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How the Pirates of the Internet steal your SEO

How the Pirates of the Internet steal your SEO

Okay, most of you thought that the only Pirates that were left were off the coast of Africa. Think again. There are plenty of them on the Internet and they are just waiting to steal the relationship between your customers and your website and charge you for it in the process!

Sound a bit far-fetched?  Not really. I need to backtrack here to make some sense of where I am coming from.

You remember the Yellow Pages? That big yellow book that everyone had on the end of the table, much loved and use every day. They had the search world to themselves.

The Yellow Pages office was a hustling bustling metropolis with hundreds of sales reps, furiously signing up everyone from the smallest ad to the largest multi-coloured display Ad. In the early 80s in Sydney the Yellow Pages office had over 150 salespeople dedicated to selling the Sydney phone book. It was a mammoth task. I was one of them.Image may be NSFW.
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How the Pirates of the Internet steal your SEO

Businesses had little choice but to be in the phone book. The pink pages, the community Yellow pages and others all tried to knock the big yellow book off its perch, with little success.

Businesses who thought they could do without the Yellow Pages, sometimes cancelled their advertisements, paying the price when the phone stopped ringing after the new phone book came out.

1982 saw the creation of the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) but it was not until the late 80s early 90s that commercial Internet service providers started selling Internet access.

There were a few who understood that the Internet would be the future communication medium for the world. It certainly took time for the Internet to establish itself and for pages to be populated with information. The creation of the smartphone and tablet and iPad has all created the ability to access the Internet even in the poorest countries.

The Internet is a simple way to search it at your fingertips and is always updated. So with the emergence of the Internet the Yellow Pages started to crumble and crumble. An attempt was made to create “Yellow Pages online” but the horse has already bolted with a well-known jockey called Google on board!

So the fact remains the Google stole Yellow Pages absolute worldwide monopoly on directory listings and searches. And they stole it fast. They were ably backed up by Yahoo! and Bing all scrambling for a slice of the search engine business.

Okay so what is all this got to do with stealing your SEO?

Understand your website

Not understanding that the basic paradigm of customers searching for businesses had transferred to the Internet from the Yellow Pages, there are companies selling services that still maintain that they can make your phone ring by all sorts of magic.Yep your kidding aren’t you?

In the old days the Yellow Pages would install a “survey phone” so you could see just how many phone calls you got from the phone book. Many businesses took up the offer – not realising that they had paid dearly for Yellow Pages advertising, unwittingly directing customers to ring on a telephone number not owned by the business! The Yellow pages would use this information to sell ads to others.

It seemed like a great idea at the time and one of the only ways to work out whether the phone book actually worked or not.

Reality was that when the survey phone was taken away you had to change your phone number in the phone book and you now lost all the value from the previous phone book and the retention of the existing book as it used to take some time for people to transition to the new phone book.

If they rang the old phone number, it was gone.

This kind of weird business tactic has re-emerged with companies offering services to help you with the SEO of your website, often wrapping up a deal to sell you Google AdWords as well.

Little do you realise that when these ads are placed they will refer to a landing page, created by by them and these pages are often if ever on your actual website!

So whilst you are paying for Google Ad words with a landing page created by these companies, often it’s a very basic page with little information but a specialist phone number provided by them, Be aware that your search volume is being redirected to these pages and not to your website.

There is little doubt that it costs money to SEO and SEM a website: it is an organic process and your SEO provider will be charging you to get your website to rank in the searches. This is a cost to your business and the outcome should be the creation of a great relationship between your customers and your website that you own.

There is a place for these well-known companies and that’s for those who have no idea on how to deal with a website. Be warned that the search volume does not rest with your website, does not benefit your website and won’t help it rank any better than when you started.

Moreover companies like this will provide a specialist phone number for callers to ring and should they actually ring the number, its not owned by you, so when you end the arrangement, anyone who had kept this number won’t be able to find you again easily.

Create a good relationship between the company that provides your SEO and Google AdWords and make sure that the work that they do is owned by you. Ask them if you are not sure.

A sure sign is that any link they provide goes to an address that is not exactly your website, you are then being redirected to their site, away from your organic search.

Your website is one of your major assets and for many of you it is where the majority of businesses created. Letting valuable searches be hijacked by interventionist companies is your call but you are making others rich – at your expense.

In the Self Storage business many owners do not want to support “Aggregators” who position themselves between a facility and a customer. Aggregators also hijack organic search, often with much bigger resources and sometimes are even public company backed. They do provide a service and for some a good business. In competitive markets they may be the only way you can get your business on the front page of Google.

In the US, ”Aggregators” have a major share of the Self Storage search business and its growing.. Operators have let this happen, some unknowingly, but many feel it is a cheaper way to get to the front page of Google than traditional SEO methods. They left it too late to compete and build organic SEO.

In Australia, aggregators have not been successful. Be aware that there are companies out there using what appear to be great methods to provide you with hundreds of leads. Be under no illusion that these leads would have come to you with a well-engineered, highly visible website.

The travel industry the insurance industry and many more are inflicted with aggregators who stepped between customers and businesses. Whilst they have overheads, they do not compare to the overheads of small business and in some cases make more money out of the customer than you do.

Keep your searches

As your website is your window to your business, it is our contention that you should be the one who owns the searches. Its your hard work and your money that has created a position in the first place.

The services offered by these interventionist companies, may appear to be attractive, but dig deep before you sign up.

Your searches are yours – talk to your SEO Company and see how with them you can protect your intellectual property.

 

 

 

 

The post How the Pirates of the Internet steal your SEO appeared first on Webstor.


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