New Tools, New Pricing, New Clients, New People!

So much to tell, so much time since we did a newsletter! The big news last year was our new website. Like lots of with-it marketers, we put a lot of effort into our blog, so that’s where the day-to-day updates on what’s happening in search marketing take place. This summer, we got recognized as one of the Best of the Best by Alltop. If you want to enjoy our wit and wisdom in real time, you can subscribe to the RSS feed here.

However, we do have a couple of big announcements which are front page news in our world, and that we want to share with you—a shiny new proprietary search engine optimization (SEO) management and reporting system, AND a couple of new pricing options, based on coaching instead of our normal full-service delivery. The new SEO dashboard gives us much better accountability and transparency, and the coaching model supports clients who either want to just do a little bit every month, or who want to learn how to do the work themselves. In either case, we think we can now offer the right solution to more clients, at a cost about half of what we charge our full-service clients.

Search Marketing Coaching—
An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Part of the reason we created the dashboard was because we believe that search marketing expertise is so important, that clients will want to have this as an internal competency. When the dashboard was just a gleam in our eye, we met with the woman who is head of Dell’s search efforts, to see what she thought. Her problems are really the problems of all client-side marketing people, just on a bigger scale: “I have 1,000 people who touch my website. What I need help with is strategy, education and tools.”

As an SEO agency, we could look at this in a couple of different ways: there’s no way we could provide a full-service solution to such a large client, but we could certainly be a resource to large clients…with a flexible service model and the right tools. The eureka moment: Dell represents one big client, AND 1000 little ones! Every product marketing manager is a prospect for the dashboard.

Meanwhile, in the everyday world of prospects and clients, our business has not been able to help the majority of people who call and ask about outsourcing their search marketing management. We have really good people, with lots of experience, and the best fit has been to find those clients who want us to manage their whole program, to the tune of $2-5,000 per month—on an annual contract. For someone who really likes to help people, the fact that lots of us don’t have a lot of money has been an ongoing problem.

Once we saw just how good the SEO dashboard was, it really opened up some possibilities. What if we used some of the contractors we have trained as client liaisons? What if they could escalate issues effortlessly to us? What if we created an online knowledge base of all our best practices and practical advice they could use? What if we could bundle access to the dashboard with a pay-as-you-go model? The upshot of all these expansive ideas was to offer our new coaching services…and we think it expands our market to hundreds of prospects who were too small or whose budgets were too tight.

New Clients, New People

These two things definitely belong together. We recently hired Patrick Wicker, a former Dell education sector salesman, as our business development guy, and he has literally hit the ground running. Not only has he been quick to learn how we do the voodoo we do, but has been super-excited about calling on prospects. Having someone dedicated to developing new relationships is such a smart investment, but he’s also proved quickly that he can contribute across the board.

New clients that he’s managing include BridgeWave Communications in Santa Clara, and two clients in Austin, Silicon Labs and what will probably be a site redesign for Convenience Office Supply and Office Furniture. We have also started work on Surgient, which provides leading-edge IT software for virtual automation and lab management, and FGSQUARED, an interactive marketing agency which does work for clients like AMD, Hitachi, Motorola, Shell, HP and Canon. We do like working on big clients, but we’re just as thrilled to be partnering with local businesses like the Tea Embassy at Ninth and Rio Grande—it’s great to hang out sampling teas and drinking in the incredibly overstuffed retail environment while we strategize fourth-quarter online marketing for their TeaTreasures.com site.

Parting Words—Friends Are the Whipped Cream on the Pumpkin Pie of Life

Next week is Thanksgiving, and despite the “unwarranted exuberance” being so quickly drained out of the stock market, we Americans have a core belief in gratitude for what we do have, and in sharing it with our less fortunate brothers and sisters. This is a good year to remember that our values are timeless, and that our real worth is not tied to consumerism. We have plenty to be thankful for, and most of us still have enough to share. It’s in our national character to be generous, and courageous.

If you’re a friend who has had the patience to get all the way through this chatty newsletter, thank you for your continued interest in our business. Do remember to mention RefreshWeb to anyone you know with a business that has an online presence. We’ll be glad to spring for a cup of golden monkey tea next time we meet!

Your friends at RefreshWeb

Showing Off Our New Baby: The SEO Management Dashboard

After nearly 18 months of work, our hard-working technical director has released our pride and joy for client use: a powerful new reporting system for monitoring your progress. It’s called a dashboard because you can see what’s happening at a glance—and in a way, it’s not just dials and gauges, but handy warning lights. We’ve always had online reporting, but the reports were difficult for clients, because they required you to see patterns where a keyword was gaining or dropping. In the new system, there is automated reporting on keyword trends, calling out gains and losses. And, you can see the real impact of the work done on optimizing your site: all the search terms are presented in relationship to the current search volume. This means you can focus on the terms that have potential to drive much more traffic, and not be distracted by all the low-volume terms that may give you a warm fuzzy feeling, but don’t pay off.

Here is a 10-minute video demo we created to introduce the dashboard to our clients…and here’s a little 10-slide PowerPoint deck you can browse quickly.

For now, the new dashboard is something our clients can use, but we are finishing up a couple of features that will allow it to be a standalone product, for release in the first quarter of the new year. The SEO industry would be well served by using a tool that objectively measured progress, and if it’s a tool that even our competitors like, then we must be doing something right!

Any Port in a Storm—But What Do You Do While in Port?

For seafaring men, time in port was not just spent drinking ale and carousing–the sailors needed to mend the sails, caulk the cracks in the hull, and take on provisions. In the economic downturn and the start of the holiday season, it might be easy to put off thinking about working on your website, but deferring maintenance may incur additional cost later…including the cost of missed opportunity. To be ready for driving business in the new year, now is the time to freshen your content, fix barriers to sales, and maybe overhaul your site optimization…or even the site design.

We have several design firms/developers/interactive shops we work with…there is no shortage of creative talent in Austin. Each company we work with has its particular niche and pricing structure, and each one really understands the importance of integrating a solid SEO strategy into the site architecture. If you’re thinking about putting the old site into dry dock and putting on a fresh coat of paint, give us a call and we’ll point you in the right direction.

If search engine optimization is one of those projects that you put off in the boom times, working with a flexible, creative, experienced SEO agency might be the most significant thing you can do in the lull to put wind in your sails when the new year dawns. We’ve said it for years: “Search marketing is the most effective place you can spend marketing dollars.”