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Drive It - Convert It | Web and Internet Marketing
John Boulter
Recent Episodes
What’s worse than overcharging for SEO – undercharging for SEO.
I just received an email blast from my phone service provider – AT&T. It caught my eye because two of the three calls to action were for SEO. Now I don’t know about you, but it’s always a tough choice for me to decide between my cable provider and my phone company as to who gets my SEO business, so I decided to have a closer look at their offer.
I was actually a little surprised at the content after clicking on the links – although pretty basic, much of the infomation hit the mark reasonably well (see links below if you want to check them out).
Well, I got ready to shutter the windows and bring in my shingle – their Enhanced Marketer plan is $10 per month and their Premier Marketer plan comes in at a jaw-dropping $15 per month. How can a guy compete with that!
What I object to here is that AT&T really isn’t interested in helping small businesses drive traffic through search. They use search information as a lead-in to try to sell their more core services. However, in doing so, they imply that you’ll see search results for those kind of dollars – you won’t. You’ll just feel misled by yet another SEO firm.
A large part of our business over at Bastion Internet is Search Engine Optimization. One of the biggest challenges we have is to estimate the amount of effort and resources it will take to successfully get a website found for the targeted phrases. Of course, effort and resources are directly linked to price. So – quote too much and you risk never getting the business, quote too little and there becomes a high risk of failure – either for your client or your bottom line.
This market is way too mature and competitive for a low-priced magic bullet to work.
(here are the AT&T links if you’d like to view them)
We’ve all experienced it. We find a new piece of software, a new website, or now – a new “app” that we just love. It’s simple, innovative, and easy to use. It does exactly what we want – no more, no less.
Then there is the inevitable upgrade or update. To our surprise we realize that our great piece of software has actually become even better. It does extra stuff that we like and is still pretty simple – nice job, developer! Inevitably though, the cycle repeats itself until that bloated feeling takes over.
Google’s two most successful products are Search and Gmail. Both continue to have more and more features heaped upon them including yesterday’s announcement of Google Instant (likely to be the 2010 equivalent of New Coke). Now this is good for many of us and great for some of us, but for the Users originally attracted to simplicity – it’s bad. Google may soon find it’s user base starting to drop (although the overall amount of use may rise as power users typically exploit the new advantages new features provide).
So why does it happen. A number of factors come into play that eventually turn our beloved piece of software (or website, webapp, phone app, etc.) into bloatware:
- Competition: A competitor comes in and the battle of the checklists begins. You’ve seen the advertisements with a list of features and check marks next to each one for one product and only a few check marks for the competitor.
- Growth: Companies need to grow or die. One way to grow is to get your existing users to upgrade. To do this, upgrades need to be available.
- Squeaky Wheel Customers: A subset of customers keep asking for more – they eventually become the power users
- Human Nature: The developers just want to keep developing
Is bloatware all bad – no. While it can be bad for many users who liked the less complicated versions, for power users the additional features can be great. In fact, Google has a ton of ways to refine your search that most people still do not know about.
From a Search advertising perspective, there are definite opportunities:
- finding the new products that return us to simpler times.
- finding ways to exploit the “bloatware”. As things become more complex the competitive riffraff are weeded out or don’t look beyond the obvious choices.
Finally, the cycle of bloatware often leads to another marketing favorite – is there a “Google Lite” in our future (for a preview check out www.google.com/palm).