How To Overcome Being Burned by SEO and Surge Forward

I’m going to show you how to grow your ecommerce store from break-even to profitability without wondering if you are investing time and money wisely.

Those of you who know me know that I am more of an introvert than extrovert, so getting in front of people like this is not my thing.

I have an engineering degree and so I really enjoy spending my time doing analysis to uncover valuable insights that will make a difference in this world.

As a SEO consultant, my day to day life involves collecting data, analyzing it, drawing conclusions from it and making recommendations to my client that will bring them more business from Google. I really enjoy doing that for a number of reasons I’ll get into later.

Explaining my work on the phone to a client is fine but getting up in front of a crowd, well, I’d rather not do that.
But I’m sharing this now because there are plenty of businesses and people who have been hurt by enthusiastic salesmen or agencies who make promises that don’t come true. I know because many of my clients have been burned by an SEO provider or agency before they came to me.

I’m tired of hearing these “I’ve been burned” stories because they give my industry and what I do a bad name.

Something goes wrong and then I get a phone call from another person who has been burned:
“Our site dropped in ranking for a number of important keywords and we want to be ranked again for them”

“Since the upgrade our website hasn’t ranked as well”

“We used to be ranked #1 for ‘healthy dog biscuits’, but now our site is not on the first page of Google for it and we want to get back there.”

For people in these situations, you once were top ranked but now things aren’t so good. But, you know what it feels like to be ranked high for competitive keywords. You know how powerful SEO can be when the traffic comes in and results in predictable sales.

One client said it like this:
“My competitors start calling me and bugging me to tell them anything about how I outrank them.”

But others aren’t so sure after being burned and they are afraid to give SEO another chance usually because they don’t know what is going on behind the scene. They feel ripped off, betrayed and hurt because they were taken advantage of in some way.

Here’s what one had to say:
“I’ve worked with a SEO agency before and it didn’t work out as they said it would.”

When I hear stuff like this it really bothers me because most of the time this was entirely preventable. It’s usually due to one or more of these situations:

• Expectation erosion – realistic expectations were not addressed or not delivered
• Communication breakdown – great communication at the beginning but then silence and/or the progress reports they sent us were not useful
• Promises broken – it was not explicitly clear what is and is not promised, or too many surprises, or you find you are dealing with amateurs
• Performance fail – “we seemed to know more about what was happening with our rankings than the SEO company”
• More money, less results – our rankings have plateaued but the bill keeps coming

Here is how we helped one of our clients who went through some of this.

Oil Change Stickers sells oil change stickers and printers online to automotive shops nationally. They came to us because their site had dropped in Google rank for a number of money keywords. The company who built the site and did the SEO did a good job in the beginning but over time their focus as an agency moved to other types of clients. The agency got busy and neglected their client, but the bill kept coming, and it was expensive.

The agency was no longer capable while their client just wanted to get back to the top of Google for their most important keywords.

I introduced them to Revenue-based SEO and within 3 months their Google rankings were going back up for their money keywords.

After 9 months:

• Traffic from organic search revenue generating keywords went up 290%
• Order conversion rate from organic search up 11%
• Google organic search visibility up 385%

From bottom of the list in organic search visibility among competitors to the top, a 385% increase in Google organic search visibility

Monthly revenue outperformed the previous year’s revenue 10 out of 12 months

Another issue I come across a good bit is this:
“Our site still isn’t on the 1st page of Google but our competitor is there and we should be ranking better organically because we want to compete with the top businesses in our space.”

Many times businesses in this situation are involved in Adwords, they may be just breaking-even, and struggling to get things going on the organic side of Google.

Paleo On The Go makes and sells paleo diet meals to people all over the US.

Their in-house team was implementing a SEO strategy but hit a plateau. They weren’t sure how to climb higher and decided to bring in a pro.

Their goal: double current revenue (which wasn’t bad).

I introduced them to Revenue-based SEO and began tracking key performance indicators.

90 days results:

• Order conversion rate from organic search up 7%
• Traffic increase from organic search up 35%
• Average position rank in Google for targeted keywords up from position 12.3 to 5.5
• Revenue up 91%

Now that’s not bad for just 90 days of Revenue-based SEO, and their revenue kept climbing. Here’s a quick look at their traffic.

In the next video I’ll show you the unexpected benefits of Revenue-based SEO and marketing.

Learn how to implement revenue-based SEO