Influence the Influencers

If you run a store, your landlord (or your webhost) guarantees a certain service level, but they do not guarantee monthly revenue or sales.

“That’s completely different,” you might say, “space (physical or on a web-server) is not nearly as ‘close to the sale’ as marketing/SEO, and so marketing results should include sales.”

But I think you’re doing yourself a disservice by not “owning the sale,” if you want to stay competitive, and be a long-term player in your industry, YOU need to know what ultimately generates sales at your store/site, not a hired gun.

Marketing delivers targeted, relevant traffic, and marketing experts (SEO, Web Analytics, or SEM) can advise you on how to tune your website content, layout, and promotional calendar to communicate your offer effectively to that audience.

But we can’t control: what you’re selling, competitors in your space, your pricing, your shipping rates, your customer service.

There are so many things that impact sales rates and volume, repeat sales, lifetime customer value, all outside a marketing consultant’s control, if they had that control, they would be running your business A to Z, they would be you…

If you think it’s “fair” to push all of that risk onto the marketing service provider, then how can you also argue it’s “unfair” to share your supplier information, your customer service system (and by extension all of your customer data), and your fulfillment/shipping process? These are all critical components of sales (and more importantly, repeat sales) and if I’m on the hook for sales, then I need to control all of these variables.

So offloading that risk actually incurs another really big risk, that I’ll learn *everything* there is to know about your business and use that knowledge to compete against you directly (and no you can’t contract this risk away, have you ever successfully signed a provider to a “lifetime non-compete” agreement?).

There is a service level, no disagreement there, but the marketer owns traffic delivery based on best practices, and nowadays those involve both money & time (the 2001-02 era of thousands daily free SEO leads/sales “just for having a website and good title tags,” and/or hundreds daily $0.05 sales from Google ads etc is long, long gone I’m afraid). There should be specific services agreed upon, a best practices guarantee, and perhaps some compensation tied directly to performance, but asking a service provider to go 100% at risk for sales without essentially turning your business over to them creates a perverted incentive structure that promotes bad behavior, whether it’s the black-hat techniques as Nick discusses, or a longer-term strategy to replicate, and out-compete, your business.
Jonah Keegan recently posted..AdWords Updates Home Tab

I like your KISS philosophy. That will help me going forward.
Nick Graff recently posted..How to Calculate Cap Rate

I really believe in to do´s list for each client and having a “flight plan” helps a lot.

Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts on this topic…

I agree that an reputable SEO firm or service provider should complete all work that they say they are going to do, but SEO guarantees just do not work for anyone and does sometimes lend to a black hat, approach to SEO as well.

Here is the exact words of Google about SEO guarantees:

“No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.”

Here is the original source as well:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

I hope this helps and best of luck with your SEO journey!