So what does selecting an SEO company have to do with Vinny Chase? I’ll tell you, but first watch this video then read the inspiration below:

If you were Vinny, how would that experience have helped or not helped you choose an agent?

Here’s how this came to me…

This week we turned down the opportunity to work with a great organization because they required us to come in with a presentation for their selection committee. We don’t have canned presentations for “pitches.” Instead we like to sit down with a potential client figure out who they are, what makes them unique, what their needs are and THEN see if we are a good fit to help. After explaining this, it was still required for “participating firms” to have a thirty minute presentation or the deal was off (yes it had to be 30 minutes). So for now we walked away (remember walking away from deals is one of my ways to grow a stress free agency.)

When I am given the opportunity to speak with people about SEO/SEM, I tell all of them that the decision of selecting a search company is one that will be made with the GUT. Why? Because every SEO/SEM company is going to sound the same, talk the same game, and use the same shtick.

Every company will have slides on:
• The team’s experience
• How they alter on-site factors
• Their linking strategy
• Results for past clients
• Bid management
• Blah, blah, blah

While some may have one or two unique features, most people purchasing search marketing services (especially SEO) still don’t have enough knowledge of the space to know if those differentiating factors mean anything to their bottom line.

At the end of the lineup, most search companies will sound the same, leaving you to scratch your head and say, “What now. They all sound the same, so how do I pick?”

For those of you seeking great search companies, you will need to be Vinny Chase. Look for the company that shows some passion, something different, and is at least somewhat discriminating about the opportunities they take on.

If you want a second or third place search firm, ask them to come in and do a presentation or answer an RFP. The ones that jump at the opportunity without qualifying you are hungry for business.

In the search space where rip off artists are everywhere, the GOOD search companies that you WANT to work with will at least want to speak with you before running off to blindly answer an RFP/presentation. The ones that come on in with presentation in hand without first asking you about your goals and how you plan on achieving them, etc, etc might be dangerous, so do your due diligence on them.

All in all, If you want to make Medellin you need Billy Walsh (), not some suit!

Finally, let’s not forget the lesson learned at the end of this episode: After seeing so many canned, unoriginal presentations, Vinny decided to stay with Ari. When he arrived at Ari’s office to tell him, Ari proceeded to deliver the exact same type of canned presentation as all of his competition, prompting Vinny to can him!

The client may think they want a full presentation at the beginning of their search for a great SEO company, like Vinny thought when he began his search for a new agent, but they’re better off getting a company that doesn’t try to fit themselves into a mold and actually takes a chance doing something unique.

Inspiration for this post:
Rachael Levenson – she brought up this episode while in the car coming back from a results & ROI review up with a current client. Rachael, we gotta take more road trips!

Entourage – please come back soon. Without The Wire, Sopranos, and Sex & the City, the lineup is looking weak.

Warning, unedited post forthcoming:

You know after seeing SEO just get crapped on by Amex, and reading this SEOMOZ post, This SEOMOZ list, the recent work by SEM compare & hearing the number of people mention how often they get phone calls from crappy SEO companies almost weekly, combined with the spam that even I get.  I am going to do whatever I can to pitch in and help.

It is pretty obvious that I’ve always tried to do what I could to clean up the space in my own little way, whether it is the conversation I had last week with a prospect who didn’t fit SEER’s model, but I told - Hey, call me before you pick someone I’ll make sure you don’t get hosed to posts & I try to write about the issues that plague our industry when time allows.

But today I am asking for help, this idea is totally off the cuff, from the gut but help me round it out.

I was thinking, can we as SEO/SEM professionals do unbiased audits on companies?  NOT because we want the business ourselves, but because we want to clean up the industry?  I was thinking could we have a group of SEO professionals who fit the following criteria:

• Has 4+ years experience
• Is in-house or works for a company that does little to NO advertising
• If you are asking why to little/no advertising,  I think SEO companies who advertise HEAVILY are needy for new clients, if so I think that adds to the likelihood that they’ll “pitch” people they should be doing unbiased audits for
• Can devote 2 hours per month to review proposals submitted for review (proposals would have to be over 25k for now)
• Has an existing track record of trying to provide unbiased information and help the industry along

So far that is all I got, but remember I am writing this from the gut.

