Is SEO really the be all and end all for risidual income?
Really what I am getting at here is regarding offering LOCAL businesses SEO services, why is this such a popular thing to do? To me it seems like "easy risidual income".
I used to work for a large, but shoddy SEO company who provided their service on the "cheap" (compared to other companies) but all we did was SEO their page titles, meta data and on page content and then add them to about 10 directories and that was it. The ongoing monthly fee the client paid was so we sent out a report each month which showed them where they appeared in the different search engines for their 2 or 3 keywords we targetted.
I found that for some keywords we would offer, the very uncompetitive ones were easy to get into the top 10, but these were not searched for very often. So how is that helping the business?
It got more competitive with estate agencies and photographers and many others, and our SEOing of their site just didnt get them anywhere near the top and alas to say these were the people I was constantly on the phone to blagging them into "giving things more time" and pi$$ing them off even more.
Now obviously, as I said the company I worked for only did a very limited job per client, and sure dedicating more time to these clients would probably yield better results, but it seems every web developer now offers SEO as part of their service and every man and his dog are doing it. It seems that its become so saturated, that starting a campaign now just may not be worthwhile.
It seems that Google Places and Facebook are much better options specifically for business who only operate locally. I am not sure how easy or difficult it is to get a business listed on the first page of the Google Places listings, but I have seen many of these still unclaimed by the business, so I am guessing people are not yet fully exploiting this service.
But Facebook seems like a perfect opertunity with the ability to create pages, people to share links, like pages, open up discounts and offers just by liking a page and all this gets shared amongst that persons list of friends. Facebook offers a platform where the company lets it's clients advertise for them to all of their friends!
I am just about to venture out into my own Offline business and have had real hangups about offering "SEO" services through past experiences. But I feel offering mobile Mobile websites, SMS campaigns, Google Places listings and Facebook page creation and updates makes for a good RISIDUAL income service.
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