A blog about smart marketing and conversion optimization.

I was recently surprised to find Google’s keyword tool reporting more than 44,000 monthly searches for “cheap SEO.” Many of the results, as you’d guess, are offshore companies using less-than-wholesome SEO tactics — but I bet you they get business.

For reference, the first 5 organic Google results ranking for “cheap SEO” look like this:

“Cheap SEO” companies get business because SEO is tremendously confusing.

Consider the difference between hiring an SEO contractor and hiring a salesperson for your small business:

Salesperson

• Most business owners know what to look for in a great sales candidate
• Most business owners have done the job of the sales warrior at some stage; they got to where they are by selling their own ideas
• Measuring success is easy and relatively fast in most sales cycles

SEO contractor

• Many business owners have a light understanding of SEO principles, at best
• Most business owners have never done hands-on SEO; they have to rely on what they’re told and what they’re “sold”
• Measuring success is tricky as SEO takes many months to propagate
• SEO is a high-maintenance channel

It’s no surprise that executives and business owners are daunted, and because the understanding of SEO is weak, the promise of “cheap SEO” is very enticing. You can “test it out” with a small budget, and if it “doesn’t work” you can move on without taking a big hit.

The problem with this approach is that optimizing your site for organic search isn’t a one-shot makeover, and the time of people who are great at it is worth a lot more than the $10/hour you can get on Odesk.

This approach is analogous to hiring a junior salesperson at $40,000/year to sell a complex, long-cycle B2B software tool. You might be able to shoehorn something, but if it doesn’t work out — while you haven’t taken a big hit, you also haven’t really tested or learned anything. If you fire your junior sales guy (or gal), you haven’t determined the tool can’t be sold; you’ve simply determined it can’t be sold by cheap help.

Why writing 6-figure checks for SEO expertise is hard to swallow

• You can’t measure success quickly enough
• Cheap SEO services seem to be available all over the web — how can I distinguish between them?
• It’s not immediately clear what you’re getting

Good point. Why is it that you see what should be a relative commodity — the “SEO audit” — priced at $1,000 in some neighborhoods, at $5,000 in others and sometimes at $35,000?

Well, there’s a few reasons. First, SEO for a simple site is very different from SEO for a complex site. Second, there are a bunch of crappy companies out there that offer cheap SEO. What makes them crappy is this: a strong SEO action plan requires profound research.

Choosing which keywords you target is a very critical decision. You can spend an hour on the research, 9 hours on HTML recommendations and troubleshooting, and sell a $1,000 audit. Conversely, it can take many hours to consult weapons-grade SEO tools like SEOmoz, Raventools and the like, and ensure you’re choosing terms that are sufficiently high in volume, not overly competitive and, importantly, terms that you can actually rank for, given the content of your site.

It’s the same story when developing a content strategy, troubleshooting your site for potential indexing problems, building a backlink footprint and the rest.

Why it doesn’t matter that you can’t “see” the results of SEO right away

Think about how you get traffic to your site. Chances are you’re paying for traffic in some way. It could be any of these channels:

• Paid search
• Display ads
• Other PPC advertising
• Affiliates
• TV / radio ads
• Blogging
• Email marketing

No matter what you’re doing to get customers to your site, you’re spending time on it, and in many cases you’re paying by the click, too.

If your average cost per click across all channels is $1.25, you should think of every organic visit your site gets as a $1.25 credit against your account. If you grow your organic traffic to as little as 1,000 visits per month, that’s a $1,250 return on your investment — plus what each conversion is worth.

The bottom line: Cheap SEO is a mirage, good SEO is the real Giving Tree

The point I’m trying to make, and perhaps belaboring, is this: cheap SEO is bullshit, and good SEO appears expensive because it’s uncertain and difficult to measure. There are no guarantees in search engine rankings (company who give them are, well… disingenuous at best). But, actually, done successfully, a site well-optimized for organic search can be among the greatest assets of a business and can generate tremendous revenue from free traffic. SEO is the Giving Tree of online marketing.

For businesses that primarily provide physical world services, online marketing is a very different animal than for primarily online businesses selling a product or subscription. The key to online success for services businesses is to view all sales and marketing as an eco-system in which online channels play an increasingly vital role.

Insight #1: It really no longer makes sense to consider “marketing” and “online marketing” as distinct. Blog, search, and social marketing are as vital to your marketing program as networking, following up with prospects, and speaking at events.

I’ve noticed that a lot of businesses are only interested in online as a way to meet new customers. They’ll put a few bucks into lead gen but shy away from taking a step back and really thinking about how they communicate. Do an off-site, think, get creative!

Insight #2: It’s relatively easy to produce leads (it just takes some budget, a willingness to test, and some patience). It’s a lot harder to get to know the human beings you’ve entered into your CRM, to understand their challenges, and then to help them from the moment they first hit your website to 20 years into your working relationship. Before worrying about getting new leads, make sure you’ve put in place the communications infrastructure to have real conversations. Remember, you’re going to have to work closely eventually with them anyway.

