Wal-Mart Offers SEO and SEM Services - Black Hat, White Hat…Sam’s Hat?
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On the one hand, the service probably won’t hurt most small businesses. With as little as you get for your $25, it seems unlikely that Sam’s Club will engage in black hat SEO practices. But that’s the point, of course; businesses will get very little for their money, and that’s going to affect the rest of the industry, especially those SEO consultants who deal with small businesses as clients.
Say you’re a small business owner and an SEO consultant has just quoted you a price for his or her services. It sounds exorbitant. The first words off your lips are going to be “Why should I pay you so much when I can pay Sam’s Club $50 per month?” Ouch.
Let’s take an even worse scenario. Say you’re a small business owner who tried the service from Sam’s Club. Maybe you even stuck with it for six months or so. But you never saw the increase in your business that you hoped for. Sure, your site got more traffic, perhaps, but most of it didn’t actually convert. So you decided to discontinue the service. Three or four months later, you’re approached by an SEO. What’s your reaction? “I tried SEO for six months, and it didn’t work for me. Why should I try it again?”
It may sound like I’m saying that Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club are doing the same kind of thing with SEO and SEM that they’ve been accused of doing with mom-and-pop stores and small retailers in general across the US. That is, they’re offering goods that are perhaps just good enough, but cost much less and are more convenient to get. Because of the better prices and better hours, consumers choose to shop there, which squeezes the smaller businesses with tighter margins out of business. Think about it. You can’t afford to offer SEO at Wal-Mart prices any more than a small artists’ cooperative can afford to sell handmade jewelry at Wal-Mart prices – and quite possibly for the same reasons.
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