(This is the 5th in a series of 5 articles about Panda 4.0) ( previous )

Panda 4.0 may have affected the number of listings your small business is getting on Page One of Google.  If so, you may need help.  There are a lot of moving parts to try to understand.

If you were using an SEO company in the past and they have done more damage than good, you may never recover.  Here are your options:

Before hiring an SEO Professional, make sure you know enough about SEO to at least interview potential companies.

If your website has not been tainted by the old-school, black-hat SEO tactics, then you can move forward with the good quality SEO methods that Google recommends.

We highly recommend learning more about SEO before hiring an SEO company.  We know that most small businesses get daily cold calls and emails from random SEO companies try to get you to sign a contract with them.  Most of them a bogus.  But without a basic understanding of SEO , you may hire a company that does more damage than good.

Here are a list of things to ask your SEO professional:

TIP: Many SEO scam companies will not give you the name of their company because their cold call script is written in such a way that they want you to believe they are Google employees.  Google employees have an email address that ends in “google.com” and NOT “gmail.com”.  For example “chris.fawcett@google.com” not “chris.fawcett@gmail.com” (not my real email).  Ask them for their email address.  Any reputable company, including Google, will give you an email address readily.  If the give you anything except an “@google.com” email – RUN!!!!

Why are tracking phone numbers and tracking URLs bad?

Two main reasons – 1. You will not own your business phone number and URL on the web (they will own your phone number and URL – what happens when you break contract?)  2. Your citations won’t match.  This creates confusion for Google and your prospective customers.

Also, when they create other URLs, you are paying them to optimize THEIR web properties – not yours.  You will not own the work that you are paying for.  Again, as soon as you break contract with them, you’re starting over – you will be their hostage.

They will have essentially re-created your online profiles with their information.  They now own your phone number and URL.  When you break contract, it will cost you thousands of dollars in lost revenue and you’ll have to pay someone to clean-up the mess.  It may take a year or so to recover.

Why would an SEO professional need all those log-ins?

Simple – a professional, quality SEO company cannot optimize a local business’s website without them.

A quality SEO company will need your Google+ log-in to link all your blog posts and pages to your Google+ profile.  They’ll need your Analytics to monitor their performance and provide you with reports.  They’ll need the log-in to your website so they can properly optimize your web pages for proper tags and schema.  They may even ask for log-in and passwords to your BBB, yp.com, superpages, yelp and other websites so they can clean-up and add citations.

Can Third Marble help me?

We would love to help everyone, but there are so many different types of websites and it would take an army of people to know how to optimize every type of website.

We have recently created an SEO package designed to help a large percentage of business owners: local businesses with WordPress websites.

IF you are a small business that wants to advertise in a 10 to 30 mile radius AND you have a WordPress website, Third Marble may be able to help.  Our SEO for Small Business WordPress Websites is $799 per month and covers all the aspects of SEO covered in this blog post.

Normally, the level of SEO service we offer would cost $2000 to $4000 per month, but most small businesses can’t afford that much.  We were able to create and utilize a series of WordPress plug-ins that make SEO for local advertisers much easier and keeps the number of hours of SEO work needed to a minimum.  Please see the SEO section of our website for more information.

PLEASE NOTE: Panda 4.0 has absolutely no impact on the Pay-per-Click Ads that you may be running with Google AdWords.

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