Wal-Mart Offers SEO and SEM Services - An Opportunity to Educate
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Don’t think for a minute, however, that you might have to consider rolling back your prices. That way lies madness, and there’s no way you’ll stay in business by competing directly with Wal-Mart. Vince Bank, also known as onlineprguy, explained it best in his blog, Darwin PR: “SEO is a highly technical, personalized, and customer-specific offering best tackled by firms taking a great deal of time to understand your business…Sam’s Club is dumbing down this concept to laughable extremes.”
If you want to stay in business, then, you’ll need to do exactly what you’ve probably had to do for years: educate your customers. Let them know how much work actually goes into doing SEO and SEM the right way, and how it pays off. Sure, they can go to Wal-Mart, but they’ll get a lot more from you. In the long run, in fact, your services are a better deal, because they offer a much better return on investment.
Indeed, taking the long view, Wal-Mart’s entry into the SEO and SEM business may be one of the best things to happen to the field. In one quick stroke, the retailing giant made tons of small businesses aware of the concepts. Now these firms know that such services exist, what they’re for, and that they might want to optimize their web sites or put search ads in Google or Yahoo.
If you look at it from that point of view, then, Wal-Mart is actually doing half of your job for you. It is explaining the purpose of SEO and SEM, and trying to convince small businesses that they need to buy those services. All you need to do is show why Wal-Mart’s offering will never deliver the results that you can. Does Sam’s Club spend hours doing keyword research? What kind of advice would they give on H1 headers, templates, and font changes? How about the infamous subdomains vs. subdirectories issue?
You can offer your clients all this, and more, because you’ve put in the time to learn your field. On top of that, you’ll be putting in the time to learn your client’s field well enough to make a difference as to where they show up in the SERPs. This is the kind of obsessive attention that you can’t buy for $50 per month, and you shouldn’t be afraid to make that clear to anyone who wants your services. Remember, it leads to the kind of increases in business that your clients won’t be able to pick up at Sam’s Club along with the kitty litter.
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