Lately we’ve experienced a humbling surge of inquires from potential clients, exceeded only by StumbleUpon traffic to our blog 🙂. It should be no surprise for any reputable web 2.0 search marketing agency to receive daily cold calls from interested SEM shoppers who have been referred by existing clients, an advertising agency, or simply found one of our websites.
Some callers are curious grazers. Many are experienced marketing professionals carrying cow flop from previous SEM relationships. Some used to be sitting pretty in the organic SERPs but now are the proverbial deer caught in headlights as competition and Universal Search gradually plow them under.
It’s common for would-be customers to have made previous contact with (or been cold-called by) at least one other SEM agency by the time they call us. They relay crazy promises from second and third tier SEM vendors ranging from ridiculous pledges of guaranteed organic prominence for long LONG tail keywords that barely matter, deceptive intermingling of paid and organic search products, and totally outdated concepts. This sort of rancid pork gives search marketing a bad name.
My favorite web 1.0 sales pitch joke is when the entire proposed KPI is organic prominence as measured by outdated tools like WebPosition, SEO Toolkit, and other scrape & report programs.
Anyway these conversations inevitably result in questions like “how is AIMCLEAR different”, “what are the long term benefits to your service”, “how do we quantify the investment?” One of several points of differentiation is in how our agency measures organic success.
Good search marketing agencies help clients create and execute comprehensive strategies to identify digital intellectual property assets and market them to radically evolving Internet channels. The best search marketing firms measure organic prominence success by traffic and conversion resulting from organic search for keywords that matter.
At SES San Jose Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience at Google revealed that over 10 million users have personalized search switched on as a byproduct of being logged into a Google service. While scrape & report tools still do have some limited value, any marketing agency touting this antiquated measuring method as the primary KPI should be discarded. Pigs don’t fly. Don’t buy silly pork.
