There's a Marketing Lesson in SEO
Posted On: 2006-12-15
It seems that this month - and for some of last month too - I've spent a lot of time talking about Google and search engine related topics in general. I guess I make no apologies for that because search engines play a huge part in our ultimate success or failure.
I know that some of you may think that you can still make bucket loads of money simply by building galleries and submitting them to every TGP in the universe. Sadly the days when you could do that are all but gone and those who come into this industry thinking they can rely on TGPs for their income are never going to succeed.
Instead you need to use every possible avenue that's open to you if you really do want to succeed and search engines are one of the most important avenues to consider. So I study, research and talk about search engines and Google because they're important. And the more I do that the more I begin to see that there are some hidden lessons here for all marketers.
Taking the Easy Way Out
One of those lessons is that people like things to be easy. They really do not want to face anything that might be difficult to achieve. For most people out there in the real world challenges are to be avoided at all costs.
How do I see that in search engines work? It's so easy to see when you're involved in search engine optimization that I can't believe that I missed that lesson until now. For those of us who do genuine search engine optimization the truth is that achieving the results our clients want is not easy.
It's not a matter of stuffing 10 lines of keywords into their meta tags. It's not a matter of filling the bottom of their web page with 300 lines of nothing but keywords in font size 1 and in the same color as the background. Nor is it a matter of taking what worked six years ago and expecting it to still work today.
Instead it's all about hard work, writing pages that include their targeted keywords in a way that is natural and easy to read and fits into an effective copywriting structure. It's also about attracting and obtaining genuine inbound links from quality sites. Of course all that takes time, costs real money and requires patience because it's not going to happen over-night.
But try telling that to business people out there who read the ads that promise a top 10 placing in just a few days, newspapers that report that search engine optimization is a waste of money because the desired results will happen naturally and a natural desire to avoid anything that might be a challenge.
They don't want to hear the truth because the truth is that it's really not easy to achieve those rankings they want and it's going to take time and cost money.
We've been having an experience like that with a local businessman and I've talked about him here before. He asked us for a quote to a build a website and mentioned that the other quote he had from a local business included a sum of $140 a year just to keep one domain name registered. We bought six domain names for him for $184 for two years which he thought was wonderful. He thought our quote for the website was quite reasonable too - but he thought the ongoing cost for search engine optimization was just too much.
Steve explained why there needed to be an ongoing cost for that part of the job but you could see his eyes glaze over because he had already read something some other expert had written that said that search engine optimization was all smoke and mirrors.
The anti-virus software
Recently a local businessman we know was bragging to us about a new guy he had found to look after his computers. He was wonderful, he was cheap, he was always on call and he had installed a whole raft of great software on this man's business computer for a song. Why, he'd even installed the anti-virus software we had recommended for free.
The businessman showed us the anti-virus software and, sure enough, it was the full working version that updates several times a day. We wondered how this wonderful computer technician had come by the software because only two computer shops in town sell it; one is the shop we're involved in and the other shop buys its licenses through us.
I was going to say something to the businessman about buying from unknown sources but Steve stopped me. He figured it would only be a waste of time and effort and the businessman would learn soon enough that the wonderfully cheap guy he had employed would cost him money.
And about a week later it did cost him a lot of money - a whole day of lost time. The anti-virus software that the wonderfully cheap technician had installed was a cracked version and the manufacturer can trace cracked versions because of the regular update feature.
And our local businessman got more than a nasty surprise when the warning message that his anti-virus software had just been disabled because it was an illegal copy popped up on the screen. It was also rather embarrassing because the computer screen was in plain view of a number of clients.
So instead of doing much work that day he spent most of it removing the cracked version, waiting for a key for a legitimate version and then installing it all himself. You see he's not very computer literate and the guy who had installed the cracked version was suddenly unavailable. Plus we were too busy for Steve to go up and help him.
Has he really learned anything from that lesson? Probably not because he's the same guy who thought that getting a good listing in the search engines for his new site wouldn't require much in the way of time and money.
So what does all that teach us about marketing? Perhaps we should be telling people what they want to hear. Perhaps we should accept the fact that the marketplace really doesn't want to be challenged or made to think.
Perhaps we just need to agree with the marketplace, give them what they want and leave them to blame everyone but themselves when they don't get the result they were expecting. After all, that strategy sure seems to work for the scammers.