After reading this article and thought why give people 7 ways SEO companies rip off their clients when you can give 1?

The #1 way you might get ripped off by an SEO company is…THEY DON’T TRACK down to REAL results and you don’t push them to. Easy.

When is the last time you saw an annual report delivered to a group of shareholders that talked about web site traffic, rankings, or links attained? NEVER! They usually talk revenues, projections, etc…

While there are few tools that easily track to ROI (I’m talking ROI not conversions), every SEO company should track traffic to as close to the sale as possible. Especially in a down economy, every marketing consultant should be tracking as closely to sales as possible to hold onto their piece of the marketing pie.

#1 - If you are a publisher, develop a revenue per page view, and track unbranded search traffic to page views

#2 - If you are a B2B marketer, now is the time to make sure you are tracking leads, even those that come by phone from search efforts, you can do this in a 1.0 way of making sure people ask how did you hear of us, or in a more 2.0 way that changes your phone number dynamically based on the referring site, check out Voicestar for this functionality.

#3 - B2B Marketers, you doing paid search? You using Salesforce.com? Here’s a guide to connecting Salesforce.com and Google Adwords. Here’s the salesforce.com guide. This will help you also tell the quality of the leads we drive!

#4 - Lastly, make sure that your SEO company is not including branded search in their reports (or they should report them in a separate report) - SEO’s can’t take much credit for people searching for your brand entirely, while we contribute to some of it, conversions via your brand should always be in a separate report.
E-commerce providers, if you don’t have e-commerce tracking turned on in your analytics reports you are nuts!

Now don’t run crazy with this report as very often we’re driving unbranded traffic in the beginning that may come back in through branded search, so a SEO company should report on both.

One place where I disagreed with the article, was by the position reports , anyone can get a web site ranking well for something, the question is does that term get queried enough to make it worthwhile? That is the million dollar question, not where you rank, but do the rankings you achieved actually drive results, and by results I mean one of these three things, traffic, leads or sales.

SEO is NOT about rankings, rankings, # of links, etc are a distraction from traffic, leads, and sales.

A SEO company fully concerned about driving sales needs to explain to their clients that it is better to work on moving a term from 9 to 3 for a highly queried, highly converting term than to bring up a bunch of 30’s and 40’s for terms that have lower query volume and lower propensity to convert.

It is never about rankings, they are just a means to an end.

We are in a recession people, not tracking your SEO results down to traffic, and leads (where possible) is going to make your job harder! Keep your job stress free, here are my tips for lowering the stress of growing a marketing agency.

I did like this pointer most from that article:
Hide behind intellectual property rights – This is so true, many companies talk about “proprietary” stuff all the time. Most of what makes a search company good is testing and their knowledge, it is rarely some home grown tool. It’s like a bid manager, anyone can buy the software it is the people behind it, their passion, drive and expertise that adds value. Real SEO companies keep clients because they know that results and service that builds trust with clients NOT secrets.

I will say that valuing links, is the one thing where a company can build a tool to help them gain an understanding for link value very quickly – again that just helps us work more quickly, the strategies are what drives the value is still the same.

So all in all, marketers start holding all of your marketing “partners” more accountable, and marketing consultants, please start tracking down to results. If you can’t track your work down to whatever metric ends up on that loan application or shareholder report, you are going to be in trouble.

Don’t want to take my word for it, well maybe you should listen to Big Blue! IBM is also saying: “Two-thirds of advertising experts surveyed by IBM expect 20% of advertising revenue to move from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years:”

Image from this exec summary by marketingcharts.com

Sometimes we’re in such a rush looking for the next big link idea that we miss the quality low hanging opportunities ripe for the picking.

1. Does your company provide scholarships?

There are HUNDREDS of sites listing companies that provide scholarships. Not only can you land a deep link, there’s a good possibility it could be a deep link from a .edu or k12.state.us site. Even if your client doesn’t offer a scholarship, why not find 50 quality sites that list business scholarships and pitch a $500 scholarship idea as a quality bulk link buy for your client?

2. What fraternities and sororities did your C-Level managers participate in during school?

Yep, another way to get links from a .edu. Most colleges and universities provide hosting for fraternities, sororities, clubs, etc. These groups can link out to alumni profiles, businesses & advisors. I know my honors franerdity links out. Does yours?

3. What industry blogs do you follow?

Oh, you don’t? It’s not always about getting a link for the client. The more a client is educated about the broad scope of their business, the less time you have to spend on questions that do not drive home conversions and revenues. This is the perfect opportunity to have your client read blogs to help your cause, whether you’re a graphic designer, developer, or SEO. Heck, they might even start commenting and linking. Just remind them of the proper way to comment on blogs by sending them a link to SearchRank.com’s correct commenting post.

