Note: This is no offense on a particular client, but we want all online marketers understand some real facts.

As we provide unmatched SEO services, our customer retention rate is above 96% .  We are working hard in finding the issues from our side to make this rate cross 98% by this year end. So our team started working on finding our flaws this year. As a part of this clean up, the emails of the client’s which we lost (stating that our service was not satisfactory) were forwarded to me so that I can come with a solution for them. I sorted these emails category wise so that it will be easier to find common errors that our guys have made. It didn’t take much time as there where only a few emails. I decided to start with the E-commerce website promotion campaign emails as that is one of our huge markets. The first email was regarding the in-effectiveness of our e-commerce SEO campaign.

The client has an Online store that sells various products which fall under a same category. As the client knew at least something about SEO, he ordered the E-commerce SEO service at first, just for one particular product section of the e-commerce store (not promoting the site all together). The SEO campaign was done for 3 months and within this period; he got huge sales and great traffic to that particular section. The client was happy and obviously he ordered the same package for another product section of the e-commerce store. The client was not happy this time as he had no sales for this product section as he had for the other one.

His email stated that, “I purchased this same e-commerce package for promoting one of our product section in the e-commerce store last year. It was a huge success and I got sales more that what I have imagined! But this time, when I ordered the same service for another product section, you guys seem to have taken it easy and there is not even a single sale. I have lost trust in you guys. It is almost 2 months and with one more month remaining for the completion of the project, I have no faith that I will get sales at all. Please move forward with the project only if you can guarantee me that you can get me sales”. - Phrases changed for client privacy

I had the analytics access to this ecommerce store. Checking the e-commerce analytics, I was able to see that the overall traffic to this website has increased to about 24 % over the past month. I also ran a check for keyword positioning and amazing, the site appears in first page of Google for the particular keyword (Keyword not revealed due to client privacy). I was also able to see that the paid traffic (adwords etc) has gone down by 25%. It means that our e-commerce website promotion campaign has boosted the traffic of the site by 50%. What is understood here is that surfers visit this e-commerce store but they find something wrong with the product or the store. 

Upon checking other e-commerce stores selling the same products, the mystery unfolded. This client was selling the new product for very high rates when compared to the others. Moreover, his products page had nothing other than the product images and prices (no description, testimonials or customer remarks). Obviously none will be interested in buying these products from him priced higher than the market rates with nothing to support the high pricing.

I passed these findings to him and now he understood why there was no sales (the product page which he promoted first was well detailed and there where many research reports and all which supported the high pricing). Now he told that he will add the specialties of his products explaining which it is highly priced.

Remember that we can send customers to e-commerce stores. It is their free will to make a purchase from you. We don’t mess with people’s free will. So here are a few points to do before choosing an e-commerce promotion campaign:

• Very high price tags can drive customers away forever (There are many choices available today so customers are not restricted to buy things from the E-commerce stores that appear in the first page of Google Results)

• Add enough description about the products so that the visitors of your store can understand what the product exactly is.

• If your product is so special and hence the high pricing, detail the specialty to the visitors by displaying it in the sales page.

If you don’t do these atleast, you won’t get any sales no mater how you promote the e-commerce store.

Alright I thought I can clear up these mails by Today and go to office fresh tomorrow with a clear solution to increase customer retention. Unfortunately, now I understand that our customer retention will increase only if all our clients understand the real facts about SEO. As already said, it is there FREE WILL and we can’t mess with that.

Into Another great weekend!!!          

I had an add request on skype from an American Name. Since that is my official skype id, I had added the contact and asked him how I can help him..

- How many years or you in the service
Me- 7 years

-What SEO do you do
Me-We do mainly manual SEO jobs

-We are a company in Bangalore (then why American Name) and I am from Tamil Nadu. We are a web design company and looking to offer SEO jobs to clients,
Me-That's fine we can help you with our services.

