SEO is only getting more complicated. As a website owner, it’s hard to balance all the aspects of your Internet Presence and often, SEO can be a major time sink and constant source of concern. You’re plagued by questions like, “Which updates will have the greatest SEO impact for my site? Which Google algorithm updates do I need to worry about?” When someone comes along and says, “Hey, I can take care of all of this for you,” it’s easy to just say yes and shove another item off your plate.

Unfortunately, not everyone who’s offering SEO services has your website’s best interest at heart. SEO scammers know that most site owners have only a basic knowledge of SEO, and they’re looking to take advantage of this. Here are a few tips to avoid shady SEOs.

1. Unsolicited Email

Every website owner has seen their fair share of these. It might be sent through a contact form on your site or through a direct email, but the message is always the same – vague promises about improving your website.

Professional SEO companies do not randomly send spam emails looking for new clients. They follow the same marketing tactics that you do – email campaigns, customer referrals, blog posts, online advertising, and of course, SEO.

An unsolicited email should be an immediate red flag. Mark as spam and move on.

2. Guaranteed Rankings

You might come across something like, “We guarantee your site will rank #1 for XYZ.”

There are a couple things to dispute here. First, no one can really guarantee a ranking for anything. Search algorithms are so amazingly complex that making a promise about the outcome is absurd.

Second, SEO isn’t really about rankings. Rankings are simply an intermediary step in the process. SEO is about driving quality traffic to your site through search engines. Ranking #1 for a keyword doesn’t mean anything unless that keyword has the ability to bring traffic to your site.

So, when you start hearing promises, ask yourself if ranking for XYZ is really going to provide any benefit.

3. The Details of Their Service Are a Mystery

With so many uninformed website owners out there, I think it’s an SEO’s duty to be very transparent. Any SEO company worth its weight in search results should be able to explain the details of their services. If they are building links for you, they should be able to tell you what kind of links they are building and the basics of how they will go about obtaining those links. If they are making updates to your site, they should be able to explain what they are changing and why they are changing it.

However, don’t expect full disclosure. Every SEO company has proprietary information that they won’t share with you, but they should be able to explain their services with enough detail to make you feel comfortable.

4. Search Engine Submission

This one’s a classic. Back in the ‘90s, websites had to submit their pages directly to search engines. This went out the door in the early 2000s when search engines developed the ability to crawl links and start indexing sites on their own. Search engine submission is 100% unnecessary and is something you definitely shouldn’t be paying for.

NOTE: Don’t get this confused with local SEO, which requires submitting your business information to Google Places, Bing Local or Yahoo Local, or with sitemaps which are submitted to search engines via Webmaster Tools as a best practice.

5. Unrealistic Prices

You get what you pay for. If someone offers to build links for $50, you’re going to get $50 worth of useless links. SEO for a small business should cost around $300 – $1000 per month. Prices can vary based on the scope of the service or the competitiveness of your vertical.

There isn’t really an upper limit to SEO spending. A medium-size business could easily spend $5,000 on some quality work, while very large businesses might spend tens of thousands each month.

How to Avoid the Scams?

Most SEO scams are built to take advantage of a lack of knowledge, so the best way to combat them is by informing yourself. If you feel absolutely clueless about SEO, the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide is a great place to start.

If you already have the basics covered, start reading SEOmoz’s blog posts or check out their Q&A Forum to dig into some more advanced topics.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t going looking for an SEO company. They are many reputable agencies and consultants out there that can do wonders for your site. If you are unsure about any company or don’t know where to start, just ask us! We spend time learning SEO so you don’t have to, and we’re happy to make recommendations.

You might also find it helpful to familiarize yourself with the SEO services covered by Pronto so you don’t end up paying an outside consultant for something we already have under control.

Tim Kelsey,
SEO & Social Media Manager

Bump in Visits from Organic Search Showcases Importance of Business Listings Identity Management

Sterling, Va. (January 30, 2012) – Localeze, a Neustar service and a trusted business listings identity management provider for local search, today revealed the success of its partnership with channel client Pronto Marketing, an Internet Presence Management provider for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). Through this partnership, Pronto Marketing revealed that clients using Localeze’s business listings identity management solution over a 90-day period received more than 30 percent more visits to their web sites from organic local search traffic than clients that did not.

