Rest in peace, SEO

Guest Post: Dave Perrera, MFA Funnel Strategist

“SEO is for suckers”.

I’ll never forget the day he said that to me. I had just recently left my company of 10 years, where I had managed over 50 people at one point in time; I was ready to venture out into the world of entrepreneurship. I was living every business-minded person’s dream – the opportunity to be the captain of my own ship.

My plan? Pay some SEO company $1K+/month to boost traffic to my website, the phones would start ringing off the hook, and I would be on top of the world.

I had a conversation with a client who put me in contact with the “Top SEO guy in the business”, and I felt like I had the secret weapon. I was going to dominate, and leave all of my competition in the wake.

The phone never rang.

Youtube videos, guest blogging, keyword-focused articles, Google Map snipers, black-hat private blog networks, vanity numbers, exact match domain names, you name it. Not. One. Call.

The dream was slowly fading away, and the thought of gracefully easing my way back into corporate America started to creep into my mind.

But why wasn’t it working? Surely all of these companies that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every day to make sure they are found on the net couldn’t be wrong, could they?

Don’t wait for your prospect to search for you

What I didn’t understand was that there was a vast difference between direct marketing and search marketing. Pretty basic stuff, but it just never clicked (I’m a little slow to the party some times).

I didn’t realize that rather than wait for the prospect to try and find me to fit their immediate need, I could actually tap into their wants, needs, desires, and tell them what they needed before they were even thinking about it.

Furthermore I didn’t understand that these large organizations, who had oceans full of optimized blog and article content, with marketing budgets large enough to squash any competitor, had the SEO business in a stranglehold.

Sure, long-tailed keywords were a great way to circumvent these conglomerates for the time being, but for how long?

Even if I were able to get the long-tailed keywords consistently sending my site to the top of the Google search, I would NEVER be able to increase the number of searches!

So how would I scale my business if that tactic actually worked? How would I grow the business?

I wasn’t even thinking about the “what if” Google decided they didn’t like the way their algorithm responded to my methods of driving my site to the top of the list, thus waking up to a rude discovery that something called “Papillion” (just playing off of the Google algorithm names) decided to put my site on page 2,406 of the search query, killing my business with one push of the button.

The LAST path to cash

Enter my old friend, Damian Lanfranchi. I had remembered Damian told me at one point he was doing something online that was very lucrative for him, but never actually understood what he did.

I tried to wrap my mind around what he was doing, but for some reason I was so programmed to the mindset of- “If they need it, they will call you” that it just didn’t sink in.

Then he said it.

“If I were starting a new business today, SEO is literally the last tactic I would employ to drive new business… it is definitely not your fastest path to cash. SEO is for suckers.”

It finally started to sink in, and I will never forget that day.

The SEO trap

Thankfully, my site never saw the first two pages of Google. If it had, I might have fallen into the trap that a lot of business owners who have moderate success with SEO fall into: thinking I had a winning formula that would last forever.

I would have been kidding myself, and my business would have been built on an extremely vulnerable, un-scalable foundation, just waiting for the bottom to fall out.

I started to understand that if you do not have your hands on the growth controls of your lead flow, and you are relying on some vulnerable tactic(s) to maintain the status quo, you are kidding yourself, thinking that your business would ever be something more than a search engine result, calculated by an emotionless series of equations that do not care about whether or not your family gets fed.

Today looking back I think about what a foolish plan I had (but hey- no risk means little or no reward) and I am certainly glad that things began to make sense.

It was almost like a veil was removed from my eyes, and I sit here, now far more accomplished, and my future far better positioned because of that realization.

If you have not yet entered into the world of direct marketing, or if you don’t think it can work for your business because you are so very different (we hear that all the time) I would be happy to talk to you to see how we can get your lead flow up, resulting in new customers and record business growth.

We have the firepower, tools, know-how, expertise and track record to help you make it your best year ever.

Is SEO dead? If you are a small business with stagnant growth and a limited budget…. it had better be.

It’s your turn!  Please share below what your thoughts and experiences of SEO have been like. Have you been doing anything differently? We would love to hear from you!

---

 

Editor’s note: Today’s blogpost is from MFA Funnel Strategist, David Perrera. Dave joined MFA in March of 2015 and has been personally mentored by Todd Brown. Dave lives in Florida with his wife and two kids. He’s done everything from door-to-door sales to telemarketing to managing a $5M+/year business. When he’s not helping MFA clients turbo-charge their funnels, Dave loves to spend time with his family and volunteer at his church. Funny fact: Dave started out in sales by selling cups of Pepsi at a local auction. 🙂