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I agree that, for all the reasons listed, selling SEO may be harder. But, for all the reasons listed, you have an opportunity to differentiate yourself. You have access and knowledge of the reasons why potential clients would say no. Address the objections head on and find ways to assure the client that you are different. If you approach SEO as something that does not differ between providers, then you will only end up competing on price. There are lots of good agencies out there. How many are truly great? In what ways can you edge out these good companies by delivering great value?

I think that depends on the sector you're in. There are specialist PR companies per sector who will most likely do a better job for you than a general PR company. For example, I use http://www.newspress.co.uk/ as I have a couple of clients in the automotive sector.

Again, thanks a lot. Your answer is really usefull to me so I very much appreciate it. Rest assured I won't do anything until I have a well thought strategy, based on thorough research.

Being a word guy, I have a little bit different take on it: '"Natural traffic" isn't a term that's widely used in SEO.  In fact, I'm not sure I've ever actually heard it used--ever.  "Organic traffic" derives from "organic search results", which were originally the algorithmic, non-paid search results before there was Local Search. Organic traffic is that traffic that comes to your site from non-paid, search results (and technically, also not from Local Search--although that might be debatable.)

Thanks David. Very helpful info.

but how would google know if its a eBay transaction or not because when we import it - it gets it's own order id when we import. hmm. We're not going PPC at the moment but we may want to in the near feature to be honest. We do have 200+ orders a month.. most months. Like everyone we do have a slow season. Do you know if you can have two conversion pages? Do they track the entire funnel i.e. cart/shipping/billing/confirm order/order complete or can I skip the funnel to email: "confirm shipping address" kind of thing -> order complete? And maybe its worth it just for the badge that we're a trusted store. Maybe it will increase conversions..

Hello Hardik, I think you are referring to a tool/service like eGrabber: http://www.egrabber.com/leadresearcherpro Hope this helps!

oops was typing as other people replied!! No problem.  When a tribe of people reply with similar advice it is all good. 

You can get a pretty complete list from Open Site Explorer by changing some of the filter settings. Set Show to only 301 Set **links from **to only external Set pages to pages on this root domain This should show you a significant portion of your inbound short URLs. iZ90p8l.png

I might use caution with that list. According to their disclaimers, people do pay to be a part of that list. http://www.topseos.cn/disclosure. So just something to be aware of.

Or, check out http://www.younify.nl/online-marketing.html/

the question has been answered perfectly!  Thanks

No that should not be an issue...a single privately sent email to customers should not effect your rankings in the google rankings.  Do the due diligence on the provider company that you worked with, use the open site explorer and Webmaster Tools to see if you have new links, if so where did they come.  It sounds like an issue that is not related to the email...but at any rate try to find out why a dropped happened

Google is now involved via their forum. Here's the thread and other complaints, should anyone care to add anything or follow the issue. https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en-US#!msg/analytics/MuuHK4z-MDQ/fRLErjRCvKAJ

Thanks.

Hey Colin, Thanks for your reply, glad to know I'm not totally alone on this. The client has been pretty frustrated with Dex in general. Dex set up all of their PPC ads to link to these extraneous domains instead of the one actually owned by my client, who wasn't even aware of those extra sites until she found one by accident. Dex and other similar websites seem desperate, saying pretty much anything to retain clients. Thanks! Tyler

Yes, I believe I have experienced the opposite. I use PRWeb  a lot. The link value I find is not necessarily in the press release itself; it is in the many industry specific pickups that choose to re-post a well-written article. Today, most of my press release add considerable value to my clients because they are often picked-up in full with all links kept in tact. This means my article is carried by reader choice to my niche, giving the validation that search engines are seeking. Another key positive factor of a news worthy press release is that Google seems to understand  "duplicate content" in another light. When it is considered "news" search engines anticipate the content  being copied and shared. Hope that helps.

Exactly.  Because they take this stuff quite seriously.  And they're not just going to do a 10 second review if you've got 50,000 links, let alone take your word for it. And since we're now in the age of "Google needs to teach people a lesson and create an atmosphere of deterrence", they no longer hesitate to take action when they believe it will be a better motivator.

I look a the general factors of traffic and ranking first. Then I move to pages that receive new visitors. But I also try to monitor the top 100 in the 'pest control' search at US level. Someone said this was irrelevant as it's not how users search. I am curious as to other factors: Webmaster tools for Indexed pages? Traffic? Impressions? Clearly a link warning would be an indicator. So what other tools could indicate how much of an impact updates are having?

It looks like around 40% users here in SEOMOz are in fact agencies.. based on what Rand said in todays WBF: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/conducting-market-research-before-investing-in-tactical-execution-whiteboard-friday