Do You Need an SEO Pro?

About the same time the internet went public I got my first website for my business. I did the same thing as everybody else. I built a website and waited for the orders to roll in. Unfortunately it never works like they show on the commercials. Customers never just find a website.

So I took on a second job so I could afford to advertise. Online advertising was not yet available so advertising meant yellow page ads. Since my product is one I can sell to the world I wanted to be in every phone book on the planet. Since even with two jobs I could not afford that I had to concentrate on the bigger cities in the United States. It was not long before my monthly yellow page bill was ten thousand dollars.

With an average annual business volume of 250 thousand it seemed I was working just to pay for advertising. Still business was growing.

Then on line advertising began. First Yahoo had Overture. I started to switch some of my yellow page ad money to my on line budget. As the internet began to be the place people would look for stuff my on line ads began to produce more results than the yellow pages did. Even though online ads were in their infancy they did better.

The reason why is painfully simple. Almost every big city in the country has several different phone directories. Maybe in your city Yellow Book does a great job. They may have a great staff that really gets out their and gets ads from every business. Maybe in your town they do the best job of making the yellow pages extremely user friendly. They might have a coupon section that people in your area really look forward to. Maybe when the other phone books show up people just toss them.

If you have to pick a book to advertise in and you do not have the luxury of traveling to every city you want to hit with advertising you really have no way of knowing which book in which city is going to bring the results. Every book you publish in is a year long commitment. You have to pick a publisher and start adding books as you can afford it. Track which areas are bring in enough business to continue or switch that ad money to a new area as a new book opens up. Every month there would be about a dozen books closing and a dozen more up for renewal.

In my area there is a small independent directory publisher that just knocks the socks off the phone companies directory. If this is true in your city and you advertise across the country like I do you just have to understand that in some places you are going to pay for an ad in a phone book that nobody is ever going to look at. When the book you put your ad in gets delivered, every household in some areas is just going to toss that into the recycling bin. So you put in your ad, track it for a year and find out you just wasted several hundred dollars. Oh well.

But like I said the on line ads began to turn more profit so I phased out the Yellow page ads and within a year I had switched my whole ten grand per month to on line ads. When Google Adwords came out I switched about half my budget to that avenue. Before long my business began to move forward from 250 thousand per year to 500, then 750. As I was able to put more money into ads my volume went up. Soon I was like a drug addict. If a little is good then a lot must be better. If I wanted more business I just needed to pay more money for advertising.

My monthly advertising budget was now a average 50 thousand dollars per month. Half my monthly business volume was going directly to Google. I had my own personal Google Adwords consultant. I could call them anytime. True I am in a competitive market but if you are in business you are too. Yes my actual business volume was going up. However when I checked out how many people where clicking on ads verses how many orders were actually coming in I was deeply distressed.

I asked my personal Google representative how to get a higher percentage of buyers they told me I was getting a higher conversion rate than most advertisers do at three to five percent. That means that if you own a brick and mortar store, and you stood outside and paid people to go in to your store, you should be happy if only five out of one hundred buy something.

My most common question was how do I get better results with the native or natural search for my terms? I was paying over half a million dollars per year to Google in advertising. I get Christmas presents from Google every year but nobody at Google could tell me how to get better native search results. I was always looking for the company that could get me higher in the search results. What I found was a lot of companies that would take my money and set up door way pages, cram my website with meta tags and keywords. All of which had little or worse a negative effect in my rankings.

So I went back to the drawing board. Do you know that this is a truly exciting time. No college class can teach this stuff. By the time it was printed in a text book the data would be obsolete before the ink is dry. Truly it is changing that fast. What I found that in order to stay on top of the search engine optimizing I had to be devoted to it full time.

Yes you really can do it yourself. You should expect to spend at least a year studying what works and what does not. And that just gets you started since it is an ongoing pursuit in a developing field. However you have to decide how much time you can take away from your business and devote to studying Search Engine Optimization. Then you get to try to implement that on your website. But this is like living in Monopoly Land. If you make a mistake you get to suffer a drop in business volume that in today's economy may take months to recover from. Or worse, some of the information out there can actually get you banned from Google.

In a board game losing is no big deal. Getting booted from Google when ninety percent of your business income comes from being there is not acceptable. If you got into business to make a profit and you do not have time to play around learning this stuff on your own, call me. If you want some one else to handle this so you can get back to managing your business, call me.