Page 2 - The only formula for guaranteed success

Non-sense. There is absolutely no field you can't create quality content which will address the interest of your prospects. The only reason one wouldn't is because of the time or cost associated with implementing and testing.

Hey, lots of people actually do read the articles in smut mags...lol

Sensei, I found it too "self-centered" to understand you equate everything to "money". Money means nothing to your paying customers if they are dissastisfied with your service and find your site too greedy. This is where the real ecommerce needs to understand,
"It is not all about money"
Frankly, I am a customer before and have been a victim of a very poor customer service although their business has it all, good content, description ,explanation etc. I really do not like the way they handle customers.And get turned off and never returned.
This is where your good content formula could be flawed.Search engine will rank you high but your customers may not! For me, even all of you will disagree, this what the formula should be (in a site visitor,customer perspective):

Good content = good backlinks = good rankings = traffic => money = customer satisfaction = customer re-visit = increasing money flow=continous business= growth of business

This is if you treat your SEO as a serious business and not like a scam.

Money means "EVERYTHING" to every commercial business... to say that customer satisfaction can occur without money... is a joke.

hmmm... oh we're splitting hairs here!

Emerson, any commercial activity is done to obtain profit, which means money, so I'd say MONEY IS EVERYTHING for an antrepreneur and his business organization ( call it boutique, hypermarket, service provider company etc. ).

Now, I equated everything ( good content, good backlinks, good traffic ) to money because since this is a SEO forum I was referring to the SEO part of the business.

Now, what you added to the formula:



This belongs to classic marketing ( which btw I study during this semester in university and it definitely is of great help even online and although I'm going to specialize in accountancy, I'll keep studying it on my own for a while after I finish this course ) and it's the same thing everywhere, no matter it's an off-line or an on-line business.

Passing value to customer means new transactions ( he comes back to you and buys again and maybe more - this is client fidelity ), more business, more money, business growth - just as you said.

So, again, I still believe the formula is correct for the SEO part of a business .

Yep, money IS everything to a commercial enterprise. More specifically, cash flow.

The fact is, service is retention and repeat business, however, you don't need good service to make a lot of money. Period!

You need value added to make MORE money.

There is indeed a difference in return, but that IS splitting hairs.

What is good services? Perception. You will almost always have repeat customers, not matter how bad your service is and you will always lose customers no matter how great your service is. Perception, not yours, rather, the customers.

Lordy this is harsh "This is if you treat your SEO as a serious business and not like a scam."

This sounds like you're accusing someone of scamming in SEO.

Look emerson, we all hate unethical firms that sell a service their not really delivering. But you have to also understand SEO is an art and each of us are painting a different picture. It all comes down to desired results and have the skill to achieve them for clients.

Clients that expect results in 60 days are not realistic and deserve to be chastised or fired. Unfortunately, this is most of them. That's bad customer service...lol but it's the right thing to do. People that call, the majority, wanting to make hundreds of thousands of dollars and give you $500.00 for work. I have no problem being rude to them and telling them where they can go to jump off.

Wow... I disagree with so much in this post i almost do not no where to start Give the guy a break he was not doing that at all. I more or less agree with him. For my business return work and word and mouth advertising is the staple of my business. There is no point in generating traffic/work if you are not capable of providing the desired service. Return business and personal reccomendations are so much easier to get the money of than new people that just happen to find you website. I am sorry but this is just plain rubbish. If you do not know the difference between good and bad customer service than IMO most business ventures are doomed. I do not know what you sell but if this is the attitude you convey to your staff than I pitty your customers. Good customer service will almost always result in making you more money than bad customer service. How can you dismiss return clients and word and mouth recommendations. Most businesses exist on these things i.e if you purchased from Amazon and the book didn't arrive and when you contacted them they just said 'stiff S.hit' who would buy from them again.... this is not splitting hairs it is the game.... A lot of us work for ourselves not other clients. Once again If this is the way you treat your clients than I for one would find it extremly difficult to recommend your services.

You cannot just say one part of a business matters and the rest does not. Its the whole package. I totally agree with sensie post and I agree with emerson point. Treat your customers like the gold they bring you. In the words of Ray Krok “Look after the customer and the business will take care of itself”. .......

I disagree with the fact that you disagree with the fact that he disagrees that... er, ah, hmmm... sorry forgot where I was...

I disagree with the fact that you disagree with the fact that gchaney disagrees with the fact that Emerson disagrees with the fact that sensei posted comments of good content = good backlinks = good rankings = traffic => money "is wrong".

