Why don't more businesses spend money on SEO?

I think SEO is a complex intellectual sale. It requires education, just like any new idea (New to the prospect, not to us).

It's why I sell my services by speaking to groups. That talk is the educational process. But it can also be done by webinars, repeated calls, etc.

Cold calling SEO, trying to sell the idea? I'd sell something simpler, and easier to explain..like PPC first, then start the education process.

DAMN SKIPPY!!!!!

That was AWESOME! I am awarding best share of the day right there and its like 4am or something!

Long stories to show how a lot of business owners don't know, because they don't track, or don't track carefully enough, where their sales are coming from and are afraid of new ideas.

I had once an agreement with an auto shop to make them a mobile site, then work on SEO. The next day, he called to cancelled. He'd talk to his friend from childhood who was offended that he'd hire me to make him a mobile site when the friend could do it for free (A week later, his friend made him a mobile site: it was a desktop site that shrank to fit the size of the screen... You could read nothing!).

The friend didn't believe in SEO, either.

Anyway, my client put his friendship above making money, so I was out of $657 for the mobile phone and the $400 a month SEO profit for a few months.

There's a bakery here where half of the pastries are made on site from flour, eggs, milk, etc. I found them 2 years ago, about 6 months after they opened and just about the owner was thinking of folding.

Most of their sales were to people from his country, specifically, people from his country who attended his church or who he'd met in previous jobs, or friends of friends. He wanted more of them. There were enough of them, he thought to support his shop. He marketed by making flyers and posters and dropping them on their cars when they were in church.

Except, they were not, for the most part, living or working within 5 miles.

I liked their stuff they made on site and decided to help. For free, he was doing -$1200 a month at the time.

I wrote him an ad for a local newspaper that would run in the print and online versions, to attract Americans (i.e., people not from his country, seeing there were a lot more of those around), thought him to give 25% off to people who responded, to do it every time, to give them a buy 1 get 1 at x% off when they came in with the 25% coupon, and changed the copy on his home page and about us page and made him a mobile version of his site. Yes, all for free, while he was arguing with me that none of that would ever work.

Towards the end of the 2nd day the ad ran, I stopped by to see how it was going. To find out that he was not giving the coupons, or asking people what brought them over.

He did notice that there were 3 or 4 buyers who were not from his country, but were some 15-20 years older than what he expected. (The ad was inviting parents to stop feeding junk to their kids; come instead to this place get pastries that had nothing in them but milk, eggs, flower, etc.)

3 or 4 meant 100% increase in business. But not enough to get him into positive cash flow.

I insisted he have the coupons on the counter top, by the register, and made him an excel page for tracking.

I stopped by the next day, just before closing. He'd given away 7 coupons to people who said they saw his ad in the print version of the newspaper. But he'd been minding the front of the store only the last 4 hours and his wife didn't give away coupons but she said she'd seen 3 or 4 new faces.

A few weeks later, the day after his mobile site went up, after a long discussion about what the copy on the mobile site would be, with him arguing against everything I knew would work and in favor of copy that was all about him and where he'd studied cooking and baking and how his mother had been a pastry chef), I stopped by to see if he'd noticed people coming in from the mobile site (there was an offer he had nowhere else except on the mobile site and the copy was all my ideas: I did it for free so I felt I could over rule him).

There were several people in line. Had to wait some 20 minutes before he had time to talk to me for a minute. He was dumbfounded: just before I'd walked in, a couple of women had stopped by, mobile phone in hand, with his mobile site homepage open. He was, now, a believer in that new-fangled online marketing I was telling him about!

On the other hand, there are those who are enamored of one or 3 marketing ways that have proven successful to them and are not willing to admit (for reasons I do not understand) that they work or whose conversion of online leads sucks.

Case in point, a mortgage broker: I made him a site a few months ago. Last week I looked at callfire. He's getting 18-20 phone calls (they go all to him) a month where he's on the phone with leads for at least 2 minutes (longest one last month lasted 16 minutes).

I cross-referenced the callfire numbers from the last 2 months against his list of prospects or clients. No matches.

Found out that he talks to them when they call, answers their questions, tries to get them to apply for a mortgage with him. He doesn't follow up. Ever.

So, though he says he can convert 1 or 2 in 10, he converts 1 in 50.

He's done ads in the past, stupid ads, the kind that list all the possible types of mortgages he can do. He's placed on in a Spanish paper because one of his processors speaks Spanish, one in a Polish paper, because one of his processors speaks Polish, ignoring completely the fact that the neighborhoods with lots of Spanish and Polish speaking people are far from his office.

So, according to him, marketing doesn't work. Internet marketing definitely doesn't work. The only thing that works is him networking with real estate agents and referrals.

If you ask him who's been his best client last year, he points to one of the few who found him on the internet. (We know this guy found him on the internet because of callfire and I happened to be present one day when the guy was there and I asked him how he'd found my client. I asked that in front of my client. My client heard the answer: Found your site on Google. Still, internet marketing, like all marketing, does NOT work!).

My two cases might be extremes, but a lot of business owners I meet do things like that to a certain degree. And, if you combine that with the endless blind, often stupid, pitches to sell SEO they get, you can understand why they don't buy SEO better.

Speaking of stupid SEO pitches, I got one yesterday. For a site about me I have. They told me I was missing on 300 visitors a day.

I'm tall, dark and handsome, I swear. Smart too. But, alas!, there are not 109,500 people (300 a day for a year) who give a rat's ass about me.