I can tear apart a proposal from an SEO company in 30 minutes, which means if I devote 2 hours a month I can hopefully help up to 4 people  do one of two things:

• Feel more confident about whom they selected
• Realize some more questions they should ask before moving forward (or leaving the company altogether)

So the problems I see:

• People pitching instead of helping
• Confidential proposals shared with outsiders would be problematic (see below)
• Companies wanting to sue instead of fixing the problems that cause them to not cut it (Looks like iCrossing filed a suit against marketingsherpa)
• Involvement / time commitment - many of the people I would hope would come along to help are BUSY, but either way I’ll go this alone if I have to and find a way to tip toe around the landmines.

In theory if we could get 50 SEO’s each able to do 4 reviews a month that is 200 companies reviewed, and maybe privately we can rate the companies so that going forward we’d not have to waste our time.  I know this is hairy, but I just am sick of the complaints about SEO, but they are warranted, SEO companies are shady and I for one want to be a part of the solution instead of the problem.

Any idea on how to keep myself out of the courtroom before I start taking requests?

Thanks!

–Wil

Ok if I put two sites side by side and I told you that one ranked much better than the other given these stats, which one do you think would rank highest?

If you said site B you’d be wrong. Even though the stats KILL site A it is just not the case that the best content always wins out.

How can Suite 101’s page on red wine (Page A), that is a general site with no theme, outrank Winelibrary’s Video on California Pinot Noir (Page B) on a search for California pinot noir??

Because content is NOT king, maybe someday it will be, but right now, that is NOT the case!

What kind of sparked this research was simple, I was following Jason Calacanis’ twitter feed (yes I am addicted to twitter now, see me here) when he praised this video of Gary Vaynerchuk.

Right off the bat, I like Gary. I met him briefly at Affiliate Summit in Vegas but really got a dose of his personality in this video (I have NEVER heard of Winelibrary TV but now I am hooked).

If you watch the video, I LOVE everything he is saying but then… I hear this at 2 minutes 15 seconds: “don’t worry about your SEO rank or how to title your blog posts”, What!!!!!!!!! (Disclaimer: this comment is about 2% of the whole video, I know I am focusing on a small part. The other 98% is awesome.)

Don’t obsess, yes, but don’t worry at all?! I think that is bad advice.

A search for “content is king” on Google showed me this:

In this video where Matt Cutts himself recommends that webmasters think about what users are going to type to find their content. He even recommends getting those keywords into the site. Optimization is NOT bad.

But the search engines are just not smart enough “yet” to make sure that the best content always wins out, and we’re not talking about #1. There can always be more than just 1 site with great content on a topic and there can only be one #1!. I get that.

What I’m talking about top 10, top 20 where so often lower quality sites can creep in. Often times replacing great content sites who have chosen not to optimize and stick to a “content is king” philosophy, where basic best practices are not followed.

Not following best practices as it relates to SEO leads to:

• Poorer results for users all over the web
• Allows lower quality sites to outrank you and pollute the web

Lets give an example of how far the search engines still have to go to determine relevancy:

Have you ever searched for a plural versus a singular and saw the difference in the SERPS? Here’s an example, check out a search for nursing college and nursing colleges.

There is a wide disparity, and I can’t image that Google really believes that Ohio-state.edu should be the second most relevant result for “nursing college” and not worth being in the top 100 for the word “nursing colleges” (as of my search) what if we complicate things by searching for “nursing university”?

With that said, search engines definitely still have a ways to go, and while they are not perfect they NEED a boost now, they need a little help, and honestly I think that that is what good SEO does.

