INTRODUCTION WHY LISTEN TO ME? My client paid us thousands of dollars in consulting fees to take a deep dive into the marketing program of their existing search firm and assess whether or not their high monthly bill was justified. The reality was that my client didn t know what the search firm was doing, or if what they were doing was working. Not only were the tactics outdated, AND they were grossly overcharging for the service they were providing, but we learned how difficult it was to leave, and the thousands of dollars of hidden costs a business would incur by leaving. We can save you thousands of dollars in costs. My client already paid for this work -- you don t have to make the same mistakes. 2
INTRODUCTION WHY IS THERE SO MUCH DISTRUST IN THIS INDUSTRY? There s a high chance you ve been burned by an SEO company or Internet marketing company in the past. If you haven t, chances are, you will unless you read this document FIRST. Want to know the biggest reason why the market is jam-packed full of snake oil salesman? THERE IS A LOW BARRIER TO ENTRY. That means anyone with a computer and a Gmail account can set up shop and start selling themselves as Internet marketing experts. It doesn t cost anything to get started in this business. There s no capital expenses and no infrastructure needed. Any technology you need can be rented and white labeled for just a few hundred bucks a month. We would say that the #1 complaint from businesses who have had an unpleasant experience with an SEO company or Internet marketing firm recently is: Have you heard things like: We can get you to the top of Google in just a couple of months OR We have a special relationship with Google to help you succeed CLICK HERE TO These high-pressure sales tactics don t work. Real search marketing takes time. It s like maintaining a garden. You have to constantly water it and prevent the weeds from taking over. There are no 'silver bullets'-- just lots of testing and hard work. 3
JAW-DROPPING FACT #1 TOP COMPLAINT YOU DON T OWN THE SYSTEMS WHAT THEY RE DOING Many Internet marketing firms, especially the large ones, are using proprietary content management systems to run your website. WHY IT'S WRONG The big guys make it easy and turn-key for them to set up your website, buy your domain, set up your chat it s all included! SOUNDS GREAT, RIGHT? But what happens when you want to leave? They said you could keep the site design, the content and everything else but they aren t going to help you take it out of their proprietary systems and put it into a new, easier-to-manage WordPress site. OUR ADVICE If you learn just ONE thing from this manifesto, if you take away just one piece of advice, let it be this: own all of your technology. What we mean by this is that it is crucial that YOU own and control the content system (like WordPress), the domain name, the chat software all of it. THE EXPENSIVE LESSON IT WILL COST YOU THOUSANDS TO MOVE IT UNDER YOUR CONTROL LATER DOWN THE ROAD. 4
JAW DROPPING FACT #2 TOP COMPLAINT KEYWORD-LOADED DOMAINS WILL SOON LOSE VALUE WHAT THEY RE DOING We re still seeing a lot of what s called exact-match domains, or domains loaded with keywords, like personalinjurysanantonio. com instead of the brand name or business name. WHY IT'S WRONG Data shows that the majority of searchers don t trust these types of domains, and they detract from the brand. The reality is that Google is over-compensating for a filter they have in place for certain types of brand-name searches. Type the word southwest into the search bar, and Google assumes you re looking for southwest.com. Type in nytimes and they assume nytimes.com. The same filter has been giving searches like personal injury attorney new york an edge by showing the domains which have those keywords. But this is changing - read how. OUR ADVICE Build your SEO strategy on a domain name that supports your brand name, and use the same domain in other marketing to avoid confusion with consumers. THE EXPENSIVE LESSON EXACT MATCH DOMAINS YOU LL BE SPENDING THOUSANDS MOVING AWAY FROM THESE IN THE COMING MONTHS AND YEARS AS THEY BEGIN TO LOSE VALUE. 5
JAW DROPPING FACT #3 LONG-TERM CONTRACTS HAVE HIDDEN FEES TOP COMPLAINT WHAT THEY RE DOING That long-term contract you signed was designed (and sold to you) in a way where you were able to get a fully-functioning website with all of the search marketing bells and whistles for a low monthly cost - for 12 or 24 months. What happens if it s not working? What if you re not happy? ANSWER: YOU'RE STUCK WHY IT'S WRONG Long-term contracts hold you hostage to the company. While it may be cheap and cost-effective now, it CAN turn into thousands of dollars of expenses later when you want to move. OUR ADVICE Pay for your website in cash possibly even from a separate provider. Ask your search marketing provider for a monthto-month arrangement where you can always back out if you need to. THE EXPENSIVE LESSON YOU LL SAVE THOUSANDS DOWN THE ROAD BY PAYING MORE UP FRONT IN EXCHANGE FOR OWNERSHIP AND FLEXIBILITY. AVOID LONG-TERM CONTRACTS THAT HANDCUFF YOU TO PROPRIETARY SYSTEMS. 6
JAW DROPPING FACT #4 LEAVING & STARTING FRESH TOP COMPLAINT THEY USE A PROPRIETARY CONTENT SYSTEM, AND THEY SET UP & OWN YOUR ANALYTICS & ADWORDS ACCOUNT. NOW WHAT? You ll need to set up a new website (in WordPress) and manually port every single page from the old site into the new infrastructure. There is no automatic way to do this; trust us, we tried. Plan on about $50-$100 per page of your website. If your search marketing firm set up your Google Analytics to begin with, they will likely be the Master Admin and you cannot remove them -- and from our experience, you ll practically have to beg to get your own Admin access. If your search marketing firm set up your Google AdWords account, they will generally not release all of the information to you. You will probably need to set up a new Google AdWords account and start all over again. Even if you got an export of all of the ads and keywords, you still need to set up a new account and port all of that information in. This could cost you another $1500 or more, and could have been avoided if you owned the account from the beginning. 7