4. Does your company sponsor any athletic events?

While not everyone likes gutting it for 5 kilometers, there are dozens of sites that list races by city, state, & region. If your client sponsors a 5k race, bike race or adventure race, make sure they’re listed on these sites. Up attendance and links. Mmmboy.

5. Are there any women or minorities that are C-Level managers?

Yes, your client will most likely be defensive and hesitant to answer this question, but do you want to remain in the shadow of PCness or get some juicy links? Act and ask in their best interest. Apologize later if necessary. There are local, national & international sites listing women, African America, Asian, and other minority owned/operated businesses. Lots of low hanging links that will be appreciated at the end of the day.

You’ve probably spent time, budget and endless stress on building high rankings for your keywords. A new player has come to town and is creeping up on your current position without even trying. Whether you sell shoes, music, tickets, heck, even Disney movies, your business is not safe.

Facebook is creeping into search results through events, groups, fan pages, and iLike pages. Events were touched on by Tamar.com earlier this week making us all think about the security side of indexable event pages. While that’s another can of worms, indexing groups, fan pages and iLike pages bring up big questions of where, why and how for your business.

Where are these rankings showing up? Searches for Victoria’s Secret, Nike Shoes, Vodka, and Coldplay bring back Facebook as the 28th, 30th, 51st, and 28th result respectively. While ankings 30th isn’t impressive, the fact remains that Facebook isn’t trying and they were also not ranking AT ALL a few days ago. It’s hard to know when Google started indexing because these weren’t on anyone’s radar at position #452, but being at #28 definitely raises a brow to how far these could move.

For Nike Shoes, Facebook is one position behind FootLocker.com. Facebook staggered one ahead of Vox for Vodka. They jumped one behind a small site called TicketMaster.com for Coldplay. Some big names are getting a small bump back.

Why are these rankings showing up? The groups and fan sites are ginormous. Victoria’s Secret, Nike Shoes, Vodka, and Coldplay each have hundreds of thousands of fans. The college kids like vodka with their Coldplay. Who knew?

These sites aren’t just full of disheveled forums, but contain videos, photos, events, message boards, product offers, downloads, even discographies. They are turning into the unofficial pages for products, services, bands, stores, and even Disney movies.

These results are relevant and definitely give some retailers, ticket websites, music sites and others a pinch in the arm. Can a business create and manipulate a group? Not likely. Spamming for fan groups is a no-no and you’ll need to build a base of at least 50,000 fans to gain any traction in the engines.

What can be done? All links on Facebook pages are already no-followed, so joining and spamming isn’t a good option for Google results. A few businesses have been able to capitalize like Rhapsody, iTunes and Amazon. They are taking advantage of iLike pages that are beginning to show up (System of a Down ranks 53) by having favorite songs downloadable through the band homepage.

So if you’re able to download songs, buy shoes, and purchase lingerie from links on these pages, what is stopping Facebook from becoming the largest affiliate marketer on the web?

There have been several articles circling around about the usefulness of Twitter for businesses. Some writers are even sending requests to HARO with summary titles, “twitter, huh, what is it good for?” Here’s the answer.

Absolutely everything to your business if you do four things:

1. Access search.twitter.com
2. Listen to your potential customers
3. Check Google Reader (or any other type of RSS feed)
4. Respond to potential customers

What do I mean by listen? Instead of searching for company brand name or products in tweets, why not search for client needs? Here’s an example from the perspective of a travel agency:

“Need a vacation” brought back 45 results in the last 24 hours on search.twitter.com. This one keyword combination along with several others (find a vacation, want a vacation, deserve a vacation) can be gathered through the RSS button available at the top of the page.

Now, what can be done with dozens of people expressing what they need/want? How about advertising a contest or sending a discount from your related business? A bot can be created to send a reply (@) to the user saying, “We see that you need a vacation and want to help! A 10% discount on our popular vacation packages is offered at http://tinyurl.com/xyz.”

Developing a bot isn’t necessary, but certainly helps make the process lean. With 4-5 queries, that’s 2000+ potential customers per month expressing that they are interested in taking a vacation that a travel agency can most likely accommodate. Regardless of your conversion %, that’s a lot of cheap low hanging fruit.

Does this address a tweeted need? Absolutely. Is it spammy? That’s yet to be decided, but your input is always welcome in a quick survey below.