Take billboards, for example. Prices vary, but in a decent urban area you’ll pay anywhere from $2K to $5K per month or more for a billboard. That’s about the same as what you would pay for a decent SEO campaign, but the SEO campaign excels in two ways; 1) you actually know what you’re getting (with a billboard you can only guess at the results unless you’re driving traffic to a unique phone number or website or using a code or something for tracking purposes), and 2) the billboard is only affecting a local audience, whereas SEO is national/global. Now, for a business that only sells locally, the billboard might be the better route, or at least a good option, but for a national company there’s no comparison between the value of SEO and a single billboard.

If you want to go national with advertising, you can look to radio, TV, phone books, magazines, and newspapers. But here you’re looking at astronomical costs. If you want to take out a full page ad in a national magazine with 100,000 subscribers you might pay tens of thousands of dollars. And that’s just to run your ad once. Again, that might be a good option, but you might get 12 months of SEO for the same price, and you can track the results better and you stand a good chance of getting more results.

I’m not saying SEO is better than everything else out there no matter what–different situations require different solutions. But when companies are looking to cut costs and can’t afford expensive advertising with dubious results, SEO logically must begin to look more and more attractive because of it’s higher potential for a positive ROI and easy-to-track results. What are your thoughts?

Disclaimer: I’m not really calling you a liar, cheat, or dishonest person. But I had to get your attention somehow because I want answers to this question, and apparently the post title worked. And if you use one of the tools mentioned in the post title, there’s at least a chance that you are doing something dishonest. First, try out this simple self-test to determine whether you’re an honest person or not:

1. Do you steal things from stores?

2. Do you tell lies or misrepresent things?

3. Have you ever charged a client for SEO services you never provided?

4. Have you ever made outrageous claims you knew were false about your SEO services, just to get a client to sign up?

5. Have you ever signed a contract and then violated it because it was beneficial to you and you knew you could get away with it?

6. Have you ever used Web CEO, SpyFu, SEOmoz’s Rank Checker, or any other similar programs?

If you’re thinking that question #6 doesn’t seem to fit with the others, then you’re where I was a few months ago. But then I started doing some research and stumbled onto section 5.3 of Google’s Terms of Service, which reads:

5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.

Tools like Web CEO, SpyFu, and SEOmoz’s Rank Checker (as near I can tell) all perform automatic queries of Google. They also display data from Google within an interface that is not provided by Google. Therefore, these tools violate the Google Terms of Service, as do you when you use these tools.

There seem to be five primary arguments for ignoring section 5.3 of the Google Terms of Service:

1. I’ll never get caught or be punished.

2. Everyone else is doing it.

3. It doesn’t hurt anyone.

4. Google doesn’t care anyway.

5. The intent of section 5.3 isn’t to stop programs like SpyFu or SEOmoz’s Rank Checker.

Let’s take these one at a time.

1. I’ll never get caught or be punished. The same rationalization is used by many, if not most, criminals. Would you say that somebody who has a foolproof way to steal cars and never get caught is an honest person? Of course not. Whether or not someone ever gets caught or punished has nothing to do with whether they are honest or not.

2. Everyone else is doing it. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it an honest act. The same logic has been used for downloading pirated music and movies, doing drugs, and killing Jews.

3. It doesn’t hurt anyone. To say something doesn’t hurt anyone is speculative at best, and merely a way to make one feel better about actions they are uncomfortable with but want to justify somehow. People use the same logic to steal from Wal-Mart. After all, they’re just a big corporation, so how does me stealing some batteries hurt anyone? That argument can be made, but it is, admittedly, a more difficult argument to make when it comes to automatically querying Google. But it doesn’t matter. Whether or not it hurts Google or anyone else doesn’t change the fact that automatically querying Google is a violation of their terms of service.

4. Google doesn’t care anyway. Just as with #3, the same goes for claiming that Google doesn’t care. First of all, you’re making an assumption that may or may not be true, and second, it doesn’t matter. Violating an agreement is breaking your word and being dishonest, regardless of how the person or entity you’ve made that agreement with feels about it. If they don’t care, then they can let you out of the agreement, but for someone to make an agreement and then break it based on the assumption the other party doesn’t care is still dishonest.