Read More…

Questions? Read: How to Update Your Subscription Preferences

The next super important thing you can do to ensure that the content Pronto delivers to your blog each week is right on target, is to join the discussion in the Pronto IT Services & MSP Content & Blog Discussion forums.

Pronto’s Managing Editor, Barb Levisay and I are actively involved with clients in sharing and developing ideas for new blog articles. You can shape the content on your website with your active participation in these forums.

More White Papers in 2012

In the Pronto IT Services & MSP Content & Blog Discussion forums, you’ll see: Forum White Paper & Copy Ideas & Discussion. We have a few open discussions on new white paper topics including Cloud Services, BDR and Business Continuity Planning. We’d love to have your feedback so we can deliver new white papers you can really use.

Don’t wait – update your preferences and join in the fun by visiting these forums. Let’s make 2012 the best year ever for the content on your website.

Many of you may know Barb and her company Marketing for Partners, from her years of work in the channel with IT service providers, partners, ISV and other companies just like yours. Others of you probably know Barb from her weekly “Marketing Matters” column in Redmond Channel Partner magazine. Regardless, one things is clear – she has a really unique blend of industry experience with technology companies and the ability to tell their stories with effective marketing and editorial content.

In 2011, we launched our services for Microsoft Dynamics partners with Barb. Right away, Barb’s depth of professional knowledge and fantastic editorial skills were made clear to the Pronto team. All of this combined with Barb’s delightful personality made her an excellent choice to join our extended Pronto team. Given the opportunity to work together, we decided to expand our partnership with Barb and have her take on the role as Pronto’s Managing Editor for our blog and newsletter content.

Over the next month or so we are going to more than triple the number of blog articles we write, improve the overall quality of articles and give you the opportunity to both contribute ideas and tailor the content to your specific business needs.

IMPORTANT ACTIONS FOR YOU

Update Your Blog Topic Subscriptions

First, if you haven’t already, please go to your WordPress Dashboard, and update your blog article subscription preferences. You’ll see the “My Subscriptions” link in the upper left corner, right under your Dashboard menu. There you will find over 40 blog topic categories that you can select from.

Tell Us What You Want

After you’ve updated your subscription preferences head on over to the Pronto IT Services & MSP Content & Blog Discussion forums. It is super easy share some of your ideas and requirements for YOUR blog content. Barb and I are actively involved in these forums – taking client ideas and developing them into content that meets your business requirements. Of course Barb will be developing many great article ideas on her own, and she will share them in the forums as well, but this is your opportunity to make sure that Pronto is delivering the right message, on the right topics for your unique needs.

We’re sure over the coming months you’re going to be very pleased with the breadth, quality and frequency of your blog updates. Help us help you, by updating your subscriptions right away and then joining the discussion in the Pronto IT Services & MSP Content & Blog Discussion forums.

Thanks,
Derek Brown
Managing Director

We started by dumping tens of thousands of data points from Google Analytics and organizing them into different traffic sources: Direct, Organic Search, Paid Search (PPC), Referral, Email Campaigns and Social Media. Next, we grabbed a data set covering a 90 day period (October through early January) and starting comparing clients enrolled in the Business Listing Management service to those not enrolled.

Analyzing the Results

The first thing we noticed is that enrolled clients had 34.7% more traffic from organic search than non-participating clients. Since the Business Listing Management service works by building citations and local listings (both important for local SEO) on directories throughout the Web, this was an encouraging figure – but inconclusive. A quick look shows that enrolled clients performed better under every traffic source, so perhaps our group of enrolled clients just happen to get more traffic in general.

Time to Dig Deeper!

To get a better understanding of Business Listing Management’s impact, we decided to look at the performance of clients over time. We started the program in early May of 2011, so we grabbed another 90 day data set from February to April. When compared to the more recent data set (October-early January), we found some fantastic numbers.

Over an eight-month period, clients enrolled in the program averaged a 14.58% increase in organic search traffic while those not enrolled only averaged a 3.67% increase. On top of that, the average number of visits decreased or remained consistent for every other traffic source. Only organic traffic showed an increase over the reporting time frame.

