I’ve been noticing some disturbing happening in the Search Engine Optimization market. As we talk with potential clients and look at competitors, it seems that a lot of organizations are popping up and selling pay-per-click as search engine optimization. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with pay-per-click. In fact, we use pay-per-click (PPC) on a regular basis and have clients that are seeing a great ROI from PPC. My issue is that organic search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC are different things. Very different…
 

Pay-Per-Click is exactly what it sounds like - you buy ads from the search engines and pay each time a user clicks on your ad. Organic Search Engine Optimization is the process of modifing portions of a web site to help the site show up better in search engines. The big difference is where PPC ads show up versus where organic results show up. In most search engines, PPC ads are displayed to the right of the main search results and up above the search results, in a light colored background. Organic results do not cost anything when the user clicks on them.
 

So, what I’ve been seeing is an increase in organizations that call their service Search Engine Optimization, however, they are essentially just setting up Pay-per-click campaigns for clients. The problem is that a lot of the clients purchasing these services don’t understand the difference between PPC and SEO and they’re not being educated. These organizations are calling it SEO because that’s what people want. I simply don’t feel it’s right to sell something to a client calling it one thing when it’s really something else.
 

At Creative Anvil, we prefer to educate clients on the difference between PPC and SEO and point out the pros and cons of each. PPC can end up costing more in the long run and has a lower click-through ratio, but organic results can take time to take hold. A good Search Engine Marketing program will include both PPC and SEO, to ensure good exposure throughout the search engines for the identified keywords.

I was recently setting up a new account for a new Pay-Per-Click client in Microsoft AdCenter. We’ve been fairly busy lately, and this is work that I can do from anywhere, so I decided to do it one evening from home. I have a Macintosh at home (and at the office). I do not have a spare Windows computer, nor do I have VMware on my home computer. Essentially, from home, I have no access to a Windows computer. No big deal, right? I mean, after all, AdCenter is just a web site, so as long as I have a web browser, I’m in good shape, right? Wrong. Let’s explore what happened…
 

I got almost all of the way through the sign-up process and ran into this error:
 

Basically, it says that I must accept the sign up charge. Hmm..I didn’t see that anywhere. Let’s scroll down and find the problem.
 

Oh, look, there’s the problem. But…there’s no checkbox. Or text. The little exclamation point is where there SHOULD be a checkbox for me to accept the charges, but it’s not there. So, I figure, well, this is Firefox on a Mac, I’ll give Safari a shot. Surely it will work in there.

I fired up Safari and went to the main AdCenter page, clicked on Sign up today, which then brought up this page:
 

So, naturally, I clicked ‘Sign Up Now’. Guess what? In Safari, you can’t even click the button. Clicking on it just does nothing.
 

I was completely dumbfounded by this, so I tried it the next day at work, again on my Mac. Same issues. Unbelievable.
 

This is an excellent example of why usability and testing are so important. The Macintosh market is growing every month, and here we have one of the largest companies in the technology industry that has built a product that only works on Windows.
 

And Microsoft wonders why Google is completely obliterating them in this market…

Most professionals in the search engine optimization business are hesitant to give any sort of  guarantee of results. Why? It’s simple - search engines are out of our control. We can tweak sites based on what we know about the search engine algorithms — that is, what we think we know. However, when it all comes down to it, very few people on this earth know exactly how Google works, and what changes they’re planning on implementing next week.
 

I recently ran across a great example of what to be cautious of. A ’search engine optimization’ firm was guaranteeing page 1 rankings within 7 business days. That’s hardly enough time for Google to crawl your pages after changes, much less for Google to get them indexed and for results to start showing. So, instantly, something is wrong. And then, they offer this for $100/month. That’s awfully cheap for that type of guarantee.
 

I did some digging on this companies site and found some interesting information. Here are a few of the items that jumped  out at me:

So what is odd about that, you ask? Well, one of the biggest components to search engine optimization is to ensure you are focusing on keywords that users actually search for. Many sites are not optimized with keywords based on user search activity. For example, say my web site has the term “red and black armchair coffee mug” on one page 20 times. Well, that’s a pretty obscure term, and therefore would be really easy to optimize. I could be #1 in Google and Yahoo for that term, but it doesn’t mean that anyone will search for it.
 

The second thing that really caught my eye was this:

OK, so they guarantee that for some specific term, that they pick without any input from you, you will show up on page one of the paid or non-paid listings. With $100/month, I will guarantee that you’ll show up in the sponsored or non sponsored areas, too! They state that they will email you your Page 1 listings. So, if within 6 days you’re not showing up organically, all they have to do is create an Adwords campaign and purchase a keyword with a high cost per click to ensure you show up on the first page. Not rocket science, and again, not search engine optimization.
 

I want to be clear - Pay-per-click (PPC) ads through Google Adwords and Yahoo work great. We’ve had tremendous results with them, both for ourselves and for clients. Ultimately, organic optimization seems to produce the best results and ROI, but PPC is great, too. My issue is not that this firm is doing PPC, but how they’re selling it — very deceptively.
 

I wanted to see how I could do, so I found one of their clients, via a testimonial on their site. I looked at his supposed ‘keywords’ and determined it was a pretty obscure term. I decided to write a quick blog on it and to create a quick 1 page web site to see if I could get myself onto page 1 in Google for the same term.
 

Guess what? A few months later, I’m still #5 in Google (organically) for that search term. It took a few weeks, but my site popped in there and has held strong since — without any further tweaking. That tells me that that specific term is pretty obscure and not very competitive. What’s the term you ask? Contact me at Creative Anvil and I’d be glad to share the term with you.
 

Joe Koenig

Principal

Creative Anvil

Web Design, Search Engine Optimization