5. The intent of section 5.3 isn’t to stop programs like SpyFu or SEOmoz’s Rank Checker. This is the only way out, but it’s a hard case to make. In order to say that you are not breaking your agreement with Google, you would have to somehow claim that Google does not mean what they seem to be saying. That the words they are using mean something other than what those words generally mean. You would have to be able to prove that when Google says they don’t want you to “access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google” that this does not apply to Web CEO. You would have to be able to read the words “You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers)” and interpret that as not applying to how SEOmoz’s Rank Checker gets its data. If you can do that, I’d like you to explain it to me, because I can’t see any way around it.

So what is the intent of section 5.3? My opinion is that it truly is not intended to target services like Web CEO or SpyFu. I believe Google included section 5.3 as a safety measure to give them the ability to prosecute anyone doing such things if Google deems it worth pursuing. I can imagine a meeting between Google and their lawyer going something like this:

Google: “Hey, what about this section 5.3? Why do we need that in there?”

Lawyer: “Because you might need to use it some day.”

Google: “What do you mean? I can’t see any reason why I’d need to stop anyone from automatically querying us? I mean, I know these tools like Web CEO and SEOmoz Rank Checker are doing it, but we don’t care about that stuff.”

Lawyer: “You might not see a reason today, and even I can’t think of a reason, but you should put it in there any way just in case. Something may happen that you can’t foresee that damages your business and that section may be the only way you can prosecute the offender and stop it.”

I’m 99.99% sure if Web CEO or any other company talked to Google and Google were completely transparent, Google would say “Go ahead, we don’t care.” But of course Google can’t say that publicly, because that could be used against them in a court of law if they ever did want to sue someone based on section 5.3.

If my opinion is correct, then that’s pretty annoying, isn’t it? After all, how are we supposed to track rankings for our client? By checking them manually? What if we’ve got 50 clients and each one has 200 keywords they’re tracking? Well, then you’ve got a problem. But people have problems all the time. What if everybody said “Hey, I believe in being honest when it’s in my favor, but if it benefits me to break my word then I don’t think that’s dishonest.” That’d be a nice world to live in, wouldn’t it?

Honest people are honest whether or not they’ve got problems and regardless of the money involved. Here’s what real honesty looks like.

Jon Huntsman owned the largest private business in the world–Huntsman Chemical. He’s mostly retired now and is funneling his billions of dollars into curing cancer. In 1986 Jon Huntsman agreed to sell 40% of his company to Emerson Camp, the chairman and CEO of Great Lakes Chemical for $54 million. They shook hands on the deal, but then Emerson lagged on getting the paperwork together. Six months later, nothing had been done on the deal, and Huntsman’s company had done spectacularly well and some things had happened with the economy so that in that short time period that 40%, instead of being worth $54 million, was now worth $225 million, or $171 million more than it was worth just six months earlier.

Emerson came to Huntsman and said that he knew the business was worth about $200 million. Huntsman told him no, it was worth about $225 million. Emerson suggested they split the difference, and that he would pay $125 million for the 40% of the business. Huntsman told him no, he wouldn’t do that deal. He told him he had shook his hand six months earlier and told him he would sell him that part of the business for $54 million, and that’s what he was going to stick to because he had given his word.

So are you an honest person? If you like to think that you are, and you use these SEO tools, then what decision are you going to make that will allow you to sleep at night?

Now, is there some way out of this? Perhaps. A company can try to make an agreement with Google so that they have permission to automatically query the search engine. I’ve tried that myself, but have been unable to get a response. And so far I haven’t found anyone else who has been successful either. If you know of someone who has made such an agreement, I’d love to talk to them. Or if you see some other way around this that allows a company to automatically query Google without violating the terms of service, I’d love to hear about it, because I like these tools and would like to be able to use them without feeling like I’m a dishonest person. I would love to find a way around section 5.3, I just don’t see it.