Here’s a step by step example of WHY people with great content who are NOT doing SEO basics, like how to title your blog posts are hurting and not helping! I’ll use Winelibrary.com as an example:

When I type in “red wine” I get this:

• A relevant about.com page (they do SEO basics)
• 2 sites about health
• A Wikipedia page (of course)
• And redwine audio’s site

No wine library in the Top 100! I think they deserve to be somewhere in the top 100, don’t you?!!!

I can’t tell you the countless times I have used search engines to help me find a good bottle of cheap wine while out at the wine store or before I head out for dinner and I NEVER saw Gary’s site. Why are you holding out on me bro?

OK, MAYBE this is not a term that winelibrary should rank well for. So, I did a search for “wine reviews” – This seems to be LOCK STEP with the idea of the show. I love Gary for not being a freaking wine snob, I hate those guys too!

Do a search for “wine reviews” or “wine reviews online” on Google or Yahoo, and they will not show Winelibrary.com and I think that is a BAD thing for wine enthusiasts and people who want to learn about wines. I honestly feel that if Winelibrary.com were to rank well for these terms that it would help wine enthusiasts all over the world.

At this point, forget the business equation of:
higher rank = more traffic & more traffic = more business for winelibrary.com (which is not part of the 80/20 principle Gary mentions)
And forget the ego boost:
higher rank = more visibility & more visibility = more notoriety (also not 80/20)

I kind of imagined a Gary & Matt (Cutts) Conversation going something like this:

I could see the conversation between Gary & Matt Cutts right now:
Matt: I love wine man, your site is great!
Gary: Thanks man, its all about just being real about the wine and the Jets bro, glad I could help, You a wine guy?
Matt: A bit
Gary: What kind of wines you like?
Matt: Well I love pinot noir, but the other day I wanted a great California pinot noir and did a search and found this site:
Some pretty BLAH content, I noticed that you had this video & this video, good stuff.
Do me a favor man, please put the title of the video in your title tag and post a transcript so me and millions of others find your stuff instead of suite 101 and a stale about.com page.
Gary: We don’t need no stinking titles, just good content man! Content is KING, didn’t you see my gigaOM video?
Matt: Well man, you know I do have to take some time out of my schedule to chill with my wife and play with the cat! We’re working on it but for now, just a few best practices will make sure I get better wines after a long day fighting spammers, not to mention you’d actually push the crap further down by helping your stuff move up.
Gary: Content is King man, I don’t need to optimize, that’s SEO stuff!
Matt: Darn, oh well, let me go talk to these 400 spammers who are going to tell me they did nothing wrong, but in the meantime, make my job a bit easier and optimize just a little bit, k?
Gary: Yeah, Go J-E-T-S Jets, Jets, Jets!

Comedic Interlude Over:

Seriously, by not optimizing your site with just basic best practices you are allowing:
Thin affiliate’s, scrapers, and low authority sites to get information (possibly poor information) out to wine lovers & possibly giving them a bad experience with wine.

To his defense Gary didn’t crap on SEO but in passing he briefly mentioned not to worry about putting the right keywords in and let content win out.

So I quickly wanted to respond by saying, I think this new approach to saying hey I am not going to optimize my site and you shouldn’t either can lead to a bad user experience when searching for things on the web.

I also look at the best buys section of wine library (cause I am always looking for a good cheap wine) and notice some good stuff there too, yet because the site isn’t following basic best practices it is not ranking well.

Gary, while I don’t like the Jets, (Go EAGLES) here are some tips to help you sell more wine to help you buy the Jets maybe a day or two earlier:
I would take the best buys section and first do some keyword research to see how people search for lower cost wines, starting with Google Suggest:

Then a little Yahoo Search Assist:

This exercise took me about 3 minutes
Winelibrary.com already has a page that has great wines called “best buys”
When looking at the admittedly quick research it seems that people search for wines under $10, $15 and $20 dollars. Winelibrary already has a page that has wines under $20, could you also develop one for $10 and $15? Because the research shows that there are people out there searching for wines at these prices and you have credibility in helping people select wines, you would be HELPING them.
Heck, maybe you could do a video on wines under these price points. Given the way the economy is, we don’t want to stop drinking great wines, but we may have less money, and I’d listen to your opinions.

