Google continues to widen their reach when it comes to offering its own services to visitors. Google used to simply be a search engine that would organize and serve information from across the web to its audience. Times are changing, quicker than I have ever seen, and Google wants to be in control of more transactions online. Many of their efforts have not come into fruition…yet, but they could very easily. They now serve up movie times (sorry Fandango and Hollywood.com). They started to offer up MLS listings (sorry real estate search sites) It was recently announced that they are going to compete with Lending Tree by offering up loan quotes to their audience. They are one of the main reasons why the Yellow Page books are glorified doormats with the efficiency of their local search platform. The list goes on.

In many ways, what they have done is good, as it puts the competition on its toes. But I am starting to lose sleep (and I am sure many other are) in the fact that they could turn a switch and be the only business, in business, for many industries. How, you ask?

80% of people find business, ideas, movies, restaurants, plumbers, through the search engines. Google owns almost 70% of the search space. So in essence, they control which sites people go to 55% of the time. They decide where people will go, what companies they will do business with. That is some really crazy power.

What if Google decided that CitySearch was too close of a competitor to Google Local? If they removed them from their index, Citysearch would be impacted to the point that the probably wouldn’t be around in 2 years. Citysearch is not, and never will be a destination website, they are only used when someone needs to find something in a particular city. I would venture to guess that a lions share of their traffic comes from the organic and sponsored results from Google. If Google removed them, Citysearch dies.

Google could do this same thing to many huge online companies. Wikipedia, gone without Google. Local.com, gone without Google. Lending Tree, gone (or at least severely impacted) without Google. I could create a list of thousands of companies, big ones, that would die if Google decided so.

What about retail? I don’t know how you can quantify it in terms of actual dollars, but Google decides where billions of dollars are spent online. With the exception of Amazon and some big offline brands, Google, for the most part, dictates where someone is going to make a purchase. If they decided to form a true competitor to Amazon, they could and within a year in business would probably have the same revenues as Amazon.

This is a monopoly. Quite possibly the biggest monopoly the world has ever seen. A monopoly way beyond a search engine. It is a monopoly on business in general. The government must see it, investors must see it. Google could very easily be a threat to business more than it is an asset.

What would your business do if Google simply did not let you or your competitors compete? I get sick just thinking about that.

The new big word thrown out in the internet marketing world is performance-based marketing. This is when a client pays only for the performance of the company. Many interactive firms are moving to this model because it is an easier sell to the client. While in some instances performance-based contracts can be win-win, often they are not.  It is not always better to hire a performance-based marketing company for your service or product. It all depends on how the contract is setup. Here are a couple of things to look out for:

1. Are they obligated to do the same work they would if you were paying them? Most of the time, the answer is NO. Most performance based contracts side to the vendor and simply state IF they get you XX performance, then you owe them money. If they don’t, you don’t owe them money. This sounds fine and dandy, but its not. Your company needs services performed on a daily basis, regardless of profitability to your agency. I will draw an analogy from the network marketing world. Just because someone signs up for to sell products on a contract basis, doesn’t mean they are going to. They will make a few calls, mostly the easy ones to people they know, and if they sell something, great. If they don’t sell to this small group, 99% of the time they wont sell anything. PERFORMANCE BASED MARKETING COMPANIES ARE TYPICALLY THE SAME. If your campaign is complicated and requires more effort than normal, chances are you wont get that extra effort and therefore, nothing ends up happening on your campaign. So great, you have a CPA deal with a vendor, but nothing happens and your business goes no where. The opportunity loss in this case is enormous.

2. Performance-based SEO campaigns - this is where I often see bad deals happen. Nothing is more crucial to an online company’s success than SEO. You need to make sure certain things are happening each month in order to gain rankings. Most performance-based SEO campaigns that I see are pathetic to say the least. These companies will bring on as many clients as they can, do the least amount of work possible, and bank on 10% of them achieving results and paying them. The 90% of the remaining companies simply never get ranking and the losses that result far outweigh what it would have cost to hire a legitimate firm to perform a legitimate campaign.

