Building And Selling An SEO Business

Service-Based Businesses

Service based businesses are attractive because they’re easy to establish.

Who can sell a service? The answer is simple--anyone and everyone. Everyone is qualified because each of us has skills, knowledge or experience that other people are willing to pay for in the form of a service; or they're willing to pay you to teach them your specific skill or knowledge. Selling services knows no boundaries--anyone with a need or desire to earn extra money, work from home, or start and operate a full-time business can sell a service, regardless of age, business experience, education or current financial resources

The downside of a service based business is that they’re easy to establish, so any service area that’s worth any money soon gets flooded with competition. The ease with which competitors can enter service-based markets is one of the reasons why service-based business can be more difficult to sell for a reasonable price.

Selling A Consultancy

Some businesses are more difficult to sell than others. Agency business, such as SEO consulting, can be especially problematic if they’re oriented around highly customized services.

In Built To Sell: Creating Business That Can Thrive Without You, John Warrillow outlines the reasons why, and what can be done about it. The book is an allegory about the troubles the founder of a design agency experiences when, after eight years, he is fed up with the demands of the business and decides to sell, only to find it’s essentially worthless. His business creates logos, does SEO, web design, and brochures, so many of his trials and tribulations will sound familiar to readers of SEOBook.com

Smart businesspeople believe that you should build a company to be sold even if you have no intention of cashing out or stepping back anytime soon

There are 23 million businesses in the US, yet only

a few hundred thousand sell each year. Is this simply because the owners want to hold onto them? Yes, in some cases. But mainly it’s because a lot of them can’t be sold due to structural issues. They might be worth something to the seller, but they’re not worth much to to anyone else.

If You Were To Buy A Business, Would You Buy Yours?

If you put yourself in the shoes of a buyer, what would you be looking for in an SEO-related business? What are the traps?

We might start by looking at turnover. Let’s say turnover looks good. We may look at the customer list. Let’s say the customer list looks good, too. There are forward contracts. Typically, owners of businesses place a lot of value on goodwill - their established reputation of a business regarded as a quantifiable asset.

Frequently, goodwill is overvalued and here’s why:

How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy

Link building has fundamentally changed. Many types of link building activities that have previously been effective are now either short-term strategies or no longer considered best SEO practice. As a result, companies and clients alike are seeking to understand how certain forms of link building can be translated into longer-term content marketing campaigns. The purpose of this post is to help you develop a framework on how to start building a content marketing strategy for your or your client's site.

Why should you care about content marketing?

According to a Content Marketing Institute (CMI) 2013 Survey, 86% of B2C (business to consumer) companies are planning to keep or increase their current content marketing spending this year. 54% of B2B (business to business) companies are planning to increase their content marketing spending in 2013. Knowing that the demand for content marketing is increasing, it's worth investing resources to start researching and learning more about the opportunities content marketing can bring to a site. 

The growth of content marketing is also a concept that Fred Wilson of Union

Square Ventures agrees with. Content marketing continues to see growth because it is the future of online marketing. He likes to think of content marketing as "moving the message from a banner to your brand and changing the engagement from a view to a conversation."

Furthermore, Google's algorithm is continuously changing, meaning this pretty much guarantees that the quick win strategies that may have worked in the past will no longer work in the future. For instance, Google has announced that in the future, they will no longer be announcing/confirming Panda updates because it will be integrated into the search engine's existing algorithm (i.e. Panda is here to stay indefinitely). We've also seen recently the dangers of garnering links from paid advertorials (even on respected, high domain authority websites), a tactic considered as "buying links" in Google's perspective.

Now is definitely the time to develop a new type of strategy to garner links and traffic. 

Google AdWords Remarketing Lists For Search Ads (RLSA): The Ultimate Guide

Google AdWords rolled out a new ad targeting method to advertisers June 25, combining a visitor's website behavior with their subsequent search queries on Google.

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) was in beta since July 2012 and is now open to all advertisers worldwide. It allows advertisers to reach people in the search results page with a text ad based on:

• Having visited the advertiser's site (received a cookie).
• Search keywords bid on.

Since, in theory, someone who has been to your site and familiar with you is more likely to convert, this type of targeting can be very effective. Remarketing can take advantage of what you already know has taken place on the website, therefore the ads are more relevant and can deliver higher CTR, conversion rates, and lower cost per conversion.

Advertisers can adjust PPC ads, bids (set bid adjustments), and keywords based on the audience and keywords they are targeting. RLSA uses the same remarketing lists and management as Google Display Network remarketing. RLSA is available only once campaigns are updated to enhanced campaigns.

Keyword search is the primary source of relevancy with RLSA campaigns with targeted audiences helping to further refine who is reached with keyword targeting. Basically, the remarketing list helps to refines a set of keywords.

Any remarketing list can be added to an ad group in a search campaign, bringing an audience dimension to campaigns because we can see how searchers respond based on how they are segmented into the remarketing lists. For example, we can determine where they are in the purchasing cycle or interest in specific products based on pages they visited in past.

To get started using RLSAs, a few things need to be in alignment. You must enable: