Marketing & SEO Discussion List - LED Digest

Nathan's comments [issue 2239] struck a cord with me.  I've always felt SEO "experts" had a tendency to act in their own best interests, even if it cost their clients money.  Many of you'all know me from the earliest days of web promotion.  I'm the guy Jerry Yang had to create the very first "web promotion" category for at Yahoo when he was still in college.  Hard to imagine a time when there wasn't a category for that, eh?

At SEO conference presentations I always make a point to say something along these lines...

"Anyone can be an SEO 'expert'.  There are no secrets.  It's all there for you to learn.  You must simply be willing to roll up your sleeves, get online, and devote the time to learn it.  Age is not a factor, nor education.  It's about a willingness to try and most importantly, refusing to get complacent after you have a little success.  I spend as much time online now studying it as I did 14 years ago."

Here's a true story.  In 1997 one of the most famous golf courses in the US decided to launch an ecommerce site to sell clothes, hats, etc. with their logo.  They had such brand recognition that they could literally do everything wrong and still succeed.  And they did both.  After they had launched, they fired their SEO firm and invited me to do a full online marketing review / audit for their site.

During the process of analyzing what they had done to date, I asked them how it was that their site was already listed in several search engines and directories.  The VP in charge told me that the SEO firm they had hired had previously implemented (their word, not mine) what they called a "Strategic Search Engine and Directory Insertion Service". I asked them what they were charged for that, and she did not know, but thought the details were somewhere in the contract.  I asked if I could have a look and she forwarded to me a 50 page document that did in fact detail what was involved.

I promise I am not making this up.  They were charged $4,500 for the following "Strategic Search Engine and Directory Insertion Service"

Submission to

Lycos

Infoseek

Webcrawler

AltaVista

Yahoo

EiNet Galaxy

WWW Worm

NCSA What's New Page

That, my friends, is it.  Eight submissions (all free back then, BTW), and charged them $4,500. (and not to be picky, but where's HotBot?  HotBot actually mattered once)

I didn't have the heart to tell the person in charge just how badly they had been overcharged, but it was at that time I first realized that SEO's weren't all to be trusted.  In this case the marketing department at the golf club was so clueless to the emerging online world that they trusted the SEO firm without asking any questions, and the SEO firm likely took advantage of this to the tune of charging $4,500 for what should have cost, well, not even $450 or $45.  In those days I could make those 8 submissions in two minutes. I bet many of you on this list could as well.

Was this nothing more than a case of buyer beware?  Was it that the marketing staff at the club didn't care because they were under pressure to get the ecommerce site live at any cost? I'm not sure what the right answers are, but I do feel that one key reason it happened was that the marketing department "believed the hype" that their SEO firm had the "expertise" to do what they could not do themselves in house.  So maybe the question is what is the obligation of the SEO firm when it comes to charging for certain activities when the SEO firm knows the client doesn't know better? Isn't character what you do when you know nobody is looking?

I push my clients to become self sufficient.  I tell them how easy many tasks are, when to pay and what's a fair price.  Many clients just need a few minutes of coaching for the light to come on.  If you have never in your life submitted a site to Yahoo it can seem really complex, even for someone with a master's degree.  But walk that same person through it one time, and they invariably say "you mean that's all there is to it?"

I'm not against making a living, but I am against preying upon ignorance, and the easiest way to do that is to make a task seem complex when it isn't, or likewise let someone believe a task is harder than it really is.

Eric Ward
www.ericward.com