Today’s sales reps making telephone-based internet marketing cold-calls take varied approaches, some pitch content creation and article marketing, while others advocate link building, Google + Local (aka Google Places Page) optimization or Google Adwords Campaigns. We’re often asked by concerned clients whether the call a client received was something they should take advantage of in conjunction with our services and sometimes have even had a shadow of doubt cast on the quality of the services they are currently receiving. The sales pitch often leads with a shining compliment, and then voices a serious concern about the client’s current online position or strategy. For example, “I did some research on local dry cleaners and saw that you have some of the area’s top ratings, but then I was surprised to find that you are not ranking well for many of the most important search keywords which is costing you a lot of business.” This money-issue is an effective hot-button to push with a prospect for obvious reasons. A persuasive sounding pitch about the vastly confusing topic of internet marketing and a great price tag can often sound so enticing you want to try it just to find out if it can be true. Faced with the daunting task of trying to understand internet marketing, most business-owners simply don’t have the time. Take a look around the internet you will find a myriad of sources with often conflicting advice. The recommendations are frequently oversimplified or just plain vague. For example, “you need to build links” or “you need a social media presence”. These easily gleaned “nuggets of vague goodness” are not generally untrue, but are not so easy to turn into actionable strategies. The road to action is so vague that one would be unlikely to affect much positive change without spending a lot of research time getting a true in depth understanding of the concepts and techniques. Once those concepts are learned, to be truly effective they then need to be coupled with the real world trial and error of experience employing the actions and getting both positive and (at time) unintended or downright poor results. Not to mention, many internet marketing techniques walk a perilously thin line between “gains” and “pitfalls” such as the concept of greyhat vs whitehat linkbuilding and the potential wasted spend of poorly managed pay-per-click campaigns which easily leads to negative ROI. These are topics that you could write entire books on today only to tear up the books next year to write new ones according to developments which have rendered last year’s information as outdated and of limited usefulness.

The best answer I can give to the question of whether the claims made by these phone-based cold-calls are true is, “well, yes and no”. Yes, some of the information is true, and yes some of the companies calling you may be legitimate companies offering valuable services. And, no some of the companies calling you are going to say virtually anything to get you to buy and then knowingly provide something of little or no value in exchange. With the explosive growth in the internet marketing industry unfortunately the “gold-chain wearing used car salesmen” have moved in amongst the honest service providers. It can be difficult to know what’s real and who is lying or exaggerating. A cliché, but very valuable rule of thumb applies here. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Here is one example of a sales pitch anyone should question along with some red flasgs to be on the lookout for. A client reported a salesperson called claiming they could rank them on the top of page 1 of Google guaranteed for $199/month within one month. Sounds really good right?

Red Flag #1 – A guaranteed ranking. No agency can proudly make this guarantee; none of us are THAT good. Google just switches things up too much for anyone to promise a specific ranking.

Red Flag #2 –Price, sounds too good to be true. A non-“Micro Agency” claiming to offer a customized service at such a low price is dubious. We strongly believe that only very small agencies, what we would call “micro agencies”, (agencies with a maximum of 2-3 employees and minimal overhead), can really afford to service accounts at low small business price points with anything more than a very generic “set it and forget it” strategy. Common small business price points of ($250-$400/month) are not economically feasible for larger scale agencies when you consider the cost of the service labor each month, need to cover sales force overhead, and need to have a reasonable remaining profit.

Red Flag #3—Claim (rather suspiciously) omits critical details. What does “top of page 1 mean”? Are they referring to paid search ads (Adwords) or the top of the normal (organic/unpaid) search results and for what (and how many) specific keywords? When asked usually clients usually have not been given this needed information. Such poorly explained offers usually indicate the shady salesmanship needed to hide the one-dimensional nature and often quite limited ROI of many of these low-priced service offerings.

Admitted, my view of the situation is a bit cynical. Unscrupulous agencies are preying on businesses that will eagerly sign-up and perceive they are getting valuable internet advertising. These agencies know most businesses have no reliable system for tracking the source of leads or the ROI of any particular advertising channel. In other words, they are banking on the fact that a certain number of clients will not cancel since they will never realize that they are receiving nothing, or virtually nothing in exchange for their advertising dollars.
How can a business get some assurance that the agency is offering an honest service that is likely to produce a true return on the investment? Try checking references of current clients, as well as taking an hour or two to educate yourself about the service you are purchasing. You can’t learn internet marketing in an hour, but you can at least gain a cursory knowledge of the service you are purchasing so you may be better positioned to make an informed purchase decision.

