Happy Pitch-mass

How to isolate yourself from customers with a Christmas Card

In the last week of December I received 40 or so Christmas e-cards from companies I had dealings with in 2008. Most were amusing or bland but one stuck out.

The memorable greeting came from an SEO company where I occasionally speak to their Managing Director.

The unnamed company sent me an e-card that was little more than a flyer for their services and a list of their products, tagged with Happy Christmas at the top.

Apart from the debatable ethics of a business contact feeding my email address into his CRM, the e-card touted a number of services my team offers and thanked me for my good custom in 2008.

Since I’ve never bought from this SEO and indeed we compete in some areas, this message was wholly irrelevant. Moreover I consider it fairly impolite to send customers a sales flyer disguised as a Christmas card.

Issues of taste aside, this SEO companies approach was a lose/lose method of doing business.

If I’m a valued customer this is a crude and impersonal messaging that suggests I’ve been blended with cold sales leads, or worse, my relationship is of little importance.

If I’m a cold sales lead I feel no warmer from such an untargeted spammy sales message.

If I’m a business contact or competitor I get an understanding of how nascent my associate/competitors CRM capabilities are.

It’s easy to criticize so I should state my approach, by no means a perfect example, but more respectful:

I avoid Christmas giving as not all my clients are Christian or in Christian countries, I’ll face to face/verbally wish people a happy holidays as relevant. Crunch or no crunch my clients get something (Sarbanes-Oxley compliant) they can enjoy as a New Year Thank-you for the year past.

I send a Happy New Year present such as Champagne, Port, Dinner and Cinema tickets, an iTunes or Starbucks credit, accompanied by an unhurried handwritten Thank You card from me. It takes ages, literally several evenings but my client took hours or days to select my company’s services, the least I can do is spend a few minutes writing a card to say thanks.

Legal restrictions stop me giving anything more generous but it’s a personal touch and I remove my sales head well before I start writing Thank You cards. One thing is for sure, clients do not get a sales brochure disguised as a Christmas Card.

Regardless of my tastes, the net result of sending a heavily sales focused Christmas e-card is that I’ve gone from respecting this unnamed SEO Company to doubting their ability to segment a customer base, deliver relevant messages or understand how to sell. Generally my clients are not receptive to a big ticket sales message in the last week of December; I doubt many of their clients were either.

Considering SEO is all about relevance and appropriateness, this SEO companies 2008 Christmas card just lost them any business I could put their way in 2009.

If the troops at the Somme could take a day out of a war and respect Christmas, there is no reason SEO providers and Digital Agencies cannot do the same in a recession.

SEM Business Development – How Not To

The Business Development Director of a significant Search Engine Marketing player in the UK contacted my office a while back.

I sit on the IPA Search Panel with one of his colleagues, so making contact could have been easy.

The following cold call email arrived with our receptionists and found its way to me. It sat in my inbox for a while, and I’m yet to respond anytime soon.

From: xxxxx xxxxx [mailto:xxxx.xxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 10:47 AM
To: Front Desk London
Subject: Search Marketing Partnership
Hi,

xxxxxxx is looking for partners and we would like to invite you to consider a relationship with us. We specialise in Search Engine Marketing (PPC & SEO) and we have an Agency model that we would like to introduce to you.

If you are interested in discussing this further, then please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Regards,
xxxxxxx.

Consulting Questions for SEO Clients

SEO Consulting Questions don’t have much to do with SEO.

SEO is about business success more than it is about any art or technology, it is just 1 (very powerful) revenue generating tool.

The SEO projects I’ve witness struggle the most are those that did not commence with a reliable research phase to gain information on the clients business needs. If you can align an SEO project to the business goals and timelines of the client, success is much more likely. Sounds Obvious.

Yet I regularly win business from intelligent SEO providers who got lazy and commoditised the SEO offering, removing the stage where the SEO deliverables and results should be tailored to the clients specific needs and appetite.

This compounded with a lack of communication and patronising search jargonese in place of a solid performance dashboard is enough to destabilise the most robust or ingenious SEO provider. If a client says “I don’t really get it..but I guess you guys are the search gurus, not me” that is not a compliment but stage one of client abandonment because it means you’ve stopped talking the same language.