Update: Since posting this, it has come to my attention that there is no “About OrangeSoda” paragraph at the end of the press release, although there is one for REMAX, which might indicate that this press release wasn’t even issued by OrangeSoda, but perhaps by REMAX, which affects some of the comments I’ve made below about OrangeSoda.

Any SEO professional knows that it’s easy to get a company ranking well in Google for that company’s name, especially if that company’s name is present in the URL the company uses for its website. For example, if I have a company named Purple Monkey Dishwasher and I own the URL PurpleMonkeyDishwasher.com, then it’s going to be a snap to get the #1 spot in Google when people search for “purple monkey dishwasher”. But what if Purple Monkey Dishwasher is a bike shop located in Tampa, Florida? What good does it do me to rank well for “purple monkey dishwasher” in that case? The only benefit I get is that people who already know who I am will be able to find me. But they’re going to find me anyway if they’re looking for me. The problem is I’m not going to get any new customers.

That’s more or less what is being trumpeted as search engine optimization success in this press release from Utah-based SEO firm OrangeSoda, only the company is REMAX of New Jersey. As stated in the release “When people search Google or another search engine for homes for sale in new jersey, or on our brand name, they’ll see RE/MAX New Jersey at the top of the list. Thanks to our partnership with OrangeSoda we’re seeing top results on many real estate keywords,” said Jeanie Farrell of RE/MAX New Jersey.

Now there’s the thousand-dollar question; is the REMAX site really showing up in the top results for “many real estate keywords” or just the company name? According to the Google Keyword Tool the top five real estate/homes for sale related keywords with accompanying search volumes are:

new jersey real estate – 368,000
new jersey homes – 201,000
new jersey homes for sale – 110,000
new jersey homes sale – 110,000
homes in new jersey – 22,200

By comparison searches for “remax new jersey” total approximately 2,900 per month.

The New Jersey REMAX website doesn’t show up in the top 10 search results for any of these keywords, and doesn’t show up in the top 100 search results for the fifth. To be fair, the site is showing up in the 10-20 results for the first four keyword searches. While not exactly “top results” you could make the argument that the site is “on it’s way” to the top, assuming the current rankings are an improvement over what they were before REMAX New Jersey started working with OrangeSoda. Or I suppose you could even make the argument that those are “top rankings” if by “top rankings” you mean anything within the first 20 results.

What really matters, of course, is whether New Jersey REMAX is getting more business as a result of this campaign than they would otherwise. Judged from that perspective, it could be that coming up in the top results for searches for “REMAX” could be generating a net gain, and that being in the top 20 results for keywords that are heavily searched also generates results good enough to justify the expense of OrangeSoda’s SEO services.

Why bother posting about this at all? Primarily because I think it’s misleading. The release puts forth the idea that OrangeSoda is doing great things for REMAX New Jersey by getting them ranking well for searches for their company name, which isn’t much of a challenge, nor is it likely to generate much in the way of real improvement to the client’s revenues. Ranking for the other terms listed above is likely to provide real value
for the client, but rankings that aren’t in the top 10 aren’t exactly newsworthy.

The bottom line is that if you’re a client looking to hire an SEO company, make sure you’re getting a true positive return on your investment, based on a clear comparison of what results you would be getting without the SEO firm vs. with them.

But the problem is there’s no way for Google–I should say “no effective way”–to differentiate between a paid link and one that isn’t paid for.
For example, take my SEO firm’s corporate blog. There’s a linkage section on the left, with all sorts of links that apparently have nothing to do with the content on the blog. I mean, what does a pain pump attorney have to do with an SEO firm? Well, it happens to be one of our clients. Are they paying for the link? No, not as such. That is, they never arranged with us to have a link on that website. It’s not part of their contract. I could remove the link and they would still pay the same monthly fee for our services. But of course we want to help our clients however we can, so we add links to their sites on some of the web properties we own, like our Utah Firms site.

