Search Engine Anti-Marketing

“I think it’s time for some tough love here…” Google’s Adam Lasnik

When my wife and I went house shopping back in 2002, we viewed a house in Sherwood that I didn’t think much of but my wife really liked. She expressed quite openly how that particular house would be really awesome for our family. My realtor took her aside and within earshot of both myself and the homeowners expressed to her quite directly and forcefully many different reasons why purchasing that house would be a terrible mistake. My wife was a bit taken aback with his behavior but in that one moment, he earned my business for life.

I wrote a post a while back where I argued that search marketing consultants should be open and direct with their clients because such brutal honesty ultimately leads to optimum results in the engagement. At the end of the post, I made the following statement:

If I ever do any solo branding, it will be as the “Tough Love SEO”.

I did purchase that particular domain name (https://www.toughloveseo.com) but it had been parked for almost a year. Recently, I finally decided to put up a professional services page in order to increase the volume and quality of side gigs that I’m doing (for up until now I’ve been getting them exclusively via word of mouth). I still feel that particular domain name to be both memorable and reflective of how I would work with clients so I wanted to create a look and feel on the page that reflects my professional point of view. I believe that the “tough love” philosophy is desired by many businesspeople provided that the client feels the consultant has high levels of both integrity and ability.

There are plenty of excellent marketers in our industry and many of them do agree with the “tough love” philosophy. However, I haven’t noticed anyone marketing themselves thusly which offers me the opportunity of representing an underrepresented niche.

When I started gigging, I made the decision that I wouldn’t work with a site if I couldn’t see any ROI in the engagement for the client. The reason why our industry is viewed with such suspicion is that clients are often deceived with inaccurate assessments of the search marketing potential of their sites. Furthermore, many consultants attempt to profit from client misconceptions about SEO and, instead of educating the client about what the end game should be for the search marketing effort (increased sales / leads and a high ROI), they feed off client ignorance to make a high margin sale without regard for the well-being of the client’s business.

For example, I just talked to a local business owner that had awful website created without any SEO considerations and which had almost no inbound links. I told him that for the low price he wanted to pay, I couldn’t fix his site for SEO but if he focused on local search optimization and paid search (with a custom landing page created for a paid search campaign), he could achieve most of his goals at a reasonable cost. I wasn’t sure he really got what I was telling him but he wanted to move quickly on the project which was fine by me.

Then, he sent me an email giving me a list of 40-50 keywords with multiple geographic modifiers and asked whether my services would include him ranking in the top couple listings for all combinations of those terms. I told him that he absolutely can get excellent visibility for all of his keywords…with paid search (at reasonably low bids), and that he might get some natural search traction for some of his keywords combinations but not to count on it.

I then got a follow-up email saying a friend of his got excellent results from the following link-service and asked my opinion about it (a certain quote from Forest Gump came to mind as I read his email). My response back to him was that he’d burn his site if he’d use that service.

Needless to say, I’m not working with that person. I’m sure he shopped on price and found somebody who told him exactly what he wanted to hear.

Hopefully, my marketing messaging will attract the right people to me (and scare the wrong ones away). We’ll see if that happens.

Note: To be perfectly clear, I’m not implying that Adam Lasnik or Google is implicitly or explicitly endorsing my Search Marketing Services. After all, if I really wanted to leave the impression that the Search Engines favor me, I would have published this picture along with my messaging.