Kansas City SEO and SEM

by:Anne Haynes

When building corporate websites it’s very important to pick the right development firm and marketing group to support business goals; more sales, market share and revenue. It’s difficult to find one solution or firm proficient in both marketing a site and building a site. Because I’ve built my career around search engine optimization (SEO), I’ve seen this experience first hand. Many times the developer streamlines the development process to reduce costs, but forgets the page-by-page SEO features that are needed to implement a strong organic search marketing strategy. Other times the IT and hosting firm the organization picks doesn’t allow for root directory access to change the htaccess file. Ten years ago programmers and developers didn’t know what SEO was, but now in today’s environment, development firms are catching on and outsourcing their SEO.

The development firm quickly sends the organization off to another firm for SEO expertise. Before you know it, the third party SEO firm is asking to speak with the programmers about technical SEO needs and the organization is left to watch and continue paying.

Recently, one of my clients mentioned a firm that was soliciting them for web development business. The salesman and owner of the company mentioned he purchased a franchise. I did a search on Internet Consulting Franchise and found 2 million results with my client’s solicitor on the first page of the Google results.

My first thought was the term; “internet consulting franchise” is an oxymoron; if you’re a consultant why do you need a franchise. Most professionals become consultants because they have a history of success in their field. Why would you need to spend 50K for a franchise?

Now do a search on Research and Management Corporation WSI all of these sites in the results are duplicates!!! I mean come on its SEO 101 here and these WSI sites claim to offer SEO skills, but they’re built on a non SEO compliant model. Why would any SEO’er or web developer buy a franchise?

Do you have an experience with an internet consulting franchise? I’d love to know your experience.