Surely the point of everything 'incuding the client hiring a SEO' -- the bottomline for them is "more money"... how can anyone disagree with that...

what... the SEOs job is to make less money for the client... seems like a waste of time to me.

I certainly agree. Everybody knows a good SEO done onsite can bring good profit thats why every website owner wants to hire a good SEO Consulting firm, just to earn money...

Quotes are nice but in reality the success of MacDonald didn't occur because of their customer service.

As far as Ray Kroc was concerned, business doesn't take care of itself and that is no more apparent in the MacDonald brothers buyout arrangement: which did allow the brothers to maintain ownership of the original McDonald's restaurant in San Bernardino, California at 14th and E Street.

BUT you give that business a helping hand by forcing the original founders to change the name of their restaurant (which became "The Big M"). Then you opened a McDonald's franchise as quickly as possible just one block away at 15th and E, purposely driving the McDonald brothers out of business.

This illustrates Ray's single-minded philosophy about the power of “Look after the business and let customer service take care of itself”.

But quotes are always nice for rhetoric.

Right.. Just adding another quote here:

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” --Sam Walton

Does that sound realistic?

I'd say that's not of actuality anymore .

As you probably now, marketing has over 6,000 definitions, so that means that pretty much "everyone" defined it according to his/her personal perception.

Now, the "latest" definition was given in 2004 by AMA ( American Marketing Association ) which at this moment is the most reputable marketing institution in the world.

Here it is:



IMHO this is also the best approach because it is the most balanced I could find.

Being 100% focused on the client ( "like my client is my boss" approach ) won't get you the best results in my opinion, you need to balance your focuse and both you and your clients will be satisfied.

Avoid that "nearsighted marketing" approach that some decades ago was addopted by many without knowing and got their business busted.

It'd be a lot to discuss on this and I still don't know all classic marketing theory , but since this a SEO forum I feel we're averting from the SEO focuse.

Well, I always felt marketing implies common sense a lot, so even without studying a lot of marketing, you can still succeed in business in my opinion, but being honest and treating your client in a correct manner.

Sam;'s dead... can't fight against that claim... he went "ELSEWHERE"!

Good one Rod, you always put it right and in a funny way .

Of course you are 100% correct. The discussion had simply taken a slight turn to be 'whether good customer service is an important part of making more money'.

I do agree the SEO is not hired to provide customer service. But disagree that good customer service is not important for making money.

The SEO though needs to provide to some extent good service to their customers (assumption here becasue i donot work in seo) or they will be limiting the value of return business and word and mouth reccomendations (or creating a negative marketing influence on the web when the dissatisfied custome creates a website saying 'companyname scam'). Customer service is simply a matter of satisfying the desires of the customer (not necessarily the customer requests but their underlying desires). An seo that gets his customer no1 for a non money term that the customer has asked for is probably providing a worse level of customer service than a seo who gives the client good advice in the first place and then gets them no1 for a money making term.

For the seo the customer is the client. For the client the customer is the lead that the website brings. Both will make more money if they can satsify the desires of their respective customers. For example a SEO who gets their client to the top of a money making term like 'new york real estate' by having used black hat tecniques (assuming the client did not know these were to be used and the possible consequences of them) to me is providing bad customer service even though they can claim to have done what the customer asked. ie 'traffic power' springs to mind. Good customer service is not just being polite on the phone...

There's a difference between buying a home gym to lose weight and buying a pill that magically does that for you.

You can't throw TP into this discussion -- I 100% guarantee had Google not taken action and banned their customers TP wouldn't hear any complaints coming from customers and they would insist that TP's customer service is "TOP NOTCH".

The customer didn't care that there website's were not inside Google's TOS... surely every one of them reviewed that doorway crap and it was prefectly acceptable to them... so long as it worked and they only cried foul after their ranks were gone.

TP "did the job" and while Google allowed them -- everyone loved TP...

While I don't like TP's practices - I've had enough clients that thought results were "impressive" but they wanted "MORE", and once they got that they wanted "MORE" and once they got that they wanted "MORE", and once they got that they wanted "MORE", and once they got that they wanted "MORE", and once they got that... the ban occurs... and it's now your customer service nightmare because it's your fault they got caught.

Ya... the customer is always right, and they are the boss and if you take care of the customer - business takes care of itself... are absolutely contradictory and total BS cliches particularly in SEO.

1. how can anyone be right when then don't have a clue what to do?

2. ever worked for a boss that makes decisions based on being uninformed

3. and when it doesn't work - the boss fires you but the boss made bad decisions based on being uninformed and they were wrong... and that's why you lost your job.