Any experience with hiring search engine optimizers?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Note: I have absolutely no clue where to put this post.

Redfly Marketing is a firm that evidently does SEO, SEM, and PPC management. I have come to the firm conclusion that I am totally dense when it comes to all three of those things and that my business is going to flounder and die without them.

For those of you that don’t know, I operate Georgia Insurance Options, selling health and life insurance from home. While I make a decent living at it (barely), I know other agents that do a significant amount of business solely from pulling people into their website organically and through PPC advertising. My website generates almost no business, which means that a very large portion of my business model is simply not performing.

So, I’m looking into hiring Redfly Marketing. Any thoughts? Thoughts on other SEO/SEM/PPC firms, or the practice of hiring them in general? And, why not, thoughts on SEO/SEM/PPC on a personal level?

2

According to their website:

Both of these things you can do yourself - organic (natural) SEO and Google AdWords. Or you can pay someone to do it for you (such as Redfly). It depends on how much money you have to spend on outsourcing it, or how much time and patience you have to learn about it and do it yourself…

I am not an SEO expert by any means, but I am a web designer and I offer SEO services as part of the package when I do web sites (disclaimer: I am NOT trying to sell my services!!) So this is just my take on it…

I don’t think SEO companies can really guarantee anything that they promise you because they have no real control over search engines. There are a whole bunch of SEO “best practices” that you can just build into your site yourself with little effort. I will get to that later…

Of course, if you want ads to pop up in Google search results, you will have to pay for it, and in a business like insurance where there are many many players, it’s going to cost a lot of money to get your ad on top of the list, where people will see it and click on it. And you will have to pay when people click, whether or not they buy your product or not. For a small business like yours, that may not be cost effective.

It’s my impression that SEO firms like these promise a lot which they probably cannot deliver, and they WAY overcharge for simple things you can do yourself.

Have you gotten a quote from them? If so, is it within your price range, and what are they offering you??

I will be back shortly with some do-it-yourself SEO tips…

3

Let me also ask, what led you to this particular company? I noticed they are based in Ireland. Seeing that you are in Georgia, USA, perhaps you would want to hire a US-based company? Just a thought… there are SO many out there.

But actually I would advise you try some things yourself first before paying money. More on that in a minute!!

4

I found RedFly reading articles about SEO in general. I liked their writing style in some article I read, although I’ve failed to bookmark it.

And my efforts to this point with SEO, SEM and PPC have…failed. I’m not sure if it’s just a lack of patience, but at this point I’m at an absolute loss as to what I’m doing wrong. It’s not that I haven’t tried to do it myself - it’s that I think that my ROI would be higher if I focused on just selling insurance, not trying to do it all myself. Stick with what you’re good at and whatnot, you know?

5

Some SEO tips, in no particular order:

Have as many links to your site as possible, and use keywords in these links. For example, “georgia insurance” would be a very desirable keyword, so if you have a link to your site on another site, have the link contain those words.

Spread your links honestly! You can’t pay other sites to link to yours! Google will catch onto this and blacklist you. They have to be real, honest links. So, for example, go to blogs about insurance and post useful, helpful and knowledgeable comments with a link to your site. Also, go to any and all of your friends and family who have web sites and have them link to your site. This can include MySpace and Facebook pages too (although the impact may be minimal, anything helps).

Little things in the html coding of your page help. For example, use <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc. for headings, and have your headings include important keywords. Google puts more weight on headings than regular text.

For example, on your page, your top headline “Reader’s Choice: Top Ten Health and Life Insurance Questions” is not wrapped in a <h1> tag, it’s wrapped in this: <div style="" class=“title”></div>. Same with the secondary heading “Full Dental Coverage in Georgia,” etc.

In your stylesheet, just make these headings into <h1> <h2> etc…

I see you already have good metadata in your head (description, keywords) but the search engines don’t actually pay very much attention to this anymore. I also see that you have Google Analytics in use, which is always helpful.

You are in a tough position, however, because you have many competitors who are selling the exact same product and using the exact same keywords. In fact, when you Google “georgia insurance,” two of your competitors (I’m assuming) come up as #5 and #8 in the organic results (and I have Adblock so I don’t see the Google ads!)

