I deal with customers every day that want their website to be perfect.

They’ll spend a year trying to get everything exactly like it needs to be.

But they’re missing the game.

They’re sitting on the sidelines trying to get everything perfect on their website and they are not even on the field playing the game.

Think about this!

If you had a choice between two restaurants let’s say one was in the middle of the desert but it’s nice.

Leather sofas, gourmet cooks the works.

If the President of the United States was looking for a nice restaurant this is where he would want to go. However, the last car that drove by there was six months ago.

Or

You had a choice of a restaurant that was sitting in the middle of New York in the middle of all the action, downtown New York. This restaurant had one big fat ugly waitress with a big wart on her nose and a cigarette in her mouth and the cook has worn the same shirt for the last 10 years.

It’s a rundown piece of junk hole in the wall restaurant, but it’s always full of customers.

Which one would you rather stick your life savings in?

The first step is getting traffic to the site and the site making money, then you can start testing fine tuning and tweaking the site from there.

Most people believe their website needs to be perfect before it goes live, but my question is, perfect from whose perspective?

I had a lady the other day that was driving my employees crazy!

Every time they would get the website like she wanted, she would come back with another thousand changes, most conflicting with what they had already given us.  I was forced to get involved. And I say forced, because if I am not interested in the website, customer or topic, it’s really difficult for me to care one way or the other how the site turns out. All that matters is that the customer is happy, and we get paid. I am sorry but that’s just me, but I’ve got to pay the bills.

You see, I believe it is the fine tuning and tweaking that goes into the offer, business model, and website that will make or break a business.

I am talking about the tweaking and fine tuning that can only be done after the site has gone live. When a business launches there should be a group of people driving traffic to the site, analyzing how that traffic reacted to the site, and then tweaking, and fine tuning that website before running another group of test.

The problem is that a lot of companies do not want to be associated with an inferior product or one that is lacking in capabilities and the ones that don’t care about their credibility normally don’t have the money for the testing, tweaking and fine tuning that has to been done daily forever.

I’ve been making my living online for the past 10 years and I can tell you, that without the desire and dedication to push a project through, it would be difficult to start a business from nothing with nothing and it become a success.

The desire that motivated me to start, build and continue running Geeks on Steroids has always been money. The problem is that as the need for money declines you begin looking in what areas your time would be best spent, and normally fighting a new start up isn’t the best use of time.

It’s the reason I started this project and dropped the ball.

At this moment and time I do not have the need, time or desire to start a new project. The amount of time it takes to start making money with a new business could be better spent working with one of my older already established businesses.

However as I write this I am reminded of one business I would be interested in, just for fun.

Here lately (lately being for about the last year or so) I’ve been getting bombarded by these so-called local SEO gurus.

Their idea is, you can find people to market your business to off-line, in your local area and tell them how great the online world is. From there you sell them an SEO package worth thousands of dollars.

My problem with this is that if you knew what you were doing you would be marketing your business online and not offline.

You see, small business owners are not stupid.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got no doubt that with all the professionally written scripts and emails going around these guys can get some small business owners interested, and even sell a couple. But the majority of small business owners will go online and do some research first.

While these guys are killing themselves running around educating potential victims, I’d like to go online and wait to educate that person before they get ripped off. As the lazy local SEO rolls out of the bed, I am sitting online researching, studying, watching and learning about them. While they are meeting potential victims at local breakfast, lunch, and dinner places, I am buying domain names and building websites. By the time they’ve cold called 200 people to get the first person to agree to meet them, I’ve already gotten their spam email, written and article about them and ranked for their name.

They get the local business all excited about the online adventure and when that business owner gets his credit card in his hand and goes online too make that purchase he’s blocked by my site.

My only problem is I have no desire to do SEO, Outsource SEO or Consult with people.   

But done correctly I think I could get a ton of traffic to the site. I guess you could build a website that reviews SEO’s and enforces the good ones and downgrades the bad ones. You could have a back office that allowed the good SEO’s to write articles and leave comments on articles but have it invitation only.

Other words, you would need three people to vouch for you before you could become a member of the site. Once you became a member you would have access to all kinds of free tools, as well as the ability to write blog post that would show on the site under your name or carry on private chats that are not shown to the outside world. You would also have access to a staff of professional SEO’s as well as SEO and conversion tools.

And while all these tools will make the site a home away from home for most SEO’s the fact that the website is getting thousands of visitors per day who are looking for SEO’s will make it a must have for anyone looking to start an SEO business.