-Can you get my clients website xxx for the keyword YYYY (a five letter most popular keyword with millions of competition)
Me- No we do not offer Keyword positioning services now.

-So what should I do to get the website on the first page.
Me-You have to design a strategy and we can help you execute your seo plan.

-We do web design, If you need web design contact me.
Me-Some of the clients need tableless CSS designs. If you can offer that I can refer you.

-Yes we can do that. Send me the info.
Me-Can I see some sample website so that I can send it to my client.

-No we cannot show you any samples as that will violate our user agreement with client.
Me: We wont contact your client, Its just to see if the designs are good. How will anyone orderfor a service without knowing what we can do.

-That has to be on trust.
Me: (!!!!!!!!!!!&&&&######, Well we talked a lot for 30 minutes and mostly this person was fishing for free information. I ran a background check with his skype name and found him to be a freelancer) Ok Bye for now.

I still am wondering if there is any client in the world who will not let his design company mentioning his website to their potential clients.

The work day started very promising, as there weren’t much clients online to respond. I was looking into some new SEO strategies that seemed to be very much promising. After the lunch break I thought of getting a breakthrough in my research (will reveal soon). AT this point I got a phone call from an Indian. He wanted to speak directly to our administrator regarding some SEO services. Well I put him on my Admin’s phone line as I thought this will be a big fish Client from India with lots of knowledge about SEO.

The conversation seemed to continue for about 30 minutes and I was under the impression that we just managed to get a huge order for our SEO services. But after the conversation, my admin seemed to be irritated. This was not another “Huge Client” as I expected. Well, he was a “Cosmetic Surgeon”. I know what you are thinking right now. If he was not calling for SEO services, what business does he like with our firm? Oh man! You guessed it, he wanted to learn SEO! Not for promoting his own website, but he wants to start his own SEO company.

While I was speaking to my admin, this cosmetic surgeon ringed back again and now it was my time to deal with him. Here is the conversation

Caller: “I spoke to your admin, regarding starting my own SEO company. Basically I am a cosmetic surgeon”

Me: “You gotta be kidding”

Caller: “Man I am a real surgeon but you know the market is down, and I am planning to earn some extra cash and I thought SEO is the best option”

Me: “Okie! But SEO is a deep ocean, you can’t offer a service without knowing all about it”

Caller: “Yes, that’s right but I know a lot about it and now I thought I can gain more knowledge from you guys”

Me: “Alright, can you tell me what you know so far about SEO so that I can continue from that point” (I know the fact that if he knows a lot about SEO it will take weeks for him to explain it to me.)

Caller: But he made that simple “It is making websites appear in the first page of Google results by getting many backlinks”

Me: “Backlinks? See, that’s not the only factor that decides whether the website has to appear in the first page of Google results”

Caller: “I see then what are they?” I told him that it will take months to explain it

Caller: “Well then prepare an email on that and send it to me”

Me: “Will Do” “Click” hung the phone

An email? Even if I write an e-book on SEO, it will be a never ending story. So he is never gonna get the email from me. I am sure that he will start his SEO firm soon (he thinks that all he needs is a laptop plugged online and a few contacts). 

Just another day to find a guy killing the great SEO profession.

We have been providing local business listing service for quite a long time now. We used to get maximum data from the client and do the listings in top 25 local business listing sites such as Google local, bing local, superpages etc. There weren’t much questions about this service earlier from the clients as this service remained unknown to most of the people. With Google revealing the importance of local business listing, our client’s are naturally interested in this service now.

I have received several calls from marketers who want to know whether it is possible to promote pure online businesses through the local business listing strategy. Some of them where even ready to provide a fake address for that. As SubmitinME does only WhiteHat SEO, I rejected all order enquiries. I just had to let them know that a genuine telephone number or local address is mandatory to get the listing activated (Though there is no activation required in many local listing sites). Even after hearing this, some of them where ready to take the service using a fake telephone number (These marketers just want to do something for the sake of doing something).

