Ever hire an SEO Agency and when you start asking questions about their work, they respond by saying “Leave all that to us, we are the experts”, or “It’s a mix of science and art, very hard to explain, but we know exactly what we are doing!”

Yeah, well you aren’t the only one.  Many of our clients have experienced that and many paid a LOT of money and never really knew what they were paying for.  Sure, it’s a science.  After learning a decent amount of  SEO, I can tell you – very few clients will want to try this on their own – it is definitely a FULL TIME  job that most of then would not care to deal with.  Thus, why is it such a secret?!

Many of my clients simply tell me, “it appears to be working”, but when I ask them for specifics, I get a “deer in headlights” look and nothing further comes from their mouth.  I guess they are treating it like “insurance” against being invisble”,  which is crazy because if they have decent content they will be in pretty good shape – certainly not invisible.

Apparently, this must be very common, because Google just announced they will REQUIRE partner Agencies to be transparent to their customers when using Google services such as AdWords.  When this goes into effect in February 2011, the Agency MUST disclose specific elements to their clients (and the client will receive a report directly), which include:

Clicks

Impressions

Spend

This will give Google the credit for the results, whereas now the Agency does not have to disclose the information and can take full credit for their “wizardry” when things go well, and disclaim everything, or get paid for more “needed” changes when things go bad.  This WILL affect those agencies who are not transparent – probably in a negative way.  However, it will affect Google in a positive way – with hundreds of thousands of accounts under third party management, it will now shine a bright light on, and weed out, bad SEO Agencies so that the negativity does not attach to Google itself.

This has been coming – it was initiated in the API terms of service years ago, then was admended, then conversation began again and a common phrase was being echoed by Google:   “Mythbusting”, I heard it many times in various conversations about transparency.

In conclusion, despite the Agencies who are going to rail against this,  I say:   TRANSPARENCY =  GOOD.  Just as in any other buying scenario, the more educated your buyer is, the better the sale.  This is simply good business and, I still believe, that most of the buyers will not go out and try to do it themselves – but at the same time, they will finally have some input into the process and will feel like they are buying a quality service instead of snake oil!

KUDOS to Google!!

Do you use Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, or the endless list of Google services for your business?

How many of them are “free”?

Now, define “free” for me.

For YEARS I have been telling my clients, friends, family…even strangers who start up conversations with me about the Internet [while I am wolfing down a Panera Fuji Apple Salad and doing my online College classwork] that there is NOTHING FREE on the Internet.

Immediately, they disagree and come back with an entire list of free services, as I did above.  Sometimes I smile and continue to eat and work…other times I explain what they give up for those “freebies”….and sometimes – if they are REALLY interested – I tell them the true cost of those freebies (data centers, datalines, staff, legal review, coders, testers, etc).

Anything you get for FREE has a price.  The price tag for the services that I listed above is YOU.  You are the price tag.  YOU are their target for behavioral marketing, search, and other services those listed businesses actually sell.

I believe we have all gotten far too used to the “freebies” on the web, we have all become “comfortably numb” (thanks Pink Floyd) to their real cost, and then when someone takes away your “assumed right” to privacy, you scream.

It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee – either pay for a similar service where you have the right to your privacy, or assume YOU are the price for free use of their service.  Those, really, are your choices.