Wal-Mart Offers SEO and SEM Services - A Closer Look at Sam’s Club SEM
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For search engine optimization, Sam’s Club offers LeadConnect. Both from the name and the description, it sounds like a repackaged version of Innuity’s LeadConnect service. The Sam’s Club service gives you a tool to create your profile, which is distributed “to major search engines and online Yellow Page directories like YPGuides.” The service also submits your web site URL to the major search engines and directories. Your profile, by the way, appears to be simply your business information – address, phone number, and so forth. This is what you get for your $25 per month.
So what do you get for $50 per month with the pay-per-click advertising package? Sam’s Club sets up a campaign for you in Google and/or Yahoo, creates your ad, and will send a targeted number of “qualified consumers” to your web site each month. As with the other service, it would appear that you get what you pay for.
If you’re shaking your head in disbelief right now, you should be. Submitting your web site to major search engines is an all-but-obsolete practice. As for the other items, you’re probably thinking that it would be easier for anyone, especially a small business owner, to just do it himself and save the fee. Indeed, a number of people who commented on posts reporting the service said that it was a waste of money if that was all it offered. One poster claiming to have once worked for an agency that Innuity bought out said that “Those guys haven’t a clue what they’re doing. They turned SEM into an assembly line affair, a cookie cutter one-size-fits-all approach. I feel bad for those small businesses who get suckered into this deal.”
While it may sound strange to you, this move by Wal-Mart makes sense on a lot of levels. First, it’s worth keeping in mind that Wal-Mart also offers to build web sites for businesses. That particular service – which is free to Sam’s Club members -- has been around for nearly two years at least. Bill Sweetman posted to his blog at the end of January 2006 that he found a three-page brochure at his local Sam’s Club for the service. Given that a web site building service already exists, why not expand into SEO and SEM? After all, how else are all those sites going to get traffic?
Another way the SEO and SEM services make sense for Wal-Mart is that they do fill customer needs. Remember, Sam’s Club aims at the small business market. Many if not most small business owners have never heard of SEO or SEM, and don’t have a lot of time to devote to their web site or other Internet-related activities. They would rather pay someone else a small fee to handle that part of their business, and not deal with the headache – after all, that’s why they shop at Sam’s Club for many of their bulk purchase needs, so they don’t have to deal with invoices from lots of separate suppliers.
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