When 'just being on the first page' isn't good enough. North Carolina's premier local SEO & internet marketing strategist.

Some day the Yellow Pages will be as rare as public telephones are today.

The truth is that we are well past the point of no return of an enormous shift in how people find businesses in their local communities. All one need to do is to read the writing on the wall.

People are abandoning the yellow pages in droves in favor of using the the internet. Not only do they find it more convenient – being online as much as they already are – but they also find it to be an infinitely superior medium for researching a business.

It’s no mystery how people research topics on the internet – they use search engines. However, here’s what you may not know. The fact that Google and other search engines ‘know about your website’ – is not enough.

The reason why is because the vast majority of people who use search engines, will click on one of the results on the first page – and never even look at the second page of results but of those who do – a significant percentage of THEM will never visit the third page – and so on.

The bottom line is that if you want to maximize the number of potential new clients and customers who are able to find your website – your website needs to be ranked in the top ten results – of as many different, relevant phrases that your potential clients and customers might search for – as possible.

Is this easy?

Let’s put it this way. Ranking for a single phrase is very much like a game of musical chairs that starts out with 10 chairs. However, if you are a local business, depending upon the the size of your town or city, and the nature of the search phrase – instead of there being 12 or 15 people competing for those 10 chairs – you are likely to be in competition with thousands to hundreds of thousands of other web pages that Google considers to be relevant.

Being one of the winners – i.e. listed on the first page of ‘organic’ search results – can be very lucrative because you are NOT paying Google for the visitors that it is sending to your website. In essence, this is the equivalent of being able to advertise for FREE month after month, year after year – which in turn leads to a steady stream of sales month after month, year after year – that you neither have to pay for nor work for.

Here’s the bottom line – being ranked on the first page of Google’s organic search results can be extremely lucrative for a business. Most of your competitors understand this and some of them are undoubtedly ‘highly motivated’ about accomplishing this.

However, you’ve also got to outrank the thousands or tens of thousands of ‘less motivated’ competitors and that means somehow convincing Google that you’re more relevant for a particular search phrase – than ALL of them – with the exception of the nine that you would be sharing the first page with. Their ‘lack of motivation’ is more than offset by the sheer number of them.

In some cases, you should also throw in a few professional internet marketers who go wherever they see opportunity that can be monetized – as well as the internet ‘elephants’ such as Craig’s List, YouTube, Amazon, Ebay, Wikipedia etc that seem to have their hands in just about everything – and the search engine rankings to prove it.

Most of your smart, ‘highly motivated’ competitors will be hiring seo professionals to compete upon their behalf.

Needless to say, the more valuable a search phrase is the stiffer the competition will be.

For whatever it’s worth, the above is a profile of the competition you might have for many commercial search phrases.

The following are some of my observations regarding seo. For whatever it’s worth, I guarantee you that all of them are true.

There is a tremendous amount of confusion within the seo industry itself about what works and doesn’t. Good people can and do disagree and this can be problematic for someone trying to learn seo.

However, the much larger problem is that there is an unbelievable amount of mind boggling ignorance in the industry. I have never known of another field remotely like seo in this respect. However, the worst thing is that much of what the biggest idiots say – will sound logical to someone who doesn’t understand seo – because they will in fact be talking about things that were once true but no longer are.

Being good at seo has a lot to do with understanding Google’s business objectives, the programming logic and capabilities of their software – both their ranking algorithms as well as the software that ‘crawls’ the internet – literally going from website to another.

Creating workflow ’systems’ is an absolute must and not the easiest thing to do.

There are a tremendous number of seo resources in the form of tools and services that enable you to either save time or do seo more effectively. Needless to say, these tend to be expensive and this is an incredibly dynamic area where new stuff is always being introduced – some of it great, most of it crap – and what is ‘best of breed’ one month is often not the next. Staying on top of all of this is a full time job in itself. Professionals can leverage their investment in these tools and services over a number of clients while non-professionals and semi-professionals can’t.

Finally, there is a creative aspect to seo which is greatly under-appreciated.

If you are competing for a low value commercial search phrase with very weak competition and you feel that you understand seo and want to do it yourself – go for it.

However, if you’re trying to rank for a commercial search phrase with real competition – hire an seo professional. Very few web designers, web developers, or writers – who ‘also due seo’ – are NOT what I would consider to be seo professionals – and thus they are poor choices for any kind of competitive search phrase. Notice, I did not say “all”. An seo professional is someone who does seo for a living.

There are many ’seo professionals’ who are completely incompetent and even unethical.

The biggest mistake people make with seo is not spending enough time on ‘keyword research’. To use a football analogy, while football is obviously a very physical game there is also a big mental component to it. Every game is an opportunity to create a unique game plan based upon the unique combination of strengths and weaknesses that you and your opponent have.

The best way to hire an seo professional is to either choose someone who you KNOW has been successful for a friend or colleague – or spend a good amount of time talking with different people – asking them to explain seo to you – asking them the most difficult questions you can think of.

‘Paying up’ for smarts doesn’t make sense in every field. However, seo is one of those fields where it DOES make sense – especially when the search phrases that you’re trying to rank for are competitive.

If you’re in the market for someone who truly understands seo and is an expert at it – I invite you to give me a call. I will be generous with my time in helping you figure out whether or not I am a good fit for your specific needs. You needn’t worry about getting a hard sales pitch from me.

And since I am just starting my consulting business, I am willing to offer you rates and guarantees that are quite unlikely to ever be offered again by me.

Gregg Terry