HUH…?!

Let me explain…

Yesterday I came across an ad on Craigslist by a forward-thinking business owner who decided he needs some help with SEO.

Good idea, I’d say. Because the difference in ROI and raw leads to your business can be staggering once you show up on the first page of Google.

(click to enlarge)

But I had to smile when I read this post.

What’s wrong with this picture?
(have a look, and you tell me…)

Did you catch it?

Okay, how about another example…

Wanted: 1 Hamburger
Please provide your price and how long it will take for you to prepare it.

Now if this was Mickey D’s, that would work. Hamburgers are all the same there.

(No really. Have you ever tried to order one with extra ketchup or no pickles? How’d that work out for you? It’s pretty likely that you got the standard hamburger, paid your $1.89 or whatever it is, and got your hamburger 2.47 minutes later. Then scraped the pickles off afterwards.)

But you almost expect that going in, right?

I mean, they don’t need to know your background, or your history, or what other restaurants you visit during the week, to filll your order. Because on a fast-food take-out menu like that, there aren’t too many variables.

“Ye pays yer money and ye gets yer burger”

What

But let’s get back to our SEO-challenged business owner. There’s a bit more that goes into even a ‘decent’ SEO project than your average quickie hamburger.

Like figuring out what your keywords are (and making sure they’re the right ones to catch ‘buyers’)… what industry are you in, and how much competition is there for your keywords… your market… your location, and your specialty?

What’s your site’s URL, it’s history, and it’s current position in Search Engine rankings?

And, believe it or not, it even makes a difference what Search Engines you want to get top rankings on. They each react a little differently, you know. So what gets you to the Top 10 in Google doesn’t even catch Yahoo’s eye some days…

As important as those ‘off-page factors’ are, you’ve also got to consider your current site’s layout, content and platform. Sure, it’s ‘possible’ to get a new, blank website to rise in the SERP’s… but it’s a whole lot easier to improve the rankings of an established site. One that’s structured with the robots in mind as well as for human readers.

(click for larger image)

Measuring and analysing all of those details is necessary before anyone could even guess what you’d have to do to fix them. A responsible SEO consultant wouldn’t dream of starting without knowing what the job would entail. And the chances for success.

As a business owner, you’d want to know the same things going forward, wouldn’t you?

So give your SEO whiz a fighting chance here. A URL is an absolute MINIMUM to provide, if you don’t know all of the answers yourself yet. Then I can do some digging, and come back to you with an informed answer on getting you where you want to be. Then we’ll create a plan to keep you there, in the competitive and ever-changing online world.

Because buying SEO isn’t quite the same as buying a hamburger…