SEO BY Dummies

We get emails and phone calls all the time from people wanting to sell web marketing services TO NeoNexus.  I also know that our customers receive them frequently as well.  While the message sounds good on the surface, if you dig into into, its all smoke and mirrors.   Let’s break this one down.  Here is the email I received this morning:
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Neonexuscorp.com Team,
I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting enough Social Media and Organic search engine traffic for neonexuscorp.com

1. Social profile is not available in top Social Media websites.

2. Your site has 97 Google back links, this can be improved further.

There are many additional improvements that could be made to your website, and if you would like to learn about them,
and are curious to know what our working together would involve, then I would be glad to provide you with a detailed analysis in the form of a
WEBSITE AUDIT REPORT for FREE.

Our clients consistently tell us that their customers find them because they are at the top of the Google search rankings. Being at the top left of Google (#1- #3 organic positions) is the best thing you can do for your company’s website traffic and online reputation.

Sounds interesting? Feel free to email us or alternatively you can provide me with your phone number and the best time
to call you.
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Best Regards,
Milda Jones
SEO Consultant

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PS1: This is onetime email and you may ask us to “REMOVE” you from our
mailing list.

PS2: I found your site from online advertising but did not click.

PS3: We operate 24 x7. I will be happy to send you links to price list,money back guarantee, client
rankings, client testimonials, “How we are different from others?”, and “Why should you choose us?” on receiving a response from
you.
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This is a case study in how NOT to email market.

1. They do not actually know how much traffic NeoNexus gets.  You can use tools to guess, but there is no way they actually know.  Therefore, they do not know if we are getting enough traffic or not, nor do they know if we are getting good quality traffic that converts or low quality traffic that does not.  Lie #1
2. Their statement that our “Social Profile” is not available in top social media sites is at best, vague, or at worst, meaningless.  Your “social profile” in Facebook is by design only available to your friends/fans, so its never “not available”.  For Twitter, all profiles are available to everyone if you search for them.  For LinkedIn, your profile is publicly visible if you want it to be.  So, where exactly are we “not available”?
3. Regarding our Google backlinks are 97, that is just a fabrication.  Here is a screen shot from Google Webmaster tools showing that we have over 80,000 links.  97 or 80,000; they were not even close.  Lie #2
4. They claimed they found our website by seeing an Adwords advertisement, but not clicking on it.  NeoNexus has done so well with organic optimization we have not run any Adwords campaigns for ourselves in two years.  Lie #3
5. They tell you to contact them for their Unique Value Proposition (USP) as to why they are better than others.  That’s a marketing no-no.  The USP needs to be in this email, not in a follow-up.  If they don’t understand email marketing, how well can they perform at web marketing?
6. If they had read our website, they would know that we implement search engine optimization ourselves, so they never even bothered to look at our website to research us.

Search engine optimization works IF you follow our procedure:

• Identify IF your target market is searching on-line.  If your product or service is unique, new, or very complicated, your prospects MAY not be looking on-line for you, and SEO/Adwords is not for you.
• If you target market IS online, how tough is the competition for different key phrases?  Going after broad phrases like “gerbil” may get you a lot of traffic, but they may not buy.  A longer tail phrase like “gerbil pet care” will get you a lot less traffic, but the conversion could be much higher.  The cost to go after longer tail phrases can be MUCH cheaper.
• How well do you currently rank for your keywords?  Its easier to push websites already on pages 2/3 to page 1 than it is to push a website on page 50 to page 1.
• If you are having trouble finding your proper SEO key phrases, Adwords can be used to do research quickly prior to starting an SEO campaign.
• Is your website ready for more traffic?  If yes, great, but if not, make sure it is ready to convert when new traffic arrives.

The bottom line is that SEO won’t work unless a client specific analysis is done.  Each client and each key phrase for each client have a unique web visibility profile.  If that analysis is not done, then you don’t know if you can succeed or what it will take to succeed.  Before spending your hard earned marketing dollars on any kind of web marketing, try to sort through the smoke and mirrors.