lot more transparency here allows us to focus on improving clients’ ad groups, ad content, and keyword selection to reduce cost per acquisition. SEO, on the other hand, guarantees nothing. So all you have is a worried client, a worried SEO agency, and the constant fear of losing your ranking to some competitor who might use the back door (black hat) to sabotage your rankings. Fear= Stress = “Bad way to live your life!”

I am not a utopian that believes human powered search will clean up the web. Every great idea gets gamed in its lifetime; human powered search will have its issues once it reaches critical mass. A lot of factors are in play that make a very strong case for it, but only time will reveal the scalability of human powered search.

If we think the search marketing industry has it rough when Jason Calacanis says a few controversial lines, think of the medical industry that is thrown under the bus every day! Do the highly publicized medical errors and scams make us believe that all doctors are evil? No. Because the good ones continue to do practice the right way, irrespective of what people have to say about their industry.

Search engine marketing is a relatively new and little understood industry (at least in the “mainstream”), and obviously is very sensitive to comments from Jason. Banning anyone who speaks his mind is not a good idea. I do want to add a disclaimer that I am not a personal friend of Jason. I have never met the guy, so this is a voluntary moment of support for him. I guess I can consider this my Jerry Maguire memo moment, where I have said things a lot of us think about but don’t say out loud.

I hope I don’t get banned — I’ve already bought my ticket for SMX Seattle.

At Evision, we have a certain affinity for hotel clients. Collectively, we have a lot of experience with hotel management, revenue management, PPC and SEO. So we can run an online hotel marketing campaign like no one you’ve ever seen. This we know for sure. And the money we pull in for our hotel clients bears this out.

But lately, I’ve become a bit disillusioned with the hotel sector. In other industries—like retail, education, real estate—clients want only two things from us: a dedicated team they like and trust, and results that excite them. They are able to appreciate ROI. If we bring in $5k more in monthly revenue compared with a previous vendor, we are well worth an extra $500 in monthly fees. Hotels, by contrast, don’t seem to connect the dots between monthly marketing fees and monthly bookings. They are devoted to keeping “costs” down with no regard for returns. This seems unthinkable to those of us who truly appreciate the wonderfully trackable nature of PPC. Yet, there it is.

Size isn’t everything. Search marketing is young. It’s an industry that only becomes more powerful and effective as new, passionate agencies enter the scene. I’m not going to say that more established companies with larger payrolls don’t have quality work to offer. And I’m not saying go with the guy that incorporated 6 weeks ago in his basement. I am just saying that smaller, nimbler groups are often the ones trying new strategies, working day by day to fine-tune client campaigns. We are not automating bids or letting campaigns run on auto-pilot. We like the trenches and we are getting the best results. And in our case, out of sheer love of the game, we are giving spectacular customer service because the more we talk to our clients, the better we can refine their campaigns.

Basically, I think that Evision and its counterparts in the industry have a lot to offer. Is it a leap of faith for some clients to hire companies with less than 100 employees? Yes, apparently so. But I say it is well worth the risk.