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13 Mar This post is from from my other blog here Sam’s Club recently started offering online SEO (search engine optimization) services, including local search marketing, Pay-per-click advertising and web design services along with the pallets of BBQ sauce, paper towels and tomato soup. Truth be told, when I first heard about this late last year I laughed and forgot about it. When it crept back into my consciousness, I realized that with the popularity of these membership stores there are probably a great many people who are considering these services and would like to know if it is a good idea to buy SEO and Internet marketing services this way. For those of you business owners too busy to read a whole blog post, let me summarize for you thusly, NO! Read on for the details of the why nots. SEO Is Not A Bulk Commodity First of all, I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that SEO can’t be purchased as a bulk package deal. Successful optimization requires taking the time to get to know the industry, the site’s needs, the personality of the site’s target customer, and industry-specific keywords. It takes time even for experienced optimizers to make changes and see results. You can’t get much information about these services without filling out a form, but based on their introductory information, Sam’s Club explains that for $30 a month they will help you “establish a local profile” and submit your site to “the major search engines.” This is only a drop in the bucket of what true professional search engine optimization services offers. If this is all that is done, it is highly unlikely that any site would experience significant gains in their search engine rankings or traffic levels. Search engine optimization requires an ongoing period of content creation and refinement. Attention must be paid to many different technical details of a site’s structure, which they do not even attempt to address with this service. Site Submission Isn’t SEO Sam’s Club is using the LeadConnect service from Innuity to provide the SEO services to their own members. LeadConnect allows businesses to create an online profile with business information that people can search for and find. If this sounds like pretty much the same thing as an online Yellow Pages listing, that’s because it is. After your profile is built, Innuity promises to submit your website to all the major search engines and Internet Yellow Pages. This is unnecessary! I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call it a scam to offer search engine submission services, but search engines find sites on their own and submission hasn’t been shown to make a difference. Besides, if your site is already listed and appearing on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, you already know they ‘found’ your site and it doesn’t need to be ’submitted’ even if this did help. One nice thing…if your dashboard (as LeadConnect calls the profile) changes, LeadConnect will automatically update it across all of the services they have submitted it to and you can update it as often as you like. This could be worth $25 a month, but if you hire an SEO professional, managing your online phone book profile is something they would do for you, and how often is your business information going to change anyway? Also, what happens when you stop paying? They will stop listing your site in these directories, so any traffic you had built up from their submission service is gone. This service is focused on local search for local businesses, and local search is definitely important, but it should be considered as part of a larger marketing strategy. Also, yes, people are searching for businesses in their local area, but they are often still using the major search engines and not necessarily online Yellow Pages, so this service may not bring much change in traffic to the business utilizing it. Sam’s Limited Scope SEO and everything that is involved in it can be a confusing landscape. It can sometimes be difficult for SEO professionals to effectively convey the many different aspects of site optimization, and the time and effort it takes. There are many different ways of approaching SEO, but calling this limited service SEO and charging only $30 a month for it may make it even harder to explain why all-encompassing SEO work can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a month. Conclusion One good thing that could come of this is a raising of awareness of search engine optimization in general. Many online business owners don’t know what SEO is and aren’t aware that anything can be done to improve their search engine placement. If this service gets people talking about SEO and seeking information about how SEO can help them, that’s a good thing. However, those business owners that become invested in this service and don’t see the results they’re looking for may dismiss any further SEO services completely, thus wasting their money and losing out on potential gains. It’s fine to have an online profile for local search, but that needs to be part of a larger strategy, which this isn’t. Have you used the Sam’s Club service? Let us know your experience or your thoughts on this in general. Your email: Subscribe Unsubscribe
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