FAQs
- What education and/or training do you have that relates to your work?
By being an active member to two totally different mastermind groups I'm able to maintain exactly what is happening right now in the ever changing SEO industry. Search engine optimization is really just a game of cat and mouse. On the one hand you have the search engines. Their primary focus is selling advertising by auctioning off to the highest bidder search terms that searchers use to find what they're looking for. They have to include organic search results for their listings in order to keep a degree of authenticity to their results pages and they each compete with other search engines for searchers. If they thought they could get away with it I'm sure they would simply develop pages with nothing but paid listings. The problem with that is there have been studies that show the vast majority of searchers do not click on advertisements. Why should they. For the most part people don't like ads. They want the most relevant organic content delivered for their search. Having said that, what all search engines have in common is they do not tolerate an artificial manipulation of their search results, which is what they consider SEO is by default. So they develop complex algorithms that pick up on artificial looking footprints created by SEO's that lead back to your site in an effort to lend more authority thereby giving it higher page rank. Bottom line, if you hire the wrong SEO work done, your site stands a good chance of getting penalized. Here in lies the reason staying on top of what's going on in this industry. It's not a luxury but a requirement. The only way to keep up is to belong to mastermind groups of the most knowledgeable and experienced SEOers the world has to offer and that's exactly what I do.
- What advice would you give a customer looking to hire a provider in your area of work?
More website traffic in certain cases does not mean more website revenue if your site is lacking missing parts. Does your website have an inviting page structure? Does it have great written sales copy? Is there problems going on off line with your sales conversions or perhaps under trained staff, or a lack of a great off line sales script? Things to watch out for: 1). Firms that offer blanket priced SEO or low prices. No two businesses are alike and each have different goals and markets they are going after. For example, a local business going after local search terms would never be charged as much as a national company going after a global market. Think about it, do you really believe that someone could earn your online business an extra $20,000 or $100,000 per month by charging you $150 a week? That's less than what a fast food burger flipper makes part time! 2). Learn who the best firm is in your area by doing a Google search. Google actually tells you who the best in the industry is with their search result pages in your particular area. Type into a Google search box "lynnwood seo" and you'll see who's at or near the top. Note also multiple listings on that page making sure we're not one hit wonders. 3). Just because someone works around computers doesn't mean they know anything about search engine optimization. The biggest mistake business owners make is they assume their web development team or IT guys know something about SEO, 97% don't have a clue. Of course they're interested in their own job security and don't want you to know that they don't know how to get it done because if they did your website would already be producing the revenue and already be ranked very high and getting the organic traffic you desire. 4). Make sure that Search Engine Optimization or Internet Marketing Consulting is their full time profession. This is a lucrative business and a consulting business that generates an additional $20,000 per month is not going to get done by someone who's purchased some $97 business in a box kit working at it part time to supplement their full time occupational income. 5). Make sure none of the work done on your website is outsourced to a 3rd party. Make sure that the search engine optimization done on your business website is done by an employee of that firm. It's always good to know who's doing work on your website.
- What questions should customers think through before talking to professionals about their project?
That everything we do takes a certain amount of time and sometimes there are instances when a task you are trying accomplish takes way more time than you expected.