JAW-DROPPING FACTS #5 #6 & #7 METRICS & ANALYTICS OVER-USE OF VANITY METRICS. The fact is most of the big search firms are using watered-down vanity metrics with their own version of an analytics software. The problem is that they don t actuallylet you drill down into anything meaningful, AND the datadoesn t correlate with Google Analytics very well. Demand that they use Google Analytics or some other analytics software that you are familiar with and have full access to. NO INTERNAL TRAFFIC FILTERS WERE INSTALLED. When we dug into the search metrics a little deeper, we discovered something alarming. Almost 30% of the traffic to the website that the search firm was claiming in their monthly report progress - was from internal office traffic! My client had a payment feature on his site that internal employees were using to process customer payments. This was inflating their numbers drastically. Excluding internal office traffic is easy and takes about 2 minutes if you have access to your Google Analytics account. OVEREMPHASIS ON VISITS AND PAGEVIEWS, AND NOT THINGS LIKE BRANDED VS. NON- BRANDED TRAFFIC. If your rep is praising last month s results based on more visits and pageviews, you need to dig a little deeper. Metrics like visits and pageviews are what we call vanity metrics. It sounds nice when they increase, but for the most part, they are meaningless. If you want to know if your SEO strategy is really working or not, look at the top 20 keywords that drive traffic to your website. You should be able to find it easily in your monthly report, or even Google Analytics. Branded traffic are visits that come in from searches that include your company's name. This is an indication that the searcher was already aware of you when they searched. Nonbranded traffic are visits that do not include your company's name. These are folks who did not know you before, and now have your firm as part of their consideration set. The goal of your SEO campaign is to have your non-branded traffic exceed branded traffic figures. In the case of my client, his branded traffic comprised 98% of the traffic he was getting.would you say his SEO was working? 8
JAW DROPPING FACT #8 PROPRIETARY SYSTEMS THEIR CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS) IS TOO BASIC AND LOCKED DOWN. Sure, for most business owners, this makes sense. Give the client a tool to manage basic elements, but lock most of it down so they don t break it. However, Internet marketing involves the use of a lot of tools and 3rd party scripts in order to identify opportunities, or turn your visitors into leads more effectively. There is likely no visible place to install scripts for things like heat maps, call tracking or other analytics tools without going through your rep. And it could take days or weeks to get what you want installed. THIS IS INSANITY IT IS YOUR WEBSITE, AND YOU PAID FOR IT! GET FULL ACCESS TO YOUR SITE TODAY, AND GET THE ABILITY TO INSTALL OTHER TOOLS TO HELP YOU SUCCEED! 9
JAW DROPPING FACTS #9 & 10 CONTENT A LOT OF THE CONTENT YOU RE PAYING FOR IS SYNDICATED ON SOMEONE ELSE S WEBSITE. BOTTOM LINE: If you re paying for content most if not ALL of that content should reside on your website. Content syndication is one way to build external links to the website. However, most of the sites being syndicated are not bringing in referral traffic, and have been penalized by Google s 2011 Panda update. This is an example of an outdated tactic that the "big" Internet marketing firms have not been able to change and update their processes - and you are suffering. THE BLOG AND THE BLOG CONTENT ARE ON A DIFFERENT DOMAIN NAME. The purpose of the blog and blog content is to provide keyword-rich content on your website around the areas of practice that you offer. With enough content targeting the right keywords, you should be able to a) increase traffic to the website; and b) increase the domain authority and trust of your primary domain. In the case of my client, their search firm set up separate domain for the blog and did not post the content to the primary domain, providing little SEO benefit to the primary domain (with the exception of a few backlinks). This is not an optimal SEO solution, and is clearly a sales strategy for the search firm to coerce their clients into setting up more websites (that they control), diluting the overall effectiveness of any SEO campaign. 10
WHAT'S NEXT? HOW TO UN-HANDCUFF YOURSELF C L I C K H E R E TO LEARN MORE FOLLOW THESE 11 STEPS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM THE BIG FIRM AND TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR WEBSITE AGAIN STEP 1 GET YOUR IT GUY IN THE ROOM STEP 2 FIND A GRAPHIC DESIGNER STEP 3 FIND A WORDPRESS DEVELOPER STEP 4 SEE WHO CONTROLS THE DOMAIN NAME STEP 5 TAKE INVENTORY OF YOUR WEBSITE STEP 6A GET YOUR DESIGNER GOING STEP 6B START SETTING UP A HOST ENVIRONMENT STEP 9 BEGIN PORTING OVER YOUR CONTENT STEP 7 BEGIN TRANSFERRING YOUR REGISTRAR BEGIN SLICING AND BUILDING WORDPRESS STEP 10 CHANGE THE DNS STEP 8 CUSTOM THEME & POST TYPES. STEP 11 301 REDIRECTS FOR OLD SITE PAGES CONTACT US FOR HELP WITH STEPS 2-11 1.888.427.2178 INFO@PEARANALYTICS.COM 11