This is continued from my local SEO post.

So, there are actually several ways that I could go about doing this; one being by state and or city another would be by industry.

The question is, if I was searching for an SEO business would I search for SEO Georgia, Peachtree SEO or custom homebuilder’s SEO. Most likely I would start with my city and work my way out.

But to build the strongest and best service for my clients I need to focus on an industry. By understanding one industry better than anyone else, it gives me the ability to offer a service to my clients like no one else has ever seen.

I want to totally dominate the industry, and I want everyone in the industry to know who I am.

By going by state I would be dealing with a lot of different types of businesses. I would have to spend too much time thinking about the best way to market each business as well as doing keyword research. And I would have to figure out what would and would not work for that particular industry as far as marketing goes.

However, if we are going by industry then we would need an industry that is not competing from one city to the next. Other words it would be difficult to do a website designer because a website designer can design a website from anywhere in the world. So I could only have one website designer as a client or else I would be competing against myself.

However, if I am building up a chain of local business as an authority in their area and then linking them together, using them to refer clients from one business to the next it could turn into a powerful network.

I am also able to split test ideas and designs across a network of sites. I need an industry that doesn’t compete across state lines and one client is able to pay what my services cost.

So let’s jump into an industry that we’ve seen the local SEO’s claiming is a good one. How about plastic surgery?

Its ten o’clock Tuesday morning and we are about to get started on our new local business adventure.

I am thinking on my feet here, but here’s what I am thinking.

Let’s build a website and set it up for people who are thinking about having plastic surgery.

I want this would be the go to place for people who are interested in either researching plastic surgeons, finding information on plastic surgery, or for that matter finding out anything they wanted to know about plastic surgery.The website needs to be amazing. It needs to be simple to use, light colors with whites and blue highlights.

I want it to include videos; document downloads, featured surgeons, etc.

I want the 50 states on the homepage. I want to be able to click a state and have an option for premier and preferred surgeons, but most of all it has to be super simple to use.

The website visitor needs to be able to interact with the website. This allows them to leave comments and for us, free content. The bigger the site, the more PR juice we are able to control and the more keywords we are able to rank for. But it has to be of the very best quality.

This website will support itself by running ads and selling featured listings. It will also link out to our main SEO and Website design sites for the plastic surgery industry.

It almost seems like there are as many SEO firms as there are small businesses on the Internet. They all tend to promise the same thing – number one rankings for your keywords in just a few short weeks. And some of these SEO firms actually deliver on this promise. Most, however, do not. If you do see your rankings shoot up for a few weeks, it’s best to be a bit suspicious unless there’s a clear explanation like your site structure was off, or the firm was able to get a search engine suspension or ban lifted.

SEO can be very complicated, and it can be fairly easy. Most SEO revolves around creating high quality content, and generating links to your site using intelligent anchor text. For example, you notice that the term CLEAR 4G is getting a significant amount of searches in Google, and you’d like to have your own wireless Internet site get a taste of some of that traffic. In it’s simplest form, SEO would involve obtaining some links back to your site with the anchor text CLEAR 4G. Obviously, SEO can and usually does get a bit more complicated, creating the need for SEO firms.

But the truth is that not every small business needs to hire an SEO firm. And, if you do choose to hire one, you have to be very careful that you don’t get ripped off. With all of the potential dangers that come from SEO, and the mystery surrounding many of the practice’s concepts, it’s quite easy for an SEO firm to destroy your online business. When you invest in an SEO firm, it’s important to understand the dangers, educate yourself on the process, and identify specific goals.

The Dangers of SEO Firms

Of course, the primary danger of hiring an SEO firm is that they may not be able to deliver the results you need to stay competitive. Worse yet, their efforts could end up getting you no results at all. As you likely invested a great deal of money in the services, this can be detrimental to your bottom line. But just how detrimental can they be? Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz.com published a post in 2007 outlining his take on the general range of SEO service prices, and came up with the following for mid-range SEO services:

• Consultation/Review of Site: $2,500
• Link Building: $5,000
• Keyword Research: $500
• Viral Content Creation/Marketing: $7,500
• Monthly SEO Services: $7,500

If you’re shelling out almost $8,000 a month for SEO services that are not effective in giving you a decent ROI, you might as well be flushing money down the toilet.

