(or any other marketing consultant for that matter)
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had an unusually high number of incidences with clients and/or prospects who have had negative experiences with SEO consultants. In one case, a new client had spent a significant amount of money on worthless efforts. In another case, a client sent an unsolicited proposal from an SEO consultant. In all cases, asking one simple question would save everyone a little consternation and a lot of money:
So what?
That’s it. When a marketing consultant makes a pitch or provides you with a report, keep asking, “So what?” until you get an answer that begins with one or more of the following:
- “You increased revenue because…”
- “You saved money because…”
SEO consultants are particularly notorious for bathing their clients in data that seems impressive but is utterly meaningless. It’s their job to provide you with a service that does at least one of the two things above. If they can’t explain it to you, they’re either deceptive or less than competent. Either way you should find yourself a new consultant.
Here are some specific examples of the misdirection I frequently see.
We Can/Did Get You Ranked #1 for…
Wow! That must be great if I’m ranking #1 in Google, right? Well, maybe. That all depends on whether or not anyone ever searches for that particular keyword. In the case of one client, their previous SEO firm was charging monthly to optimize a list of 142 keywords. They submitted regular reports showing that many of them had a #1 ranking but there was just one problem. There were zero monthly searches for 101 of them.
If the client had used my critical question, the conversation may have gone something like this:
SEO: Here’s your latest monthly report. You are now ranking #1 for 95 of these keywords!
Company: So what? How does that help me?
SEO: So when people search for those terms you’re the first listing to show up.
Company: So what? How much money did that bring in last month?
SEO: Actually, none because nobody searched for it.
We Increased Your PageRank
If you’re not familiar with the term, PageRank is a grade that Google gives to pages that ranks them on a scale from 0 to 10 for a given keyword. In the early days of SEO, this was considered to be the end all, be all of search engine optimization. Today, PageRank is one of more than 200 signals Google looks at when ordering websites. It’s a factor, but just one of many, many factors that will determine how well you perform in search results.
If the client had used my critical question, the conversation may have gone something like this:
SEO: We increased the PageRank of your landing page to a 7!
Company: So what? How does that help me?
SEO: It means that Google thinks your page is important for that keyword.
Company: So what? How much money did that bring in last month?
SEO: Actually, none because despite the PageRank you were on the 5th page of results.
We Increased Your Site Traffic
Unless you’re selling ad impressions, website traffic doesn’t pay the bills. Leads do (eventually). Customers do (immediately). Increased traffic is good only if it’s quality traffic. Increased crappy traffic is not good. It costs you time and money. If SEO is not done properly, it can actually increase the amount of bad traffic to your site.
If the client had used my critical question, the conversation may have gone something like this:
SEO: Your site traffic was up 20% last month!
Company: So what? How does that help me?
SEO: You had 500 more visitors last month than the month before.
Company: So what? How much money did that bring in last month?
SEO: Actually, none because they’re not our target demographic.
Bottom Line
I’ll be writing another blog post about basic keyword research and strategy but in the mean time, asking the simple question “So what?” will teach you an awful lot about what is or isn’t working with your SEO. The only thing that matters is how these efforts impact your bottom line. This means that you have to be measuring how well your SEO efforts are impacting your web marketing goals.
Which, in turn, means that you need to have web marketing goals in the first place. More about that in a future blog post…
