Optibits

Sozo Firm, Inc. would like to announce the addition of Deborah A. Bering to our staff of marketing professionals. As a new intern at Sozo Firm, Inc., Debbie hopes to add to the company’s successes as well as gain valuable experience in the process. As a marketing major at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, she plans to graduate in the spring of next year. In her years as a high school student, Debbie concentrated most of her attention on the arts, more specifically drawing and ceramics. Upon graduating, her teachers presented her with the Senior Art Award, in hopes that she would continue on to art school. However, Debbie hoped to blend both her artistic foundation with her love for business, and in doing so, decided upon marketing.

With a background mostly in writing and graphic design, Debbie is eager to formulate new ideas that may be useful to the firm’s objectives. Under the guidance and direction of SEO/web marketing consultant, Andrew Jensen, she hopes to develop her skills so that she may one day lead marketing teams in a variety of settings. Her focus during her internship will be to support and promote the Sozo Firm’s mission of individualized attention to its clients, while expanding her knowledge of internet marketing strategies.

“We were running what we call a scrub on your website and noticed that you weren’t ranking well for some of the keywords in your site,” drolls the telemarker from a web marketing company in New York that I’d never heard of.

Me: “Oh, really?”

“Yeah, we do a scrub that lets us know if you’re ranking well for your keywords.”

Me: “And I should hire you to ‘fix’ that while we focus on helping our own clients rank well?”

“Yeah, we’re running a special right now. For just $19.99 a month you can …”

(I never have patience with telemarkers … please forgive me for my rudeness) “So what do you think my clients will say when I tell them that the reason we rank so well isn’t a demonstration of how well we can apply our skills but is because of some outsource SEO … ”

“We work with a number of marketing companies like yours.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

If you haven’t received an SEO sales call for your business website, then you’ve probably received the SEO emails:

I was browsing through your website and discovered that you didn’t rank well for your most important keywords. Let me submit your website to a million search engines and add your link to every questionable website I network with. In turn, all you have to do is entrust the reputation of your website to me, and I guarantee you I’ll get rich while you wonder where all your marketing bucks have gone. My payment plans are simple–just $9.99/day for 90 days. And boy will you get traffic once I buy one of those pop under banners–I’ll be able to send you 10 million robot hits within just 2 weeks! Sure hope your servers can handle that converting traffic. You’ll be richer than ever and so will I. Just call me now because good things like these surely don’t last. Signed, the SEO Quacker @ hotmail.com

Perhaps it’s just my cynical nature, but why should an SEO company be annoyingly aggressive like this? Because they aren’t getting referrals from disatisfied customers? Because their own website doesn’t rank well? Because their business strategy consists of making a fast buck from as many people as possible?

Just the fact that the SEO sales calls are all so similarly alike … as are the emails … makes the whole thing smell of rancid fish (I don’t eat most seafood, btw). And so the moral of the story is, don’t fall for this junk. Just because a company is being “proactive” and bugging you to death is no telltale sign that they’ll give you your money’s worth. Do your homework, ask around. See what marketing companies others recommend. And tell the telemarketers to find a more promising, meaningful job, because half of them have no clue what they are really even talking about.

It’s one of those often unspoken realities: SEO rates often vary in conjunction with demand.  At Sozo Firm, we’ve had some months where the demand was so high, we were providing sky high quotes knowing that we were essentially maxed out.  As we are beginning to enter the summer months now, things have slowed down, and we have a number of large proposals “hanging out there” while I scurry to keep the team productive and occupied in the meantime.

Downtimes are valuable. They can be excellent times to sit back and exercise your brain, as if we don’t do that enough in the fast paced world of SEO & internet marketing. Downtimes also provide excellent moments to get caught up on our own projects we’ve set aside during the insanely hectic times.  But, oddly enough, it seems like the very moment we begin working on some of our own websites, the phones start ringing off the hook and the request for proposals begin to swamp us and those forgotten projects of the past resume their dusty places on the shelf.

All of this late night jibber jabbering to state that we have just released our SEO rates for the month of May 2008, and we’ve slashed a number of our rates. Most visibly affected were our internet marketing consultant packages followed by our corporate SEO packages. Our hourly rate went from $150/hr (with lesser tiers) to $120/hr with several lesser tiers based on the total number of hours “purchased” within the contract.

My intention in making these temporary rate changes is not to attempt to compete with the “cheap” SEO companies which swamp the web (we have no desire to turn into a “search engine submission company”), but to merely exercise an experiment in supply & demand. In doing so, I’ll readily acknowledge that even search engine optimization companies are flexible when the economy bends. 

But I won’t get all bent over and depressed about the economy.  As I never stop saying, it’s when the economy is out of shape that the little guys have their best chance to fight the giants.

June 5, 2008: The experiment continues. With the rate drop in May, we saw a definite increase in requests for proposals. We’ve decided to drop the rates one final time with the mentality that the further increase in RFPs will permit us to be even more selective about the projects we accept. I’d much rather have a dozen RFPs come in during a week and have three that interested me than have eight which didn’t strike the “creative urge.”  It’s clients with interest holding projects that make the job exciting!

July 16, 2008: We’ve been literally swamped with RFPs. Hourly rates now set at $110.