Of course, there’s another danger of hiring an SEO firm, and one which can be significantly more costly. In early 2011, the New York Times published a revealing report on the fashion giant JC Penney, following allegations that the company had illegitimately gained backlinks when they began ranking highly in SERPs for terms that had many confused, like “bedding” or “area rugs.” As it turns out, an SEO firm that JC Penney hired simply farmed out links from unrelated sites, some of which included topics like casinos and property rentals. Needless to say, a lot of money had to be thrown at the problem, not to mention the amount of money JC Penney was likely paying the SEO firm for such “incredible” results.

And the problems caused by poor SEO can follow your site for what seems like an eternity, with bad neighborhood links festering in your backlink profile like scarlet letters. Ignoring the initial cost of the service itself, how much time and money will you spend undoing the potential harm to your website. It’s likely to be far more than the SEO firm could have hoped to make off you. Fortunately, however, there are some things you can do to protect yourself from such dangers.

Learn a Little SEO

It’s not all that complicated to learn the basics of SEO, and we’re not talking about becoming a guru. The more you know about SEO, however, the better service you can hope to get from an SEO firm. If SEO is done right, it’s not a matter of the tactics being some big mystery. Instead, any meaningful SEO task takes a great deal of time – time you should be spending on other aspects of your business. Link building is an especially arduous task that is best outsourced to an SEO firm.

Learn how anchor text, content, backlinks, and basic site code all factor into your overall site. If you understand how keywords work, you might not even need to hire an SEO firm to perform a keyword report for your site – you’ll already have an idea of what you’d like to target. Better still, you’ll know if the SEO firm you hire is completely missing the mark when they deliver their first reports.

There are countless good articles on basic SEO, and a lot of very poor articles. Business Insider has a list of the 10 Basic SEO Tips to Get You Started that is a quick primer into the rudimentary aspects of SEO. Any articles on sites like SEOBook.com are also excellent resources written by one of the industry’s leading experts.

Outline Some Basic SEO Goals

Before you approach an SEO firm, make sure you outline some basic goals (another area where some small knowledge of SEO can help). They should be as tangible as possible. For example, don’t approach an SEO firm saying “I’d like to get more traffic to my site.” Instead, say “I’d like to appear on page one of Google’s search results for the phrase rubber ducks.” If you’re interested in building links, come up with a general idea of your budget, and what you expect to receive. Some SEO firms will charge per link, while others will charge a contract fee, sometimes splitting it into chunks.

If possible, outline what’s acceptable and what’s not. If you can, try to reserve the right to reject any links that you do not feel are legitimate.

As long as you have some basic knowledge of SEO, set some reasonable and tangible goals, and monitor the project closely, there’s no reason to fear SEO firms. But be aware of the dangers and be prepared to make changes if things aren’t going as planned. Your SEO firm should provide regular updates on their progress, as well as clear accounting for any bills they send. Keep your expectations reasonable, but don’t let an SEO firm gouge you for unnecessary services.

In my last post I talked about how important keywords are for your business.

By knowing which keywords are relevant to your business and what keywords your potential customers are searching for when trying to find the type of products or services you offer, helps you increase the chances of being found by the people who are searching for the things you sell. This means you get quality traffic to your website.

It is difficult to know exactly which keywords will get the most relevant people to your website but by determining the popularity and competitiveness of those keywords and testing and analyzing how effective the keywords are in drawing the visitors to your website, you can figure it out.

So the first thing to do is to make sure that the right people are finding your businesses online.

Unless you are a big company like Coca-Cola your business name is not going to be what people are searching for when looking for your services and products.

So…when you choosing keywords based on relevancy, for example; if someone wanted to start a web design business a good keyword would not be design.

1. It isn’t very relevant. Someone could be looking for car designs, boat designs, house designs, so chances of someone not becoming overwhelmed and redefining their search is pretty slim. About as slime as someone searching for designs who is actually looking for a web designer.
2. As a small to medium-size business we want a less competitive keyword. Something more specific and more related to our business. A lot of people refer to these as longtail keywords. People determine how competitive a keyword is by how the number of searches that are being done on that keyword every month.

There are a lot of tools online that can be used to determine how competitive a specific keyword is.

An important factor in picking a keyword is how relevant it is to your business. But ranking for a keyword that no one is searching for is also a waste of time because chances are it’s not going to driving traffic to your business.

It’s about finding a balance between being relevant and being difficult to rank for. To start with you need to find the best ten keywords that match your business, really well.