If not for growing your business, how about for actually helping people on the Internet find good wines under these price points from a GREAT source, which you are. Remember your 80/20 rule, help me, and many others find great wines, you guys are a credible source, with yes, GREAT CONTENT, even if it needs a little boost to make it findable.

If you don’t want to do it for yourself, do it for us, the wine loving public!

SEO is an industry with unethical, unscrupulous, shady folks at every turn, and I hate what many of those people do to our industry, so I figured I’d post the following list of how SEO companies lie and how to not fall for those lies. So here goes:
SEO Company lie #1 – Their Clients

STOP being lemmings!!! For you who select SEO companies to work with, please don’t fall for the client list! It matters less than you think! Putting a client on your client list doesn’t mean you did a real project for the company listed.

Being invited to speak at a company does NOT make them an SEO client, nor does doing a 5 hour engagement (in my opinion). If a company has impressive client roster, pick the references! Having worked for someone and having a GOOD relationship with them are two different things.

SEO Lie Repellant Tip - Choose your references

While any SEO company will have some references all ready for you, you should ask for at least a couple that YOU PICK from their client list.

The SEO company should say “NO PROBLEM” when it comes to connecting you to at least half of the client you requested, asking for more than 3 references is just weird though so don’t ask for the whole client roster to be a reference. Keep in mind some clients just aren’t into doing the reference thing sometimes and as a result SEO’s may not be able to easily get them, that is why I say half is a good figure to shoot for.

One thing to expect is that a lot of SEO companies don’t work direct with their clients, and often are private labeled, so they may not have direct connections with each client.

The agency that brought them in should easily be able to vouch for their work though. Some SEO companies private label, so you may see some big names that are brought to them by an agency, you should speak with the agency in these instances.

There will always be minor reasons why someone can’t connect you with every requested reference, the bigger issue is how they react to being asked this question. Their gut reaction should be like “no problem”, if they gut reaction is “why” or “ummm, well, err, my contact left there” or some other excuse, be wary and do deeper digging before selecting them.

Again people, stop falling for the client list and big client names, get the details.

Even SEER has to clean up our list a bit, as a smaller search company that knows we can compete with the big boys, we fell into the trap of listing our most recognizable brands only, that will change with our impending re-launch.

SEO Company lie #2 – Their Staff

If you feel more comfortable with a certain size SEO company, that’s fine. I am not here to change your mind, but to help you do a little due diligence and make sure they really have that many people. After seeing an SEO company totally rip off a prospect and just flat out lie about their staff of 25 people I was pissed and thought…

“how can I help people figure out how to catch these liars…I got one way…”

SEO Lie Repellant Tip - USE search engines!!

Of course there are always special relationships, virtual CFO / COO types work with multiple companies, billing people, exec assistants, etc. But when it comes to the core SEO/SEM team, you should be finding members of your SEO/SEM team on LinkedIn, Digg, Del.ico.us, Zoominfo, Sphinn, etc. Hint: search for the company name in addition to the individual’s name, also search for the persons name as one word too, see what I find when I search for dannysullivan vs. Danny Sullivan again, if someone uses their real name, run the search on that too.

Now of course many will have aliases (sugarrae, greywolf, oilman) so they won’t be easy to find, and to be honest you don’t really need to. I have another way if the search engines come up a bit lame.

Use Linkedin (most business people are here)
Here’s my quick check, a few of ANYONE’s search team should be on LinkedIn, if a company says they have a search team of 10 people it is not crazy to think that by typing in the name of the company in LinkedIn and see 4 or 5 of them, right?

Go search for the company name, what comes back?

I think small good companies have no problem saying, “We’re small, and we’re GOOD”. If what makes a company good is their size then they’ve got problems, and now you do too!

SEO Company lie #3 – I know (insert celebrity here) Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Aaron Wall, Neil Patel, Todd Malicoat, Greywolf, etc… knowing them and THEM KNOWING YOU are TWO different things.

