If you have a website you have, not doubt, received many email offering you website design, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and social media marketing services.
If your own and operate many websites like we do at Kona Impact, you will receive tens of these email a day, as well as a handful of cold calls and other pitches.
How do you know what is a genuine and useful service?
Here are a few that should definitely avoid:
- Search engine submission. The value of this is almost nothing. It used to be that we had to tell the search engines to review our website. Nowadays there are only three search engines of value: Google, Yahoo and Bing, with Yahoo and Bing sharing data. They control well over 90% of searches, so take a few minutes and go to the Google , Yahoo �and Bing and you�ll have done what you need to do.
- �Guaranteed #1 on Google.� This cannot be guaranteed and any company that does is lying. Note: you can buy ads on the search engines, but you will only be shown as long as you keep paying.
- �We reviewed your website and found several problems�� Chances are they have not reviewed your website, and chances are your website does not have any or many critical errors. All websites have some technically incorrect code or design elements, but the true issue is: do these �errors� affect usability in important ways?� Chances are �no.� The content on your website most likely can improve and this is where hiring professional help can make a difference.
- Link building. Links to your website are a major factor how Google and the other search engines judge and rank your pages. That said, almost all (ok, all!) link building schemes are highly suspicious and can have the unintended consequence of lowing your ranking or getting your website removed from Google.
- �We have uncovered a secret formula for higher rankings� If you had a secret so powerful would you tell anyone? The fact is there are hundreds of elements to how the search engines rank websites. We know many of them and have a very good idea what is very important and what isn�t. Someone who claims to have proprietary information is lying.
We advise most of our clients not waste their time responding to spam email because 99% of them are for services that do not work in the long term.
What we recommend is that people go online and search for companies that offer the services for which they are interested. If a company ranks well on Google for �social media marketing� it is likely to be good at what it does: help businesses be found. Compare companies and ask a lot of question. Go over their websites and make sure you know what you are and aren�t getting. One thing you�ll find is that most spam email does not have an established company behind it.
And, of course, if something looks too good to be true��you know the rest.
If you are in West Hawaii and need some reliable, honest help with your online marketing, give us a call: 329-6077.