What’s the moral of the story? Do your homework and ask questions. Don’t take any claim at face value, and expect any agency you purchase services from to provide at least some type of reports or metrics that demonstrate they are affecting some change for your business’s position within the confusing internet marketing ecosystem. If you notice a positive change in the leads you are receiving from the internet that is obviously a great sign. We also coach clients to expect that a good agency will be able to obtain gradual improvement in results over the first year of service, which at some point will reach a plateau stage where many or most of the possible exposure has been obtained through the achieved gradual improvements and continued work on the campaign will produce more of a maintenance effect than one of improvement. All expectations must of course be weighed in relation to spend, as $100/month only buys a “lemonade stand” not an intensive marketing campaign.

There are four basic areas we will cover here that you should look at on a Technical SEO Audit.  (These areas certainly don’t cover everything—hardly! But they are a good start in terms of some important areas you should be reviewing.) 

1. Broken inbound and outbound links
Broken links, both external and internal, inbound and outbound are bad news since they render a website less usable, and search engines do not like that idea. Not to mention any search traffic or links that would have referred to pages are now dead ends and that is bad news. When removing or moving pages on your site is important to use 301 redirects to tell the search engines or referring website where the page or resource has been relocated to. Excessive broken links can definitely hurt your SEO, as well as your site’s user-experience not to mention that hard earned link juice may go right out the window if you fail to redirect it using a 301 redirect. A technical SEO audit should pull a report of the links to and from your site and verify they are valid, and if not replace them or 301 redirect them.

2. Duplicate content
This is a big one, duplicate text content (whether it is duplicated on your site, or between your site and any other site on the internet raises a red flag with Google and the other search engines.  The search engine algorithms don’t like duplicate content and have ways of filtering out content that is a duplication of content that existed somewhere else first. Often site owners post written content that they have cut and pasted from other websites. This is bad for SEO, as instead of creating rich content that Google will love, they are creating content that Google basically sees as “webspam”. Sometimes there are innocent technical issues that create duplicate content such as having both homepage.com and homepage.com/default (which sometimes happens when you create a new site).  Often site owners create a decent website, but fail to do very simple things like creating unique title tags and meta descriptions for their pages which can hurt their site’s SEO.

3. Link Profile Review
One critical part of a Technical SEO audit is to perfom a review of the links pointing to a website, aka “link profile or link portfolio”.  Post-Penguin, we care more about quality of links although both quality and quantity both remain important in terms of what is getting SEO results. Looking at the link profile of your site and competitor’s sites can help you understand what links you currently have as well as provide link opportunity insights. In a link profile for a local business, we like to see a mix of both citations and links. Citations are a mention of your business, often with the address, phone #, etc. and are an important ranking factor for the Google Local results. Links should come from a variety of sources, such as trusted local resources like review sites, the local Chamber of Commerce, local groups or organizations, or other local businesses.

When analyzing your link portfolio be on the lookout for:
- link exchanges
- hidden links
- links in blog networks (many of which were deindexed by Google)
- paid links (buy 1000 links for $29.99 today, etc.)
- any other sort of “spammy” links

4. Review your Anchor Text
This is another big one, and was a major cause of a lot of recent penalties from the Google updates. In your SEO Audit you should look at the anchor text profile used in the site’s inbound links to make sure it looks “natural”. Old-fashioned SEO strategy (what used to work), was to create many inbound links with the exact anchor text you wanted to rank for. For example, a site that had SEO done might have 500 links to it that all say “albuquerque mortgage lender”. When the updates hit this past year, many of these sites which had been ranking well were penalized so badly they no longer appear near the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). In the current climate, what is working is a diversified anchor text profile, using a proportion of exact match keywords combined with brand links, naked URL links, variations of keywords, and random text like “click here”.

