We were about an hour from the Puerta Vallarta airport, having just left the highway, meaning, a two- lane, no-shoulder asphault strip barely holding the jungle off of our car. My son pointed toward a lot of green to our left and asked “What are those purple things?”

“Mangoes” our host replied. “We pulled a bunch of them out of the pool this morning.” During the our visit we learn that while the mango hasn’t reached nuisance status, we certainly see as many of them rotting on the ground as we see in margaritas or for sale on sticks.

There was another pervasive fruit on our trip. Sometimes it was luscious - just hit the spot. You’d savor its many flavors. You’d lean in to the table, asking for it to be passed to you. It would be so good, you couldn’t stop. You could do so many things with it.

Other times you’d taste it and fantasize about tossing it over the cobalt blue curved-topped retaining wall to break far below in to small pieces to be carried away in the awkward wave of fluorescent yellow pincers attached to a purple crab the size of a pork medallion.

Shiny pieces then to be passed from crab to crab (they are the ants of this fancy pueblo, but cuter! In a Gabriel Garcia Marquez kind of way, like they might form towers of 10 or so crabs and then spontaneously ignite in to a feral sparkler, a friction fire set by rubbing brutal natural succulence against poverty painted Matisse’s colors, then fanning with a local election, odd tourists, and stray dogs, many stray dogs) to be placed at the center of the jungle in the crab version of junk shop / treasure trove.

This fruit looked like this:

Somehow we managed to get three of these ’s through customs, even though all other fruit was confiscated. Added to the fourth already at the house, and we were an orchard of DSL-hungry, flickr-uploading, facebook-friending, friend-feeding, yedda-answering, Nana-skyping, yes, even search-engine-optimizing and internet-marketing laptop-dependent tourists on a jungle getaway. (For the demographers in the crowd, everyone using the machines was well over 18, 25, 30, ok, 40.)

Is it so wrong? “Stop splashing, kids, you’ll get the ibook wet!” “Hey, let’s skype Nana in for the sunset.” “He’s sitting where a glance catches the jungle, the pacific, and a Picasso … Is he really reading his feeds?” Muttered disbelievingly by someone who twenty minutes later will be uploading nearly a hundred images to flickr. Then a third person will say: “Is someone uploading pictures…my connection’s really slow all the sudden.”

Do not worry; the crabs are very, very shy. Now, are there more mango margaritas?

I get two or three new business calls a week. It’s typically a business owner who needs to improve her web marketing, but has no idea what it will cost to get to the top of the search results. Or, it’s a sales guy in a company who is looking for a quick fix, to make his numbers for the quarter. Both get a quick, free assessment, and it usually doesn’t include my recommendation that they sign up for search engine optimization.

Having a small business myself, I know how much I needed sales in the early days, and how much I have had to learn about marketing to understand where sales come from. Have you ever noticed how few advertising agencies advertise? That should tell you something about marketing professional services.

When it comes to web marketing, the small local business owner is clueless about what tools are available. One of the most powerful is absolutely free: signing up for a business listing on Google Maps. Local results are often at the very top of the search engine results, right where you want to be found.

The other recommendation I make is to try pay per click advertising. For a modest budget, maybe $300-600 a month, you can advertise on the most popular search terms for your business, and target only local prospects. Over a few months, you will gather data on what search terms are resulting in traffic, which terms actually turn into business, and how much it costs to be present when people are shopping. Since a full SEO program costs at least a couple thousand dollars a month, PPC advertising can help you test the waters and see if search marketing is profitable for your business. This is a test we recommend, before you make the financial commitment to use SEO to show up on top of the rankings, based on your site’s merits and not ad dollars. If PPC works for you, and you know that only 18% of B2B prospects click on those ads, then SEO starts to look like a better investment.

I enjoyed reading the recent post by Gord Hotchkiss, titled, “Will Agencies Get Search: Don’t Hold Your Breath.” He’s right about several things:
1) Companies (advertisers) are allocating a fraction of their small online budgets for Search…because they should be investing in Search. Everybody says so.
2) It IS better now than it was even a few years ago.
3) And – he really nailed this one – agencies don’t “get” Search because they see Search as small.

Search does not lend itself to high-falutin’ campaigns or creative graphics. It’s not sexy. And even though pay-per-click (PPC) Search is advertising (right up an agency’s alley), it is not glamorous. The creatives don’t find Search stimulating. There’s nothing there for a copywriter to sink his teeth into, and the art directors aren’t even invited.

There is money in it for an agency, though. A percentage of media spend. As more advertisers dictate that budgets (however small) be allocated to Search, the agencies will “get” Search. As long as Search means PPC.

What agencies won’t ever get is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the killer app for advertisers – not so much for agencies.

SEO, even less glamorous than PPC, requires lots of research and patience. Not fun. You do get to do a little bit of brainstorming, but then it’s more research and patience. It’s all about implementing, waiting, measuring, and then tweaking and waiting some more. The lion’s share of SEO work for a site is done upfront, and the results take longer than PPC. Then, you follow up with more of those tweaks I mentioned. That’s not profitable for the agency.

SEO requires access to the company website. Not always an easy task. And company websites are almost never accessible to an agency. Typically, the agency’s client (probably a marketing or advertising manager) has to wait – sometimes weeks – for the “owners” of the site (probably the IT folks) to make recommended SEO changes. Then they can start the waiting and watching stage, only to wait weeks for the next set of tweaks to be put into place by the site owners. Very tedious. And, not something an agency can charge for.

But SEO is effective. And profitable…for the client. Amazingly so. Often, when SEO starts working, clients can reduce PPC budgets substantially and still increase Search traffic to the site. Incremental traffic starts coming in “for free.” So much for the agency’s percent of media spend, I’m afraid.

I understand how an agency makes its money. I’ve worked for – and with – some great agencies. But they aren’t going to get SEO because they can’t see how it improves their bottom line. It’s not fun. It’s not sexy. It’s a lot of hard work.

But SEO really is sexy. It’s a little bit technology. A little bit marketing. A little bit sales. And a whole lot CREATIVE. It’s a giant jigsaw puzzle, and when the final pieces fall in place and the metrics start their upward climb, it’s a beautiful picture. Clients see the results and, sure enough, funnel more budget to Search. Next thing you know, they’ll be allocating some of their Search budget to Advertising.

Once your site is optimized, there are all these important keyword terms embedded in your content, but only the search engines know how they fit into the information architecture of your site. Unless you have unique content, they won’t begin to PREFER your site until other people link to it…preferably using the very keyword phrases you have worked so hard to integrate. Links are equally important to getting good rankings from your SEO efforts on content and architecture.

Articles disseminated across the web are a great way to plant these seeds. On a regular basis, write short articles (600-1000 words), put them on your site, and then offer them up for people to use as content on their blogs, in newsletters, etc. Sites that specialize in this include ezinearticles.com, articlesbase.com, articlesfactory.com, contentdesk.com and ideamarketers.com. When people reproduce your content, they pick up the links, and often will link to the article on your site.

The very best mentions are on pages with relevant content on authority sites, because these links are seen as most significant. We recently participated in an online survey from Business.com on B2B search marketing, and were quoted in the resulting white paper. Of course you can buy links from a big vertical search engine, but by helping them gather good data and providing a thoughtful little snippet, we have fresh new links to our site:

In this case, we didn’t get a keyword phrase as the link, which would have been more beneficial, but they also are distributing this white paper to all their advertisers, so the prominent mention at the top of the section on B2B SEO is even more valuable…prospects can click right through to the site.