However, the Utah Firms site also has some paid links on it that are placed there through a text link broker who shall remain nameless. Can you tell which links are purchased and which aren’t? As a human being you might take a guess, and you might be right, but you might be wrong. And if Google is trying to develop software to figure it out, I can’t imagine how it would be able to detect paid links unless it can look at the source code prior to it being processed server side.

On many of MWI’s web properties if Google were to start penalizing the sites or the sites the links point to they would be penalizing “innocent” sites along with the “guilty” ones. And if they’re going to rely on informers, then they open the system up to a whole new front in terms of black hat SEO.

So in the end, can Google discriminate? I guess they can try, but so far I don’t see any evidence they can do it successfully without throwing the baby out with the SEO bathwater.

Full service 1-on-1 SEO marketing since 1996. Check out comprised month-to-month packages at SEOgame.com (Eg. $375 package will start out at 2,220 manual directories and 550 manual article directory submissions) Manual submission services will provide permanent 1-way links and include 3 project managers and 17 site submitters to get the job done right with lots of worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrk! Get to the top of the in less than a month for your top keywords today.

If you’re shopping for SEO services and you hear this type of pitch, you might figure “Hey, it’s only $375 and maybe I’ll get something out of it even though it sounds too good to be true.” But what you should be thinking is “For $375 I could take my wife out for a really, really nice night on the town, and the ROI would be higher to boot.”

Let’s take this apart piece by piece:

1. “comprised” – Beware of SEO firms that don’t use the English language correctly. To use the word “comprised” in this sentence makes no sense.

a. To consist of; be composed of: “The French got … French Equatorial Africa, comprising several territories” Alex Shoumatoff.
b. To include; contain: “The word ‘politics’ … comprises, in itself, a difficult study of no inconsiderable magnitude” Charles Dickens.
c. Usage Problem To compose; constitute: “Put together the slaughterhouses, the steel mills, the freight yards … that comprised the city” Saul Bellow.

2. $375 gets you “2,220 manual directories and 550 manual article directory submissions”. Perhaps their English is a bit off again and by “manual” they mean “automatic” or “spamming”. But let’s assume they’ve got the wording right and they are really claiming to submit your site manually to 2,220 directories and submit one or more articles about you to 550 article directories. Should you believe such a claim?

Submitting a site manually to a directory takes, at a minimum, 45 seconds, if not a full minute. But let’s be generous and say it only takes 45 seconds. 45 seconds x 2,220 = 27.75 hours. And let’s suppose that you have to write the article and give it to them, and that submitting that article takes 30 seconds, which is being incredibly generous. That would be another 4.58 hours, meaning these people are promising approximately 32.33 hours of mind-numbing work for $375, or about $11.60/hour.

As they say, this is work that Americans won’t do. So in case point #1 didn’t make it clear, you’re not dealing with people in the US, but hey, I’ve outsourced work to other countries and sometimes I’ve had good results, so I’m not saying outsourcing to India means you’ll get junk back. Junk is junk and American SEO companies can provide junk too, the only difference being they’ll charge you more for it.

3. But here’s the real problem–if these services worked, everyone would be doing it. But I would guess that if you surveyed the 200 leading SEO firms, not a single one is outsourcing their link building to companies like this. If it worked, it’d be great for them. They could charge their clients $20K, do zero work, pay $375, and their clients would be happy and they’d make a bundle of money. Heck, I’d do it, but instead I’m doing the work myself or I’ve got a guy I’m paying $800 per month, per website, for link building services, and I don’t expect to get more than a few links out of this guy per month. The fact is, these types of services don’t get the results that lead to genuine SEO success. That is, they don’t lead to increased numbers of quality incoming links, and therefore they don’t lead to higher rankings, and therefore they don’t lead to increased amounts of traffic. They might submit your site and some articles to article sites, but these aren’t the directories you want to be listed in, nor the article sites you want stuff on. There’s a chance the directories these people are submitting to might even hurt your rankings.

So next time you read a claim that seems too good to be true, think about it a little, and then maybe take your wife out for a nice steak instead.

