It’s an event. No need to call consumer credit counseling.

If I’m renting my 17″ Sylvania that may be a problem.

Website promotion is the same. Rent or Own.

Ultimately you want to own.

How do you own your web site ranking? Simple, when someone searches for what you do, it should be YOUR WEBSITE they find.

You may ask “what about paying a top ranked directory or portal? That’s almost the same right?”

If you could rent a car, drive it every day and it was cheaper than owning you’d do it right?

What if I add some conditions?

• I can come take your car any time
• You rented a Cadillac and I replace it with a Yugo
• You’re paying $50 and I raise the rent to $5000

I’m sure you get the point.

This is what it’s like to limit your internet marketing to industry directories.

Stop paying and see what happens.

This is also what it’s like if you advertise with a third-party company where they control all of your listings.

Let me explain…

If you know what my return is on your lead acquisition technology you can raise your prices up to my acceptable profitability and I’ll still pay.

The worst case is that I’ve put all my eggs in your basket — it happens, especially among small and medium sized businesses.

My favorite example from Yellow Pages is the transition from black and white to color, then to multi-page ads.

The Yellow Pages ranking is ad size and seniority. The biggest ad which has been in the book the longest comes first.

Soon enough black & white was no longer good enough and the publishers added color. If you didn’t upgrade you lost your spot.

Then came the “Double-Truck” — an ad spanning 2 pages or more (in Las Vegas some Entertainers cover 4 pages or more).

Upgrade or lose your spot. You don’t own the ranking — it owns you.

I’m not saying directories have no value. There are paid directories which deliver customers. These should be part of any program and they’re not proprietary closed systems. They’re part of an holistic marketing package.

When developing your plan to build online sales (or leads) you must ask “what happens when I stop paying for this?” With little knowledge of online advertising, limited budgets and thin margins, small businesses can be hobbled when the one bet they could afford doesn’t work.

If you rent your store, an increase in rent can be tragic. Ask my friend Nancy Murphy who makes New Orleans Gift Baskets (the irony is that Nancy’s old landlord is still without a new tenant).

In the long term, owning it is usually less expensive than renting. And, if you own it, you don’t have to lose sleep over your provider not performing, or worse yet performing well enough to hold you hostage.

It does makes sense, If you have the budget, to test multiple marketing channels. Just make sure you’re tracking which leads come from where.

If you have a limited budget you must be sure that at the end of the day you can at least drive away free and clear in your Yugo.

Resources:

• Greg Sterling of Screenwerk on aggregated online ad companies for small business
• Andrew Shotland of Local Search Optimization on updating your internet yellow pages listing
• SEOMoz – Directory Link building
• SEOMoz – Beginner’s Guide to SEO
• Search Engine Journal – Local Search Blogs (Best of 2006)
• Michael Gray – 5 Ways to Promote Your Local Business
• Content Development Ideas from David Mihm
• Todd Malicoat on The Magic Formula for Retail Website Success
• Matt McGee – How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes
• I would read anything from Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide. Search Engine Guide is the most generally approachable of these.

All of the above offer a wealth of resources for small business owners looking to better understand online marketing.

Photo Credits:

Many thanks to Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide for his editorial comments.

Court Cunningham, the CEO of NatPal, has been incredibly quick in responding to my earlier post in which I was critical of NatPal’s handling of mirror sites.

He indicates in his comment that they are also being quick to address the problem noted.

You may read his comment here.

Mr. Cunningham, well done sir.

Good – that’s out of the way. Stick with me and it’ll be worth your time.

“Natpal” offers “Local Search Advertising”.

So do a number of other search marketing aggregators. They’re not all the same even though on the surface they offer similar products.

The keys, as pointed out by Greg Sterling are a sales channel and an aggregated online advertising buy. Additional commentary from Greg on Natpal.

As some of you may know I have a pretty deep experience in the online yellow pages industry.

From that time I have some experience with each of those listed by Greg above some of which is good. For instance:

• ReachLocal – offers a real service. I would contend the same value can be delivered at a lower cost, but with their independent rep network and some nice lead tracking technology they do provide some value.
• WebVisible – works primarily through existing sales channels such as yellow pages and newspapers. I like and have a lot of respect for Terry and Kirsten.
• WebListic – offers local search engine marketing and is a creation of one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known when it comes to local online advertising, Dick Larkin .

There are others about which I’m indifferent, some of whom I know from prior dealings to be a little weak and at least one who in my recent experience has demonstrated downright destructive behavior.