These are great numbers that show the results of a great program. Feel free to review the full results. Plus, read more about the Business Listing Management service, how it works and why it’s an important part of any local SEO strategy.

Tim Kelsey
SEO & Social Media Manager

Keyword Domains

An example of a keyword domain might be something like computersupportphoenix.com or automechanicsanjose.com. The primary benefit of domains like these is that Google looks at keywords in the domain as a ranking factor. So if someone searches for Computer Support Phoenix, computersupportphoenix.com has a better chance of showing up on the first page of results.

However, an exact matching domain is by no means a guarantee of appearing on the first page. In fact, neither computersupportphoenix.com nor automechanicsanjose.com show up for their exact matching search term. Granted, there are no site currently hosted at those domains, but there are hundreds of other factors involved in ranking that tend to be more important like the number of inbound links, the quality of the content, the quality of the user experience and the level of competition for the keyword phrase.

Each year, SEOmoz publishes a report reviewing search ranking factors. They correlate a potential factor with actual search results to determine the level of influence it has on rankings. This year an exact match .com domain had a 0.22 correlation with higher rankings (if you’ll recall your high school stats class, a value of 1 would be a perfect correlation). This is down from 0.38 the previous year so it looks like Google is giving less weight to keyword domains and relying on other ranking factors instead.

Some other important things to consider when deciding on a keyword domain: the exact match ranking correlation is much lower for non-dot-com domains, and using multiple hyphens or having a lengthy domain name can have a slightly negative affect on your rankings. Remember, Google wants to provide quality results and these are signals that the site may be spammy.

Branded Domains

A perfect example is our domain – prontomarketing.com. The main benefit here is that the domain is easy to remember and fits in well with your other marketing strategies. It’s very likely that people hear about Pronto Marketing from a source outside of our website, and it is not a stretch for them to guess that our website is located at prontomarketing.com.

We don’t get the benefit of an exact keyword match, but as with many businesses, our services cover such a wide range that there isn’t one keyword phrase to sum up our business plan. Likewise, hosting your site at computersupportphoenix.com could improve your results for that one keyword, but gives you no extra benefit for additional important keywords like Managed Services, IT Consulting, Cloud Computing, etc.

Short and Sweet

There is no clear winner. In the end, it really comes down to your preference, but no matter what you decide, make sure you keep it short, simple and easy to remember. Your domain name is just one small piece of your website. Don’t spend too much energy picking one out. There are other tasks that are much more deserving of your time such as link building, adding quality content to the site and making sure the overall usability of your site is in tip-top shape.

Tim Kelsey
SEO & Analytics Manager

There are always two extreme points of view on both sides of every issue, but the truth usually lies in the middle. While you don’t want to change your IT marketing plans willy-nilly, you also don’t want to keep going the same direction when there’s evidence that it’s not working.

Sometimes you need to stop and evaluate what’s happening in the market and see if there is a need to make changes. The real question, though, is how will you know when you should buckle down and keep going or pull back on the reins?

Pull the Troops Out – Or Surge?

IT Services marketing can be much like conducting a military campaign when the question arises regarding whether the current war strategy is working. One of the dilemmas that often develops in battle is trying to determine whether you have enough troops, or whether you need to conduct a more limited campaign. Most Generals will tell you that they base these decisions on the prevailing conditions on the ground. This means that if things are going badly and you’re losing, then it’s either time to send in the cavalry – or pull back the troops and regroup!

The same philosophy should be considered when evaluating the effectiveness of your IT marketing campaign. If you have been faithfully staying the course for several months and nothing even remotely positive is happening, then it might be time to stop the press so you can change the marketing message or model. Once you reach that decision, then you have to decide what changes to make, and how.

Research, Research, Research…

The only way to make an intelligent decision regarding what adjustments to make will naturally come from research. This simply means you should know the cause of the failure before you start making haphazard changes. Should you immediately run out and hire a high-priced Madison Avenue research firm to provide that data? Only if you have that kind of money – otherwise, you should just listen to the troops on the front lines.