Insight #3: It takes multiple touches to transform a prospect into a customer. They see you in paid search, get retargeted with a display ad, open one of your emails, listen to a voice message, read a blog post, read an article, see you at a networking event, etc. — one-and-done leads might do a couple small-value transactions, but customer relationships need to be nurtured.

Insight #4: Be original. Get inspired by what other companies are doing, but don’t copy. If you’re a services business that’s been around a while, you’ve done something unique and special. Going online doesn’t mean you should abandon your winning formula — rather, see how you can adapt it for today’s marketplace. For example: just because your competitor’s website uses stock photography and “business” language doesn’t mean your off-beat humor should be covered up.

The best time you can spend building an online marketing program is stepping back and really looking at your business as a whole.

Insight #5: Create a vision for the eco-system in which your prospects and customers will interact with you. You’ll know you have an effective eco-system if it includes all of the following:

1. How people get to your site (Facebook ads, Google paid search, email, PR, channel partners, etc.)
2. What are the crucial calls to action on your website and what is the most vital information visitors need to know.
3. How you want people to contact you (lead gen form, phone call, email, on-site chat).
4. Lead nurture schedule (when and with what info emails are sent, where they link, when phone calls are made, etc.)
5. How will you present information to visitors (text, photo, video, webinar, white paper, etc.)
6. How you are tracking all of your sales and marketing activities and making sure no lead is lost.

Over my next several blog posts, I’ll touch on each of these areas in more depth, so stay tuned.

Humans are playful. In fact, that’s one of my favorite features of being human. For some reason, though, when we think about “doing business,” we seem to think that it’s important to be boring.

We start to talk in boring ways, write boring stuff and use boring terms that no one wants to admit to using without inserting some verbal footnote about being a tech nerd (yeah, I know you’ve heard that).

Old school marketing, like old school business, is conservative. You don’t take risks by using newfangled lingo or addressing your customers casually. You stick to formalities and represent yourself like the gang of aristocratic, suit-wearing professionals that you are.

And that’s what I expect from my medical insurance provider and (weirdly) my internet service provider.

But I love that I don’t have to expect that from the companies and technologies I interact with in my day-to-day life as an online marketing consultant, and in this post I want to pay a small tribute to a handful of companies whose messaging I find playful, humorous, interesting and engaging. Those things make me want to work with you, companies. So thanks.

1) MailChimp

If you’ve used MailChimp, you know what I’m talking about. That chimp is no quiet little animal. With every pageview, he’s goofing off and telling you some little joke, pointing to one silly YouTube video or another.

Why do I think that’s so great? First, I love a company that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Second, believe it or not, I appreciate a little levity when I’m hanging out and cranking through projects and analytics in an email marketing toolset.

Last but certainly not least, these touches of style give me the feeling that when I call up MailChimp to talk about an issue or request service, I’m going to have a good experience and talk to someone I can connect with — not some drone at the other end of a 1-800 number.

2) LoopFuse

In the process of looking for efficient, modestly priced marketing automation tools, I recently checked out LoopFuse. One thing that got my attention was the little messages LoopFuse spits out while it’s “thinking” — or calculating — or whatever you want to call it.

Instead of “working” or “loading,” the little dialog box would read “calculating the square root of -1” or some other quip.

Again, it was refreshing to see a company that doesn’t take itself too seriously, even as they sell marketing automation services, which is among the most academic of acronyms in the already-ultra-geeky online marketing space.

You see, the trouble is, we interact with machines almost as much as we interact with humans, and in some cases far more. If you’re a consultant like me and you work out of your home or from various San Francisco coffee shops, it’s possible that talking to a marketing automation platform (MAP) doesn’t satisfy your need for real and meaningful interaction.

I’m not saying I don’t love marketing automation — we all know I love it with great gusto and MAPs are as American as cherry pie — but a little humor helps grease the gears of cognition a bit, you see.

3) CD Baby

You might’ve heard about the “CD Baby private jet” before. In short, the founder of CD Baby spun together this clever little confirmation email. At the time, perhaps he was just trying to avoid sending “ye olde boring confirm email” that we’ve all seen and ignored so many times — but what resulted was more than 20,000 references to the thing, many of which yielded some nice SEO backlink juice to the site.

Nice work, Derek. I salute your refusal to be boring.

Here was the email:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, December 11th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby

4) E*TRADE

Believe it or not, once upon a time, even these guys got in on the fun. Remember that one E*TRADE Super Bowl commercial from oh-so-long-ago?

We just wasted $2,000,000. What are you doing with your money?

When it’s brand recognition you’re trying to build, humor is maybe the best tool in the shed.

Look, there’s a time and a place for being serious. All I’m saying is this: companies who can take a joke, who aren’t afraid to be playful, and who communicate with the world in a direct, friendly, easygoing voice are often companies that earn my trust more readily than the Anthem Blue Cross’s and Comcasts of the world (sorry Anthem, but you suck).

Does your company appreciate humor? Talk to us; we want to know how.