I get this phone call at least once a week... sometimes twice a week... and it annoys the HECK out of me every time! The calls goes something like this...
"Hi - I'm ___ from the Internet-Marketing-Gurus Company! We can make your website more profitable by Search-Engine-Optimizing it for you! Blah-Blah-Blah-Blah..."
There are TWO THINGS that annoy me about this phone call...
The first thing is that I picked up the phone to answer the call. My most precious asset is TIME and this call just wasted 1 minute of that asset. Usually they aren't as direct as the above so they waste 2, 3, or 4 minutes before I find out that this is why they called.
Like the call this morning... It was from "Discover", so I thought they were calling about our merchant account that allows us to take Discover cards. Nope. Discover apparently owns a search engine optimization service of their own, OR they sell their customers names and phone numbers to some SEO company that calls and claims to be affiliated with Discover.
By the time I have figured out who is really calling and why, their telemarketer is well into their pitch about how they can solve our problems. Wow. Pretty amazing. How do they know I have a problem with search engine optimization? Do they know how much traffic we get? How many content pages we have? How many number 1 spots we have in Google?
No.
But they know all about search engine optimization and they can solve our problem!
By now the telemarketer has said something stupid that reveals what they personally know about marketing on the web equals zero. For instance, this morning's caller said "We want to burst the notion that keyword meta tags don't matter. Only 2 of the search engines don't currently look at metatag keywords, over 700 others do!"
Okay - I should have just hung up the phone but I couldn't resist! "Which two don't look at keyword metatags?" I asked. (Already knowing the answer.)
"Google and Yahoo" she says proudly!
"Great" I said... "Now tell me this - how much traffic do those other 700 search engines direct on the internet?"
Silence.
More silence.
"I'm sure I have that here..." she says, voice trailing off.
"The answer is 71% of all serches are done on Google and Yahoo as of April 2006 and the Google market share is growing by about 1% every 60 days" I said. "So WHY would I want to optimize my website for the 29% of the engines that are losing market share every day rather than optimizing it for Google, the 800-pound gorilla?"
We finished our conversation in less than 5 minutes total time and I'm back to work on something important.
And that brings up the second thing that annoys me about these phone calls. I didn't even get into with the telemarketer. But I will bring it up with you because you need to know this...
Search Engine Optimizing a website is not something you do AFTER you build the site!
Analogy: That's like building a house, then when it's finished, deciding you want to add electricity, plumbing, heating systems and a basement! In order to do that, you have to rip out all the drywall, drill holes through lumber that's already nailed in place, crawl around in places you don't want to crawl through, jack up the framework, dig a hole under the house, fill it with concrete, ... etc. You get the idea.
It's easier and cheaper to bulldoze the house and start over again from scratch, this time planning for the plumbing, electricity, etc from the start.
It's the same way with a website!
You don't want to build a site then once it's done start making it attractive to Google. It's too late! You're better off scrapping that dog of a site and starting over again fresh.
Here's the bottom line in two points...
1) If you're going to build a website, make sure you build it with search engine optimization built-in from the get-go! Don't try to retrofit an existing site.
2) When the telemarketers call, let your answering system pick up the call.
(If you're building a website, start with a website building tool that builds search engine optimization into the process! I know of two that do this for you... one of those programs is SBI! )