3. Performance-based PPC campaigns - All to often we run into companies that currently have a ppc campaign being ran on a 100% Cost per acquisition basis. While this sounds great on the surface, all too often they are paying their vendor way more than needed. This is especially true with larger clients that have a large offline push. The PPC vendor will normally buy up the low-hanging fruit terms like branded terms and long tail terms that result from their offline advertising. When they are spending their own money they are unlikely to push the envelope to find your true paid search potential. If you are going to go with a performance-based PPC campaign, do the branded search in-house, because that is very easy in most cases. Let the performance-based company go after generic terms and make sure they have to spend a minimum dollar amount per month to make sure you are getting performance out of them.

There are a lot of good companies offering legitimate performance-based deals out there. Simply make sure they are held accountable to a specific set of deliverables, outside of simply pay-per-sale as you will never reach your true online potential if this is the case.

I know that everyone is trying to crack local internet marketing, but the end game needs to be to deliver proven value to the small business. You could rank your small business client for every dry cleaner based term in Carlsbad, ca, in every search engine and they still wont be able to gauge if the dollars they give you are good investments or not.

Small business owners don’t care about placement or traffic. They care about customers.

When I am speaking to small business socially or at an industry event, I hear the same thing from them over and over again. 5 years ago, so long as I advertised in the yellow book, my phone rang. Can you make my phone ring like it used to?

The only way a small business gauges success of a marketing campaigns is how much business walked through the door or called them on the phone. The issue with web is that a web visitor converts much lower than walk in traffic or someone on the phone.

Yellow Page world: phone call comes in, you could have as high as a 40% conversion into business.
The Web Word: visitor (like Aaron Matthew Breslow) comes to your site, if you are lucky you are converting them at 1-2%.

The web has changed. It is not as simple as taking yellow page budget and spending it in search engines and local directories. It is about changing your business model. Small business owners must start getting creative and really understanding the web and how it relates to their particular business. If they don’t, online marketing and media companies will continue to be hard pressed to prove value to them, and therefore, have a constant retention problem.

As an SEO consultant, managing clients expectations are an absolute must for the success of a campaign and a long term client relationship. There has been a lot written on managing campaign expectations but what is often missed is managing a clients expectation when it comes to work flow, costs, availability, etc.

In my younger years, I would answer a clients phone call no matter what. In fact, I am often ridiculed by friends and family about a client I used to have where I did a 1 hour strategy session on Christmas.

The problem is that if you give them it once, they will always expect it. If you set the expectation by answering an email or phone on a night or weekend, they will not only expect it in the future, but they will get upset with you in future weeks if you do not do the same.

In the very beginning of a client relationship, you should have a meeting or phone call that outlines expectations from one another, including:

1. When they will be able to reach you.
2. When they should pay you (and how much they should pay you)
3. How long it could take for you to respond to a phone or email
4. If you will work nights and weekends, what is your rate?

Nothing will start off a relationship better than if the above are done in the very begining. Set the expectation and create your parameters. More importantly, no matter how much you want to respond to a client outside these parameters, dont. If you give once, they will expect it (rightfully so) in the future.

We do a lot of Social Media media for clients. It has been a very effective part of what we do. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. When we pitch these services to large companies, they are always so afraid of “backlash” if we post something. I wont name names, but we are working with the largest restaurant franchise in the world and they will not allow us to perform social media unless we have 100% control of what happens.

Big companies beware - people are talking bad or good about you regardless of if you plan on getting into the social media space. Look what recently happened to Domino’s Pizza. Their brand was severely damaged by rogue employees. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/business/media/16dominos.html

At least if you are active in a social marketing campaign, you will not only find these types of things quicker, but you are in a better position to react to the situation if you are already there.

Grow up big companies….it is time to accept and adopt using social as a brand builder, not a brand killer.