If you do not enable your client to give their boss/investor a great elevator pitch on the business value of the SEO activity, do not be surprised if they cannot expand funding for the project, maintain priorities or budget. 

However, before you can talk your clients language with confidence, you need to understand their business and their needs.This requires SEO providers to look at the whole business and consider, “how can I provide success at the scale, cost and timelines that my client needs”. 

To help calculate our business direction I require my staff to ask the following 23 questions when engaging a new client.

Questions to ask new SEO clients:

Market
1. What markets are the client operating within
2. What is their market size
3. What % of their market do they have
4. What are the market trends (technological & social changes)
5. What is the maturity of the market
6. How fragmented is the market
7. How seasonal is their business

Competitors
1. Who are the main competitors
2. How are their main competitors performing
3. Who is looking to enter the market

Customers
1. Who are the clients customers
2. What are the key drivers of purchase amongst their customers
3. Does the client want to change their customer base

Revenues
1. What is the margin on the product/service
2. What are their primary sales channels by %
3. Where is their revenue coming from (not always  obvious – british rail was from property)
4. What are their current revenues and projections (may be hard to get if not publicly quoted)

Strategies
1. Why is online important to the client (especially if offline sales channel is dominant)
2. What is their strategy and objectives (fast follower, market leader)
3. What time scales has the client set for objectives to be delivered
4. How will results be measured

Marketing
1. Does their product or service compete on price or brand (or other such as convenience)
2. How robust is their brand

20 Most Expensive SEO Keywords

Below is the Top 20 SEO Keywords by price (In GBP) from Google Keyword Tool, based on English Language run against all countries. Of the Top 20 by price, only two were in Top 20 by search volumes. The term “SEO firms” is popular in the US, with “SEO Companies” popular in both UK and US.

SEO Keywords	Estimated Avg. CPC £	Avg Monthly Search Volume
search engine optimization companies	8.93	14800
search engine marketing companies	7.78	27100
search engine optimization firms	6.99	3600
search engine marketing firms	6.87	9900
website search engine optimization	6.46	33100
search engine optimization marketing	6.41	33100
search engine optimization consulting	6.34	4400
search engine optimization service	6.17	480
search engine advertising	6.06	49500
search engine optimization company	6.00	4090000
search marketing	5.95	74000
search engine marketing	5.81	5400
pay per click	5.75	823000
search engine optimization services	5.45	33100
high search engine ranking	5.41	33100
web search engine optimization	5.34	2900
internet search engine optimization	5.24	12100
website optimization	5.23	12100
search engine optimization strategy	5.19	22200
cheap search engine optimization	5.18	22200

FYI – Raw data from Google above,  I usually discount Google search volumes by at least 75% to remove network and duplication (My pinch of salt).

SEO Staff Activities

How does a full time SEO spend his time?

The answer is never the same for any two websites, but for an SEO on my team who spends his time on a site where there is some need for retrofitting SEO, the following chart gives a top line overview of how his role breaks out.

How one SEO Spends TheirTime

This role is a one year rolling project in an established company, and is merely illustrative of a frequently seen SEO model amongst my staff, and varies cleint to client,

Kenshoo Search – SEM Platform to watch in 2008

Kenshoo was funded by Sequoia Capital in November 2007. The Israeli SEM company Kenshoo has some powerful technology for long tail SEM and controlling campaigns. As the recession sets in, platforms that can scale SEM on reduced staffing should have good opportunities.

Edinburgh Based SEO Ambergreen gains new chairman

Ambergreen, an Edinburgh based SEO company has appointed Scottish advertising agency founder John Denholm as it Chairman.

This is another signal of SEO companies looking for experience from old school advertising leaders to guide them through an increasingly challenging market where the big advertising agencies are now perceiving SEO as viable and natural service within their marketing services. Denholm formed the Leith Agency in the 1980’s and has the standard FMCG background.

Hopefully Ambergreen can share some SEO love for Denholm’s old company as the Leith Agency website is like a parody crimes against search.

Interestingly, Big Mouth Media are nowhere to be seen on the query [ Edinburgh Based SEO ] , despite being one of the UK’s largest SEO companies and being based in Edinburgh.