Share on Facebook

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

DanceCrazy [3/5] Paying to much for SEO and Marketing

Ok, really short section here. Basically I signed up for the Link Building program (via NetworkSolutions), and also the SEO program (where you chose 10-50 keywords, and can “optimize” for them).

 A full year later, we had NO ranking in google above page 5. That’s right, no rankings in google above page 5 (and only a few of those). We ranked rarely in Yahoo and MSN, but no on the pages that were purportedly “optimized”.

Let me be clear. This is disastrous for an online store. None of our store built pages or products pages, ranked at all. This is a huge deal! You want your product pages to rank – that’s where your frekain’ products are there for (apart to sell your products). If someone is searching for, say, a swing video, you want the page of your “swing videos” to rank well for … “swing videos”, when typed into a search engine. Once again, NOT rocket science. We had none (that’s right ZERO) top ten rankings in any search engine – and frankly, we had few regular organic rankings of any level.

Why did our pages not rank? Well, they were dynamically constructed by the shopping cart, with poor SEO technique, so I’m guessing that has much to do with it, but in truth, I have no idea.  I just know what’s happened since then, and how we turned it around (and that’s coming).

But first, what did we do about nine months in? We complained and asked about the “Guarantee” that is provided. This is the part that’s going to make me look so foolish, but I’ll take the brunt of this, so that you might learn from it, and not make my (admittedly amateur) mistakes. Ok, so, um, we then received a report about how GREAT we were ranking, and how we had so many top search results.

Yes, that’s right. We received a huge report about how great we were ranking, and how we had been over-delivered to in every possible way, shape and form. We were getting NO traffic, so I was perplexed, until I had a major “aha” moment. I was such a sucker. This is the most embarrassing thing I’ll likely ever write.

The guarantee, which I failed to read fully, did not guarantee Top 10 listings in the major 3 search engines! It guaranteed top 10 Results in ANY of 30 search engines. Oh god. I am such an idiot. So yes, we did rank for some terms in some engines, and the guarantee held, and the service they said they would provide, they did, indeed, provide. It’s just a totally worthless service for us, and resulted in little to no traffic to our site.

Gotchy’aaa!  The link building service, unfortunately, was also very expensive, and since I promised to keep it short, falls into the same “guarantee” trap as above, and frankly, give you so few links, at such a middling quality, as to be completely worthless to me. Your mileage may (but likely won’t) differ. 

Want to read about link building and proper SEO?

Here’s the big tip for this article, and it’s no marketing course. There are TWO sites which I use for straightforward happenings. The first is:

PlanetOcean.com - $60 every six months I think, well worth it.

SEO Book.com – Free, but some additional services.

Read and learn about proper link building. It’s easy. A few directories, continuously outsourcing ink request emails, a few paid links, articles, and then rinse and repeat for the rest of your life. See…it’s simple!

Those are great tips, but frankly, there’s more to this story, and more things you can learn.  The worst is yet to come, and the tale of a an internet ecommerce disaster has much still yet to be told.

I could go on and on about this, but frankly, all of this is coming soon in our masterful (if I do say so myself), “Empire” course.