Overwhelmed with the desperate marketers trying to misuse the Local listing service, I was wondering when I will be speaking to a client who knows the real potential of Local business listing? That day was today. A client based in Texas was extremely interested in the local listing service. She had a brick and motor office for his business of XXX and she had a decent website as well.  Alright, now she had a question that was very reasonable. The information database giants of USA (superpages and infoUSA) share local business information across many other local business listing sites (including Google Local). She had her business listed and active in superpages and Google Local automatically grabbed this info and displayed it in Google Maps for a particular keyword (keyword not revealed due to security issues). Now she wanted to know how our service (local business listing to 25 sites) is useful to the clients? As just one listing in Superpages is shared to 100s of other local listing sites, it can be done by the client themselves (That was her point).

I transferred the call to my colleague Sunil who is in charge of the local business listing service. I listened to him as well. He came straight to the point. He got the keyword from her and ran a search in Google Maps (was in 6th page of Google maps). Upon seeing the listing, there were only minimal data shared about her business through superpages. And now Sunil started firing the answer. With this minimal data shared to other local listing sites, the visibility of the business in the search engine results will be minimal. For instance let’s take Google Local for example. Google allows adding as many information about the business such as coupons, video, images, specials, products, awards, hours of operation, a long description and much more. However, only a very few basic data will be shared to Google Local from superpages. With thousands of businesses listed directly in Google local, this shared listing with minimal will disappear in the crowd.

The client now understood the benefit that she could get out of our local listing service. She placed the order for local listing (excluding listing in Superpages). Another great day for me to get a new client.

One of my best clients (name not revealed) rang the phone this morning. Basically he wanted to know whether the telephone line existed. Well I picked the phone and he made a huge sigh of relief. He was satisfied to find atleast one SEO company in India with an active telephone line with a real human answering them.   This client himself is a search engine optimization expert. But somehow, the SEO service providers have confused him with plethora of strategies. He is now clueless on what SEO strategy is really the best. And I started explaining him:

I started with a few questions:
1. Is your website rich with fresh and informative content? (This question is the most important one because without fresh content in the site, there is no point in spending thousands of dollars in Off-page SEO)
2. Does your site carry appropriate META tags, titles and descriptions? (Though I am not an expert in On-page SEO I pretended to know at least something)
3. What kind of off-page SEO techniques have you applied to your website so far?
4. How is the result for the off-page SEO?


The client’s words:
His website is of ecommerce type and there is no much content in them as the site just carries products. He has done enough On-page SEO and lots of effective Off-page SEO tasks as well (according to him). I was surprised to hear what he called as effective Off-page SEO (most of them can’t be revealed in public). He has never tried article submission or press release distribution. Some guy who calls himself an expert in SEO has misinformed him that article submission has lost its charm. After spending several dollars for several months on the SEO strategies that he suggested, this client has lost faith in his words.


My SEO Advice
I told him straight away that you cannot spell SEO without article submission and Press Release distribution. In fact, the inexperience of the SEO guy who this client hired is proven by his words that “Article Submission has LOST Its Charm”. Well at this point the Client demanded a proof to support my statement that article submission STILL HAS ITS GLORY. Man I don’t talk without solid proof. I and my colleague have spent several days researching on article marketing and recorded our findings. We forged our findings into a Whitepaper. I pointed this client towards the WhitePaper on Article Marketing. I let this client read the entire “article marketing research result” right away so that I can get some break time to have a cup of fresh Indian Coffee. By the time I finished my coffee, the Client has realized the Importance of article marketing in SEO (with this solid proof, none can ignore the fact).

I later suggested him that, though his site presents only products, he can get product descriptions written and tagged to each product. As this will be fresh content, search engines will love them. As he had native writer under his wings, he said that he will be adding descriptions for all products over the few days.
In a business point of view I failed to get this client make an order for Product Description Writing. However, it was a pleasant chat for me and I was happy to have another person out there to understand the importance of Article Marketing.