Natpal is a relatively new kid on the block among those Greg details and I’d never heard of them until the incident described below.

—

Some of what follows may be a little technical. If it’s confusing, please comment and ask for clarification. I know this stuff seems like voodoo but I try to keep my explanations accessible regardless of your level of knowledge but some of this is definitely search engine marketing specific.

Recently we (Search Influence) have had the huge blessing to have been referred a fair number of plastic surgery practices. Plastic Surgery (particularly “cosmetic”) is a great business – high margins, great compensation for the surgeon and a real incentive to maximize return on advertising investment.

Return on investment is what we focus on with all of our clients, so it’s been a nice fit.

Because of the potential for profit though, these guys are prey for all kinds of snake-oil salesmen. For years there have been directories, SEO firms and search marketing aggregators chasing this market. No doubt some of these do add value.
Recently we discovered Natpal.

It turned out that we had a mutual client who didn’t realize the potential risk in their techniques.

While reviewing our progress with one of our clients we were doing some searches to check on our client’s ranking we came across some Google pay per click ads. Since the only people who would have authorized PPC were sitting in the room we knew something was fishy.

We did a little more investigation and found a complete mirror of the client’s site on a different domain (.net when theirs is the .com).

So why is this bad? Search engines don’t like seeing the same content in two places. In fact, they want to treat one as “authoritative” and may even drop the non-authoritative site out of the rankings altogether.

There are some simple ways to avoid having content appear duplicated and a responsible provider does so.

Rather than go into a long explanation of why duplicate content is bad I’ll defer to Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz who makes it very understandable here.

“It’s particularly dangerous with new sites or those that have recently changed ownership. However, no matter whether you’ve got penalties or just find lots of your pages in supplemental hell, I highly recommend fixing the issue as I’ve described above.”

Aaron Wall of SEOBook discusses it here way back in October of last year.

And then, to make it even easier the Google engineers are nice enough to tell us all about it here.

And if you’d like a longer more technical description, you can read this post by Todd Malicoat, which includes a link to a PDF describing the concept of “shingles” relative to duplicated content (this is more technical than I typically recommend and not for the faint of heart).

In short, if you’re going to make a duplicate of a site you need to block the search engines from “indexing” (collecting data from) the duplicate – otherwise you run the risk of seriously hurting the real site.

The most common way to block the search engines is by use of a “robots.txt” tag in the root directory of your web site. The robots.txt file is primarily used to tell the search engines where they can and cannot go. Below is an example of what you’d find in a good robots.txt (copied from a ReachLocal client site):

# go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Simply put, User-agent is the name the search engine calls itself when it requests information from your site (“*” = any). So in other words all search engines need to pay attention to what follows. “Disallow” should be obvious, and “/” is the root directory of the web server (and by default anything below).

So, with 3 simple lines of code you can keep a site safe from duplicate content.
The real problem is that once the damage is done, it can take months to regain ranking and some may never regain their original prominence.

So Natpal, a venture funded startup, reportedly a product of the Wharton school, has decided they’re going to focus on this rich market as well.

We have mutual clients with ReachLocal, JumpFly and other PPC aggregators and can clearly point to the value provided by these providers.

And, whether I like the return on investment or not, ReachLocal does do it right when it comes to issues of duplicating content.

As I said, it starts with one client. We say – gosh, what dopes! (Sometimes we use stronger language in private.)

And we tell our client that the next time they get an offer for online advertising they should forward the call to us. ‘Nuff said.

But then, we realize that we use the same call-tracking company and while in conversation with one of the techs there say “hey, if you’re working with Natpal you ought to tell them to watch out for this problem or they may really, really screw their customers”.

So, we don’t know them we don’t really compete with them and we were legitimately trying to help them in what we thought was an isolated incident.

I want to be clear: I don’t personally know anyone at Natpal, I don’t have any knowledge of their internal workings or their process. All I know is what I can see in the Google search results, and as a result of their ad-placements.

—

So today, while doing some searches on behalf of one of our clients I came across Natpal again. And, what I originally thought was a simple mistake is actually a consistent failing on their part likely to do a lot of harm.

If you work with Natpal, you should really look at some alternatives because these guys are, in my opinion, running a risk of hurting your real site’s ranking. If you feel like you can’t beat the ROI (and I’m sure you can if you find the right provider) and must stay with them then at least tell them to clean up their act.

In my investigation I started with this search:

This gave me a list of sites with Natpal’s self-promotion in the footer.

I then dug a little deeper and found a number of examples like the following.