Search Engine Optimisation

SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, is one of many strategies you use to promote your Web site. After you create products and services worth buying, plus a build a Web site worth visiting, search engine optimisation is the next critical step, but not the ten secrets steps the SEO specialists sell, you need a real SEO strategy.

Generic service

SEO is typically provided as a generic service. Note how many SEO consultants fail to ask the right questions about your business. They usually grab hold of a small number of potential search terms and track your site performance with those terms, terms that they know they can easily improve because there is no strong competition. Generic SEO might get you to page ten of Google results but nobody looks past page three.

There are a million SEO consultants offering the generic service and their work will eventually push your generic SEO entry back to page 100 in Google results because there are so many sites doing the same things as your site. If SEO were that easy, all 100 million Web sites, with their 6 billion Web pages, would be on page 1 of the Google results.

You need something specific from someone with experience in your type of business.

Use what you already do

Some SEO consultants research your business before visiting you and most do it to work out how much they can charge you. Good SEO should not be expensive and the bulk of the work should be what you already do. Your work product is one of the critical ingredients. It is the chilli that SEO consultants leave out of the curry. Your creativity, expertise, and uniqueness are the cornerstones of your business plus the chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla of the Neapolitan mix that is SEO ice cream.

Whoa! Ice cream? Strawberry? Why the funny references? Well, ice cream is something that does not work unless everything is right. Too little of this and you get ice. Too much of something and you get flavoured milk. None of the ingredients in ice cream are expensive yet getting the ingredients to work as ice cream seems like magic. When you succeed the magic seems simple.

How much should you pay?

You might not want to cook for yourself. You might want to pay someone else to cook for you and to SEO for you. one critical thing is to understand what is happening and what you pay for. Buying food in restaurants is easy because we are used to buying food and there are too many restaurants competing in the same market for them to overcharge by a large amount for a long time. Unlike dining out, SEO is new to most people and they just do not know what to pay.

One SEO consultant quotes $60 per hour, another $6000 per day, and neither has experience with your market or your type of business. They try to lock you into long term contracts. They use the same sales techniques as used car sales people and the sales people in discount furniture shops. If they try to rush you into anything, just say no. Look for a SEO strategy that fits with and is in proportion to your existing business plans.

Horse racing

Here is an analogy you might have experienced. You go to the horse races because it is the Melbourne Cup or some other fancy social event. Someone offers you a tip then asks for a share of your winnings when the horse wins. There are 30 horses in the race, they offer 30 people an exclusive a tip on each horse then rush to the winner, ignoring the 29 people who lost.

These people do not know who will win, they just know how to make money by signing up a lot of customers then charging big fees from whoever is lucky.

You will get a lot of SEO consultants approaching you with the same strategy. I get about two per day. Most do not know what my business is, what my goals are, or the purpose of my Web sites, yet they guarantee certain victory in the SEO war, and they offer the same victory to all of the millions receiving their marketing email.

More than luck

SEO success is more than luck. You do have to work. Fortunately the hard part is work you are already doing. There is little additional work to convert your special talent, product, or service, to something with real SEO value. You just have to know how. If you live in Sydney, Australia, help is on hand.

Outside Sydney

Okay, you may live outside Sydney. Real effective long term SEO is a little more expensive because you have to fly me over there. Not a problem. Get together nine other businesses that do not complete against you and we can talk face to face. You pay only one tenth the cost. Talk about cheap.

Outside Australia? That is pushing it. You could cheat if you have a ski field nearby. Buy myself and my wife the air fare, accommodation, and a week long pass to the chair lifts then pay my basic fee and we can run a workshop on site.

Work, work

SEO becomes harder every day. There are twice as many Web pages competing against you every year. There are ten times as many SEO experts helping your competitors compete against you every year. You do have to keep up the good fight but there is good news.

Good SEO success is cumulative. The generic SEO activity is not cumulative, it is only temporary, and disappears within days when you stop paying. True SEO success grows on itself the way the trees in a forest thrive on the mulch from their own leaves and the droppings of all the creatures attracted into the forest by the trees. Good SEO is holistic and long term.

Work, play

A good SEO strategy adds fun you your working day. Perhaps I can speak about fun at your next conference and help you enlist your workforce into playfully contributing to your SEO strategy.

Play, play

Your target is to reach the critical point, tipping point, insert marketing catchphrase here, where you gain the momentum, leadership, or become the reference point in your market. You then get to play a lot more than you work. One of my books reached that point for six months and if I was not bored with writing at that point, I could have cornered a market for several years. Make sure you reach the play stage doing something that you will enjoy for a long time.

Contact me for more details on how you can turn SEO work into play.