Please post anonymously (unless you really want to reveal who you are) the following information:

Yearly salary / compensation
Years of SEO experience
Inhouse SEO vs SEO agency
Brief job description (management, business development, specialist, all around expert, etc.)

Oh, and if you don’t live in Utah, still feel free to post your information, just let us know what state your work in.

If you had done a search for “utah seo” two years ago you would have found a handful of companies offering SEO services, and most of them were like us, web design or web development firms that offered SEO as a secondary service to the primary services. Today, most of the companies coming up in the listings are full-on SEO companies offering search engine optimization as their primary service. I suspect a similar trend would be seen if you researched other geographic areas as well.

So who cares, what does it matter? Well, for SEO firms, it means the scene is more competitive. You have to do more to stay on top of the game. I used to do virtually nothing to maintain the #1 spot for all the keywords I wanted, now I actually have to do some work, darn it. But a flood of SEO providers isn’t bad news, it’s good. It’s a sign that there’s a legitimate market that’s growing, and if I can keep my firm in the upper rankings, then that’s a good thing. I’d rather be getting 5% of a huge market than 50% of a small one.

For those purchasing SEO services it’s also a good sign. More competition means lower prices and higher quality (too bad people don’t recognize that this basic principle of economics applies to our public school system as well). So it’s win win. The only losers, perhaps, are the firms that offered SEO services as a secondary service but which now find the market too competitive to maintain a foothold, but hey, even they win. After all, I stopped offering content management systems and custom web app development recently, primarily because I was having more success with SEO, so now those firms don’t have to compete with my firm for those jobs any more.

So I generally write content for my potential customers rather than other people in the SEO industry. Part of that is because, as I said, I’m more interested in developing customer relationships as opposed to relationships with other SEO types, but it’s also because it’s easier. I mean, I have to come up with something really good to impress somebody in the SEO community, but impressing customers takes a lot less effort. Seriously.

But recently everyone seems to be changing course. SEOmoz has been updating their beginner guide and I’ve been seeing a number of other blog posts being made that specifically target those who are just getting started with search engine optimization and probably aren’t intending to become SEO experts, but rather just do some SEO for their own one-off project or their current employer.

Then again, maybe it’s just me noticing what’s been there all along. Got any SEO resources for beginners? Post ‘em.

I haven’t used it beyond creating an account, but it seems well put together and shows promise, if you’re into this type of thing. How’s that for a testimonial?

What I mean is that as I frequent SEO websites and read the SEO blogs I see a lot of very detailed discussions about the science of search engines, how they work, and how you can refine your SEO strategy down to the tiniest aspects. But when it comes to making money as an SEO firm, how important is it to stay up to date on all these tiny details?

Sure, it’s fun to know all the little secrets, and it certainly doesn’t hurt unless you become so obsessed with the minutiae that you ignore the big stuff, but when the vast majority of the potential market is doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the way of SEO, I have to wonder if us SEO professionals are getting way ahead of the game.

Maybe your situation is different than mine. Perhaps you have clients in a hyper-competitive industry and every little difference counts. Most of my clients are such that I can go in and tweak some title tags, clean up their code, write some content, recruit a few backlinks, and within a few weeks they’ve shot up in the rankings and start getting real results. I don’t have to dig into the latest and greatest techniques, I can focus on the very simple aspects of SEO that have been well-known for years, and in most cases that gets the job done.

This doesn’t mean I ignore what’s going on and I’m not saying you can ignore the websites, blogs, and message boards talking about everything SEO. There’s no telling when something I’m doing might turn out to be wrong and I need to know that as soon as possible. There’s no telling when some new tool might come out that makes my job easier. All I’m saying is that for most of the clients I see, keeping it simple is better until such time as their industry really gets on board with SEO and more sophisticated approaches are called for. And I guess the other thing I’m saying is that I think there is a hugely underserved market out there of small-time clients who could benefit from very simple SEO techniques provided at low cost, but so many of us seem focused on getting the higher-end clients that I think we’re missing out on the larger opportunity.