If you have a veteran telemarketing team with some business savvy, they should always be asking “why”? If asked, most prospects will disclose why they don’t have an interest in what you’re offering. If this data is tracked properly, a trend might appear over time that will illuminate the problem and you can adjust your message accordingly. As a result, making changes to your IT marketing will be more successful, and you should return to a healthy ROI.

John Black is the Marketing Director at MSP Telemarketing and has over 10 years of experience with IT marketing on behalf of Managed Services providers.

His experience ranges from writing articles, blogging, IT telemarketing, sales coaching, and speaking at events.

Every webmaster and blogger wants quality content for their site. The only problem is that quality content isn’t easy to produce. It takes time or money or both. Often, site owners will jump at the opportunity to post an article on their blog written by a guest.

Quality content is to B2B marketing as catnip is to LOLcats.

Guest blogging isn’t easy either, but the links you build to your site and the connections you make with other site owners can prove invaluable in the long run. AND, you have an amazing tool at your disposal to make this much easier – your existing blog posts. You already have hundreds of articles on your site ready to be used as guest blogging articles.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – you have total control of the articles posted by Pronto on your blog. Feel free to use them however you please.

Here’s an example of David Spire at United Systems Computer Group leveraging an article to build a link from his local Chamber of Commerce’s blog. David accomplishes two important things here: 1) he built a quality, relevant link back to his site and 2) he exposed United Systems to a wider audience that might not normally visit his site. In short, he increased his internet presence.

These guest blogging opportunities won’t just fall in your lap. You have to go out and find them. David did a great job of finding a blog within his local business community. This is a perfect place for you to start too, but where do you look after that? I’m sure we all have our favorite tech blogs, but TechCrunch and Mashable probably aren’t looking for guest bloggers. So where do we go? To the internet!

Google has several advanced search operators that can help you find exactly what you are looking for. I’ll briefly discuss two of them that can be useful for our purposes here.

The “inurl:” function limits the results to pages that contain a specific word in the URL. Searching for “pronto marketing” returns all kinds of pages from our site and other domains, but searching for “pronto marketing inurl:blog” cuts out everything that doesn’t include the word “blog” in the URL.

Now, you can pick out a specific service that you offer, add inurl:blog to your search query and BOOM – a list of blogs on that topic.

The “site:” operator restricts results to a single domain. A search for “site:prontomarketing.com” returns every page indexed by Google on our domain. There are tons of uses for this search operator but in this case we are going to use its negative function (-site:) which removes a domain from results. This can be useful if one domain is dominating the results, or as in the example below, you want to remove UK websites from the results – no offense to our friends in the UK!

Now get out there, find some blogs and send a message to the site owner! I recommend getting as specific as possible. Is there a service you specialize in that most other companies don’t? Focus on that! Don’t expect a perfect reply rate. Any blog worth its weight in LOLcats gets a ton of messages everyday – be patient and stick with it. You’ll hear back from someone eventually and it will totally be worth it.

Sound interesting? Good! Here’s a much more detailed article on guest blogging.

Tim Kelsey

SEO & Analytics Manager

P.S. MORE LOLCATS PLZ!

You have enough going on to worry about staying in touch with every one of your clients on every holiday or occasion. That’s where we come in, with customized eCard services that include the design, production and emailing of fun-filled cards to your loyal customers. Choose between our affordable Full Year Holiday Program or Winter Holiday only, and outsource holiday stress starting today!

For Pricing and Sign-Up information:

US clients – click here!

Canada clients – click here!

Clients Worldwide – click here!

Check out some of our 2011 eCards by clicking on the images below.

In October, Google announced that it would stop passing along keyword information from searchers that are logged into their Google Accounts. Instead, this search traffic will appear as “(not provided)”.

Publicly, Google says they are trying to protect the privacy of their users… but that doesn’t quite make sense because you can still access keyword data through an AdWords account. So what they are really saying is: “We want to protect user privacy unless you’re willing to pay for it.” They may also be trying to push alternative ad networks out of the market by cutting a portion of their data.

According to Google, this update will affect about 10% of keyword data, and from what we’ve seen in our Google Analytics accounts, this seems to be roughly accurate. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s definitely an inconvenience. Hopefully, the slew of negative comments on Google’s official announcement will make them change their minds.

Tim Kelsey
SEO & Analytics Manager