Toronto SEO Firm
Search Engine Optimization Marketing Services

Want to advertise your brand on the cheap to a specific qualified demographic?  Sure, don’t we all!!  Here is a peek behind the scenes of my newest Facebook advertising campaign and the bang-for-the-buck is spectacular!  I thought the one million impression mark was a good time to sit down and figure out the value of this test project.

As you can see we got over 1 million impressions for less than $100 and I was able to laser target many of these.  You might notice that the clickthru rate is not that high but that is not really the purpose of these campaigns.  In my judgment any click was cream on top of the great brand promotion I got for the amount of money invested.  Truth is that one conversion could equal $200-$300 profit so this campaign has not only increased the reach of my clients brand but likely made them some decent coin as well!  We even put our phone number in the ads so we don’t need to always depend on a click to get a conversion.

Bottom line is that Facebook advertising right now is in the ‘sweet-spot’, lots of potential customers and we are able to reach them and expand our local brand at a low-price.

So I have been happy to report over the past couple of years that Canada, in particular my neck of these woods, Ontario has been catching up to the UK and USA by offering good starting salary for valuable Search Engine professionals.  But a quick look at Craislist today makes me wonder what is going on.  Not only have good paying SEO jobs been a rare occurrence the past few months, there are some really jokers offering peanuts and I can’t image what kind of specialist or professionals they are expecting to get.  Just a few weeks ago I saw an ad for an experienced link builder starting at $60k per year plus benefits – then today:

looking for a hard working (very very hard working) individual to help promote our business with twitter, facebook (various social media sites), SEO etc. Compensation: $24,000 per year + stock options

Yikes! And this one:

In-House, Full Time PPC Specialist Position!

You must have knowledge and experience of managing and running multiple PPC campaigns ( AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search & Microsoft Ad Center) , have client oriented approach, ability to manage numerous and changing project priorities, excellent organizational skills, team player, ability to analyze and make recommendations for client up-sells (SEO packages, PPC campaigns, web design, and more).
Compensation: $30-$40K pluse commissions based on performance

Crazy experience and high level duties for $15 an hour?  Data entry people at my office make that much!!

I still have faith that Canada is catching up and today’s posts are just a brief setback.  Hope everyone is having a great summer!

Seth Godin had a really nice post about hourly work vs. linchpin work (flat fee) and I found it very applicable to SEO.  I forever see the same questions floating around the SEO message boards, “how much should I charge” – usually it comes from someone who is just starting out but sometimes the replies are quite interesting.  I  love the example Seth gives:

I had a college professor who did engineering consulting. A brand new office tower in Boston had a serious problem–there was a brown stain coming through the drywall, (all of the drywall) no matter how much stain killer they used. In a forty story building, if you have to rip out all the drywall, this is a multi-million dollar disaster. They had exhausted all possibilities and were a day away from tearing out everything and taking a loss. They hired Henry in a last-ditch effort to solve the problem. He looked at the walls and said, “I think I can work out a solution, but it will cost you $45,000 if I succeed.” They instantly signed on, because if he succeeded, the project would be saved.

Henry asked for a pencil and paper and wrote the name of a common hardware store chemical and handed it to them. “Here, this will work.” And then he billed them $45,000. That’s quite an hourly wage. It’s also quite a bargain.

In my opinion this is the same valuation a good SEO might garner.  Read the entire post here.

It seems the US Government is preparing to classify search engine marketing as a real job and is consulting with SEMPO in working out job titles and descriptions.

n a recent SEMPO newsletter, the organization explained what’s going on:

You can be part of an important and exciting task force for SEMPO, to help the US Government understand and document the job classification that includes search marketing expertise. Among its many uses, it will allow those in the Search Industry to bid more easily on government contracts.

SEMPO has been asked to facilitate participation by at least 500 industry experts to fill out a questionnaire on a new O*Net-SOC Code that will be used by the government to classify professionals in the Search Industry.

SEMPO goes on to explain that they’re looking only for U.S.-based companies and individuals, and preferably those with five or more years of search marketing experience.

If you’d like to volunteer to help with the Labor Department’s questionnaire, SEMPO asks you to respond “Yes” and fill out this online form:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Industry-SOC-Code

That page gives an April 30 deadline, but SEMPO says if you hurry up and respond now, it’s not too late to get involved. The DOL will pay $40 to those it selects to complete its questionnaire.  Considering that Canada seems to lag a few years behind the USA in all things search marketing related I don’t think we will see this type of interest in the Great White North for at least a couple more years.

A friend of mine just emailed me some social circle results that came up when he was doing a search for Toronto SEO – while I think these are interesting I am worried that Google is going to make it very hard for new companies in any industry to breakthrough in the search results.

Everyone knows you can pay cash in the form of Google Adwords to show up above the regular organic results but how about showing up above them for free!!

For the term ‘cool logos’ my site occupies the first two image spots, which show above the number one result!!  The first one actually goes to my category page which is extra nice!

I have heard from a few potential clients before that even though their own website does not rank for many searches they are OK in the SEO department because their various directory listings rank, so people will find them anyways….

This is a really bad decision and will most certainly guarantee a long-term unsuccessful foray on the web.

Even the high quality listings typically offer multiple chances for a potential customer to veer off to another competitors website.  Then there are some like below that just post your company info with the intention of making money by NOT sending a customer to your website.  In the sample below, note the two ads before company info and then there is not even a link to the destination site listed.  No where to go but directly to one of your competitors I guess!  If you are located in Toronto and need a quote on SEO please give us a call at 416-671-3114, we also help international clients across the world wide web.

I found an interesting blog post on DigitalPoint and that combined with some local research really has me concerned about the current and future state of SEO. Almost every new client I speak to has one or two horror stories under their belt from dealing with SEO in the past. Btw, here is the post:

hiii friends
i have join seo line very shortly n i have no knowledge about it all,, i think i choose better line but some body told me that there is no future. is it true if yes then tell me why.. n if its false then tell me how growth is possible in this field.

To me this is a good example of why so many people have bad SEO experiences. Now don’t get me wrong, my favorite coder is from India and we have been working together for the past four years but if you are going to provide research, content, backlinks and represent a company’s website online you should be able to read, write and speak the language you are optimizing for.

I just spent a few minutes perusing the computer services category of my local Craigslist to see what the local competition is up to….and let me tell you – they are up to no-good!

Usually it would make me feel good to see so many clueless folks calling themselves SEO and SEM experts but I am really starting to get concerned.  Why you may ask, would I be concerned if my local competition is a bunch of quacks?  Well the thing is that I still think they are getting clients and those same clients will walk away in a few months scratching their heads and thinking SEO/SEM is a total waste of time because of these tricksters.

Let me take a moment to count the ways my local competition scare me (and should scare away clients):

1. Most of their websites have very few backlinks but they all brag that they have 5-10 years experience.  How can that be?

2. Most of them don’t rank for anything at all, well almost nothing…one of them ranked for ‘online SEO youtube vids’ – now there is a money term!

3. Most of them offer submission to search engines as part of their service.

4. One doesn’t even have his own website, when I called he said he is not a good designer so he needs to buy one soon?!?!

5. A couple are on free hosting services.

Here is a great simple pie chart showing how valuable SEO is in relation to PPC.  This is not to say that PPC has no value but finding the right mix for your company can really help boost the quantity and quality of visitors you receive from the search engines.