It’s helpful to scour their sites and see what they are doing and borrow some ideas. Also do a “link:” search to see what sites link to them. Although it does appear that more sites link to your site than to the #5 result on Google.

Those are just some really preliminary ideas, I will be back with more, and hopefully some links to good sites with SEO advice.

6

I’ll admit, one reason I’m so keen to tackle “Georgia insurance” as a page one keyword is because one of the top organic results, Georgia Insurance Shop, is run by a very good friend of mine and we have a friendly competition going. I’m #3 for that term in Yahoo, but not in the top 50 for Google. Blah.

I’m going to take a look at changing the div containers to h1 tags, but I am (at best) functionally retarded when mucking about in that stuff.

Building backlinks has proved…frustrating. I have Google webmaster tools installed to track the number of backlinks I have - it stays at 455 no matter what I do. Post links in comments? 455. Social bookmarking? 455. Go to one of my other websites (The Online Insurance Broker, for example) and post links there? 455. Maybe they’re just not being picked up in this particular tool, but it makes it royally frustrating to track my progress.

Also, random PPC question: you know how when you do a Google search and see the 2-4 sponsored links in the yellowish box above the organic results, then the other sponsored links down the right side? Is there any difference in those two?

And thank you! I really appreciate your taking the time to help.

7

SEO does not ensure that you get into the top pages in a google search. The keyword here is “optimization”. It just increases your chance that a search engine will index your page properly. If you want to get lots of hits, you have to spend effort (either time or money, usually both) selling your site.

SEO tips usually include:

  • Having relevant wordings in <title> tags
  • Links are human readable (“site/category/random-rantings/” vs. “site.php?cat=1&post=123”)
  • Frequent updates
  • Use of meta keywords
  • Submission to search engines sites and directories
  • Having a RSS feed

It’s like carpet bombing, you never know which hits. If you are talking about increasing hits and page-views, it’s another thing all together. From my experience those strategies usually allows people to find your site through search engines, but it does not mean your site is top of the herd, or that you will get hits.

Getting hits is a matter of having exposure. This is another topic by itself, but

  • pimp your site
  • join a web-ring
  • have a directory of links and hope other people will reciprocate
  • pay for advertising
  • frequent updates
  • submit to directories
  • have a rss feed and submit the feed

Good luck

8

It’s due to the amount of money paid.

Google ads are done through bidding (in a sense). Whether your ads will show up depends how much you have bid. So if I am not wrong, it depends on how much money you have paid to bid for your links to come up for this particular keyword.

9

I wonder what the difference in CTR is between those links placed above the organic results and those off to the right.

10

Hmm, I feel as though my earlier assertion of incompetence has been confirmed. Nearly all of the keywords in my current PPC campaign have been downgraded to 3/10 (Poor) quality scores. Landing page is fine, landing page load time is fine, but the ad is being called “irrelevant.” It’s simply generating no clicks.

Frankly, I’m discouraged but optimistic. I have no idea what I’m doing and I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on. If I can ever figure this out, I think I’ll be well ahead of the game. If.

11

I have a lot of experience with SEO and SEM - Marketing reported to me within my company for a few years and we had to lay out a plan to maximize our rankings based on them.

Bottom line: if you are a small company, then go buy an “Search Engine Marketing/Optmization for Dummies” book (see search results I got on Amazon here). At the same time, buy the book “Don’t Make Me Think” which is about how to optimize your website structure for easy navigation.

Read both / any books you buy, then figure out what aspects of SEM/SEO and website updating you want to handle - the stuff you have to do is actually pretty straightforward, but you need a bit a comfort with tech stuff and you have to decide if you think it is a good use of your small business owner-time. It often isn’t, at which point you need to look around for who can help you.

Many of the mid-market SEO/SEM enhancer-type consultants are charging a lot of money for some pretty easy services. Heck, you can set up relationships with folks in India and pay them dirt-cheap $$, provided you are comfortable that you can keep up with and approve of what they are doing on your behalf…

My $.02