"Here's why I don't do SEO for my offline clients..."

Hey,

Do you still offer seo as one of your main services?

If so, how's that working out for you.

I actually gave up on seo as a main service offering last year. It just wasn't consistently generating enough paying customers quickly enough for my offline clients.

Oh yeah, just to be clear. I'm talking about gaming the system to get higher natural search engine rankings.

Maybe I just stunk at it, but at the end of the day, I simply didn't enjoy all of the work I had to put into it just to stay in the game.

I'd much rather focus on putting out good, relevant content that readers will actually enjoy, like, share and tweet.

Yes, I know that there are SEO wizards out there who can rank a one-page website for any term, without even having any content on the page, but that's not me.

Plus, if your clients are anything like mine, they want paying customers more than they want teets, likes or shares.

So, at this stage of my business, any seo results or natural rankings I achieve for my clients is simply a byproduct of my direct online marketing efforts.

After all what good is investing $2,000 with me if it doesn't get my clients any paying customers for months at a time?

I felt like a crook when I had to tell my clients to keep waiting and that it doesn't work overnight (or even overmonth).

Of course their intellectual mind knows that, but deep down they still want paying customers today.

Of course there is the rare exception when a client just wants branding only advertising to get their name out there.

However, that is not the norm.

My main issue with focusing on natural search engine rankings as a main service is that it's just too unpredictable. I had Google hitting my clients website rankings with some new algorithm every few months.

Sure, I can beat the search engine ranking system today, but what about tomorrow or the day after that?

For the most part, our clients only love us because we continue to get them paying customers and clients. That's the long and short of it.

The day I stop getting results for my clients is the day that I deserve to be fired. It's that simple.

Now, that's not to say that I'm bashing SEO, Google, Bing or any other search engine for that matter. It's just that I personally don't offer it as main service anymore.

- I still teach my clients to put out quality content that their target market would find useful.

- I still teach my clients that they have to optimize their website and webpages for relevant keywords.

- I still teach my clients to do backlinking from relevent websites because it's the smart thing to do.

None of that's changed.

However, after 10+ years of playing the search engine game, I realized that I have more fun and get better results doing "offline" offline marketing and paid advertising for myself and my clients.

I'm talking about the good old fashioned ad buys and ad placement, direct mail and database marketing stuff.

How about you?

Are you still offering "get on the first page of Google" services?

Chris