At WrightIMC, we will always be transparent with our SEO strategies and tactics. We don’t believe there are above-board, white hat SEO trade secrets.
Disclaimer: We don’t reveal client trade secrets or details that we are asked to keep to ourselves – especially.
The SEO strategies and tactics we employ as SEO professionals are an open book to anyone who asks.
Recently, we’ve noticed a growing trend among some respected and prolific SEO sages. There is a proclivity to keep SEO knowledge close to the chest. This line of thinking has two main justifications:
- If I tell everyone how I do it, they’ll become my competition.
- Why should I teach everyone else how to do their job? They need to learn by doing, just like I have.
To understand how we view these issues, it’s important to understand how WrightIMC thinks about transparency.
- Nothing we do is proprietary. We don’t hold patents on our marketing techniques because our techniques aren’t patentable. Nevertheless, we do create innovative marketing that moves the bottom line. If you take a look at the analytics of any of our clients, you’ll see their traffic, reach and most importantly profit margins resemble a proverbial hockey stick. What we do works, yet it isn’t groundbreaking. We take best practices and execute them properly. And when that isn’t enough, we get creative and take chances, or as we like to say educated risks. Occasionally, our more creative endeavors have failed. But more often than not, taking risks pushes us past a hurdle previously thought to be impossible to jump.
Our educated guesses are based on experiences and data. Those experiences and data come from having “been there, done that.”. But there’s also nothing that easy for anyone to just replicate. We dare you to try to achieve what we do.
- WrightIMC is not a training company. We don’t train others in how to do what we do unless they work here. Why? Because we don’t want to be a training company. Every few months we’ll have a prospect that asks if we can do the work while training their staff. Presumably, these companies want to take their digital marketing in-house. Our standard answer is “we’ll do the work, but we don’t do training.” It’s not that we fear the client actually making good on their goal to do their own digital marketing. If you don’t want to work with an agency, that’s fine. You can hire a marketing team with the experience to make that a reality.
The reason you want to work with an agency is the diversity of experience that simply can’t be replicated with an in-house setting. And frankly, it’s almost always cheaper to work with an agency. You get more qualified people working on your program for less than the gross salary you’d have to pay to hire similarly qualified personnel. Don’t believe me? Try to find someone with more than 20 years of digital marketing experience that will touch your account for less than a $50,000 annual salary. Most of our contracts are $50k a year or less. And you can be assured that every hour an agency works for you is accounted for. It’s much harder to keep in-house staff accountable for every hour worked. Also, in-house folks are likely to get stuck in a bubble. A bubble is when someone only works in one industry and misses the overall trends that are apparent when working in many verticals.
Educated clients are the best clients. So we don’t train our clients, but we do educate them. If our clients want to learn from us, that’s encouraged. Clients who can provide value to our work makes everyone better. The big difference is we aren’t there to turn you into a great SEO, but if you do turn into a great SEO by working with us, we’re ok with that.
SEO is not rocket science. It’s more like plumbing.
If my sink is leaking, I could go read how to fix it, look at some Youtube videos, buy the proper tools and learn how to fix it. By the time I’ve fixed the sink, I would most likely be out at least 10+ hours, have bought a hundred dollars worth of tools – oh, and there’s a good chance I would screw it up and cause major damage to my house. Or, I could pay a couple of hundred dollars and have a plumber come out and fix it correctly in less than an hour.
Just because I COULD fix my sink, doesn’t mean that I should.
SEO is the same. Businesses can hire in-house personnel or learn SEO themselves. They can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on in-house salaries or spend countless hours learning the ins and outs of SEO. But ultimately, they run the risk of spending years to get their site ranking properly in the major search engines. More importantly, they run the risk of damaging their site or getting a penalty from Google.
So when a client tells us they want to take their work in-house, or a prospect says they want to run a DIY SEO campaign, we say go for it. If you have the time and resources, there is no reason you can’t succeed. At the end of the day, the value we provide is that we know the pipes to bang on to fix the problem. We know how to achieve SEO success without breaking the site. We already own all the expensive tools to get the job done right. And we can do it faster and more efficiently than most in-house marketers.
We tell clients what we do, so if you want to know how to do SEO and to go the in-house route, more power to you. Just don’t expect to be able to take our strategies and tactics and magically rank for your number one keyword. It just won’t happen, and we suspect you’ll be back for help soon enough.
Need Help With Your SEO Strategies and Tactics
Contact WrightIMC today for any SEO strategies and tactics questions you may have.