A good Technical SEO audit is something that should be done periodically on any website, especially one that is having problems with its rankings. In the current chaos of Google updates every few months, Google will continue to keep us guessing and reacting. But it is important to try to understand the current best practices and penalty factors so that your site can continuously be adapted.

Manual Search Engine Penalties

Here’s a quote from Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s anti-spam team, “Google’s definition of a ‘penalty’ is when manual action is taken against a site.” A “penalty” is when a real human being employed by Google takes a manual action to de-rank a website. One of the most newsworthy examples of Google placing a manual penalty on a website was last year’s  J.C. Penney paid links scandal. JC Penney was at the top of page 1 for “Samsonite carry-on luggage” (even ahead of the official Samsonite website!). After the penalty was applied, they dropped to number 71. There is a reconsideration form that website owners can submit after they believe they have cleaned up the problems with the site, although it is unclear how much the reconsideration form will actually speed up the reconsideration process.

Google Algorithm Changes

A website that is affected negatively by an algorithm change is not the same as a manual penalty. In this situation, a Google employee has not taken a manual action to penalize your website due to either a Policy violation or a perception that your site is not worthy of ranking highly for a particular keyword. Google’s “Penguin” and predecessor “Panda” updates were algorithm updates that impacted a lot of sites de-ranking them. Why? With regard to Penguin, the penalty appears to have gone mostly after over-optimized anchor text and hit sites hard that had link profiles full of high percentages of exact match anchor text. For a website to rebound from the negative ranking effects caused by a new algorithm update, website owners should try to remove any spammy tactics (i.e. keyword stuffing, link buys from shady places, lin exchanges, blog networks, keyword cloaking, etc). Periodically Google re-crawls each website and re-ranks everything. Hopefully, after removal of any shady onsite tactics the site’s rankings will improve. Onsite tactics can be easy to remove, offsite tactics such as extensive numbers of shady links etc can be very difficult to remove, in fact some even recommend starting over with a new domain when hit with one of these heavy penalties and offsite factors are believed to be the culprit. Why do you need to understand the differences between the two types of penalties? One reason is that when your website is affectedby an algorithm update you should not submit a reconsideration request after changing any items on the site believed to be causing the penalty. If you submit such a request, you are likely to get this message in your Webmaster Tools account:

“We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site’s ranking in Google. There’s no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site’s ranking. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes

to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users”

Wow, probably not a good idea to draw Google attention in this way unless everything you do is a shining example of Google’s best practices. When you have been affected by an algorithm update all you can do is tweak the site, then sit back and wait for the site to be re-crawled and re-ranked which generally will not take too long. These recrawls are not on any set schedule, so it could be days or weeks before this automated re-ranking happens.

If you have no clue how your site offended the Google algorithm and don’t want to try to figure it out yourself you can consider hiring a qualified agency to review the site. A good agency will be able to review the website for any black or grey hat SEO tricks that could have caused a penalty (either manual penalties or from an algorithm update).

A properly optimized website with a high ranking on a SERP (search engine results page)  is an awesome way to provide brand visibility and send traffic to your website. But, some searchers may be cautious if they have not heard of your of your brand or business already. This trust factor is why other marketing efforts (even offline) and SEO should go hand in hand. An organic listing will serve as a reminder when searchers are looking for what your products or services. Even when you are listed in the top 5 on a SERP (search engine results page), if the searcher has never heard of you but vaguely recognizes your competitor’s brand or business name, they are often more likely to click on the competitor’s listing, even if you outrank them.

So, it is important to combine other marketing initiatives along with your properly designed SEO strategy. Each type of marketing media has its place in the strategy. Each touchpoint works together to accurately brand a business in the customer’s mind. That’s why it’s important to have a well-rounded marketing strategy working for you to attract different audiences that are at different stages in the buying cycle. Traditional marketing methods such as direct mail and trade show marketing can lead to social media followers, or email newsletter subscribers. Then, even if they don’t convert to sales immediately, that doesn’t mean that the brand wasn’t recognized and reinforced. When they finally need what you offer, and conduct a search, your highly placed organic listing will communicate trust. A well-rounded marketing campaign that target audience members in different ways, while conveying the same brand image and tone consistently, will augment and boost SEO efforts thus resulting in the most-powerful overall marketing campaign possible.

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