Accepting someone on LinkedIn doesn’t mean you are friends!

Sure this adds credibility, but come on people, when someone says they know someone, I would expect that to be a reciprocal relationship. These SEO celebrities probably get 1000+ cards a year from a ton of people and may even have e-mailed some, chatted a bit, but that doesn’t a relationship make.

SEO Lie Repellant Tip – This doesn’t matter!!

To be honest, knowing these guys shouldn’t really mean much for you as a purchaser of SEO services. Why would your SEO team need to know Matt Cutts? I’d like to think that Matt has heard of me or seen my SEO videos - A guy can dream right?

If for some reason who an SEO knows means something to your in your selection process, you are focusing on the wrong things!

LEE Odden did a great piece on the Fallacy of the SEO celebrity.

SEO Company lie #4 – We do social media

Because social media is hot right now, I think everyone says they do linkbaiting / social media, which is fine, we all gotta start somewhere. But here’s how you can decipher one from the next: (Tamar, thanks for the help on this one & please never go back to full time server admin work, LOL!)

Ask your social media strategist for their URLs on:

• Facebook
• Youtube
• Digg
• Del.ic.ous
• Stumbleupon
• LinkedIn
• Twitter (which I hate but recently fell victim to)

If they have accounts for most of these consider them a beginner that has at least done the basics (which is OK, this is a new area and you shouldn’t expect them to have 3-4 years experience in this area).

The question is do they actually have activity and friends and are adding to these profiles with plugins, groups, etc? You really have to be active on these communities to understand the nuances of how they work. Each one is slightly different.

Mid level social media folks should be very active on many of these above, not all but many. Additionally, some of these would be a waste for marketing, but at least a mid level person is involved enough in the community to stay on top of marketing opportunities if they exist.

The top folks at least know of these & what kind of content plays best on these:
• Sk-rt
• Hugg
• Mixx
• Reddit
• Yahoo Answers
• Ballhype

Be careful here, the key is ACTIVITY not just an account. If they were not active recently, maybe it is because they have not found a lot of value there, but at some point there should have been some serious activity.

And yes, the key is activity, but if you’d want to emphasize anything, don’t spread yourself too thin (by using all these services). Do a little and get good at one or two social media sites.

SEO Company lie #5 - We can guarantee XXXXX or we’ll get you XXXX links per month sales pitches

If the guarantee is for keywords, or #1 rankings, or page 1 rankings, NONE can be guaranteed! This is the easiest issue of the 5, but after having been asked in a room of hundreds of people about the effectiveness of a 20 THOUSAND keywords meta tag at a recent affiliate summit, I think basics are still important and worth discussing.

Ok, here’s a simple rule…if you got cold called, DO NOT work with that company. Sure some of you may have exceptions, but this is simple, no cold calls, no marketing e-mails!

No company can guarantee an actual ranking, or an actual number of terms on page one. If you do have a company that gives you a guarantee, ask them if you can select the terms that count, make sure all are two the word phrases and watch them squirm! The issue with guaranteeing page ones is that the SEO company is likely to include some softballs in there to make sure they hit their “guarantee”.

Any company that tells you how many links they expect to get you monthly is the wrong company to work with. Do you really care that they get you 3, 30, or 300 links per month? NO you shouldn’t, it should be about maximizing rankings to maximize leads / sales for keywords that are applicable to your business.

Links are a byproduct, not to mention, getting 3 good strong hard to get links could be worth 10x more than 30 or 300 in terms of how they help you rank.

Disclaimer:
We do have a guarantee though

It is simple. We feel that if by 6 months we don’t have a certain percentage of terms on the first 2 pages of Google / Yahoo / MSN and the client account is in good standing, then we pause payment until we do. We do this because we just don’t feel right taking people’s money if for some reason 6 months in we are not performing.

Don’t fall for other SEO Lies, if you have more please let me know, I plan on developing am ongoing checklist of things to look for when selecting an SEO firm and obviously I am missing a bunch!