Free website and SEO assessments are on the rise. It seems that almost every company with a product to sell now has a consultant team knocking on your door. Most are very well educated and knowledgeable professionals for sure, but here’s the lowdown from our perspective on how to maximize these opportunities.
“Remember, free advice – if you decide to act on it – has little or no accountability to get results.
Everyone is an SEO expert regardless of their hands-on experience, time in the field or behind the scenes knowledge of your web site and its traffic or conversions. No one company knows everything, even us. We calibrate and learn from our colleagues just like you do.
The reality is the science of Internet marketing is only a few years old. It appears that pretty much everyone in the field is self-taught and the rules change as rapidly as ice cream flavors at 31 Flavors. So, who can you believe?
At Strategic Edge we think the most important things to look at when you are making critical decisions are the data and secondly, the relationship you have with your internet marketing team. How resilient and flexible are they? How much do they know about your practice, and for my money how much do they care?
Data…King of the Hill
As you might guess we hear a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when it comes to the money that goes into Internet marketing, but it’s all relative. Only a few years ago doctors were spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on print advertising and yellow page ads and never knew where their patients were coming from. Internet marketers have found universally that we are either heroes or bums depending upon the month, the economy, the weather and why someone isn’t #1 on Google for every procedure.
Hold on! Before you think we are starting a pity party, we of all people understand how challenging this Internet chess game is and how difficult it is for our clients to have blind faith in us month after month.
It is a wickedly changing industry on a minute-by-minute basis and we fully embrace your need to continually evaluate your options. After all you are in a very competitive business and you’ve got to ensure your dollars are producing.
How we ensure your return-on-investment
Every month we look at our clients Google data. It doesn’t lie. It is by far an objective source, a rational source for you and for us to make marketing decisions. Instead of responding to a “drive-by” SEO consultant or your gut or the time of day you happen to be surfing the Internet ( because things shift continuously), schedule a report call with the SEO team, or anyone of the executive team who can address your marketing goals and better yet has an idea of what your practice is about and where it stands juxtaposed to your competition.
When we go through your Google scorecard and analyze trends, we search intensely for areas to improve, but we also know when nothing should be done and a client should simply stay the course.
Internet marketing has become a game of calculated changes based on statistics. Combine that with a consistent practice strategy focused on long-term results and you’ll surely succeed. But here’s the rub – very few people want to be patient.
Just as you can’t fool Mother Nature, you can’t fool Google. Clever SEO practices that try to outsmart the system are eventually discovered and sent to the bottom of the pack. In a future edition we’ll cover what it means to get a good Google Spanking, but for now there are a few safe ways to nudge the system and sometimes make things happen a little more quickly.
–Dana Fox
