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SEO Here I Come!
Dec 11 2007

After doing some research on hiring an SEO firm, I decided to go with the full service firm option.  It wasn’t an easy decision and I was concerned about spending the money, but now it’s done.  I just signed the paperwork with SpryDev for our search engine optimization internet marketing campaign!

SpryDev is based in Austin, Texas and I found out about them from a reply their founder, Ben Finklea, left on the Bootstrap Austin email list.  I had been thinking that I needed to find someone to help me with SEO and there was his email with his guarantee:

By the end of your contract you will have at least as much additional business from your Web site as you spend on our services…  or we’ll work for FREE until you do.

I took it as a sign.  Of course I checked out a few others but given that time is of the essence (I will start fundraising in 1Q 2008), he is based in Austin (I can meet with him face to face if any issues arise), and I didn’t have to get anyone else’s approval (I’m still bootstrapping) except for Erin’s (my husband), I made the decision to go with them fairly soon after our initial conversation. 

Ben must be pretty darn confident about his services, and based on our few discussions he seems like an honest guy.  I have heard stories about bad SEO experiences so I was paying particular attention to what he was saying and how he was saying it.  He didn’t act like he knew everything and seemed interested in learning about new things.   He said they haven’t worked with a company in the parenting space before, but he did some preliminary research and felt like he and his team would be able to increase our web profits and that he would be able to cover his guarantee.

He was proud of the fact that his firm has never engaged in paid link campaigns to increase their clients’ rankings…especially since Google recently updated PageRanks of several sites.  He was also proud of the fact that they didn’t follow a practice of internal linking between different pages within a domain to increase rankings.  I didn’t know this but apparently Google announced they would only count links to one domain so if people were linking between “www.companyname.com” to “products.companyname.com” those internal links will no longer be counted when determining search results.  Honestly, I don’t know why people would have thought that would work or why Google’s algorithms wouldn’t have already taken that into consideration.

Rose Holston is the project manager for Babble Soft.  I’ve already filled out a fairly extensive questionnaire about our market that she will use to help create the internet marketing/SEO plan.  I mentioned some of the target markets that Naomi mentioned on her post about ‘monsters and pants.’  Thanks Naomi!  Rose has two kids and she could instantly relate to the need for Baby Insights.  She is a self-professed anal retentive Excel spreadsheet mama.  I wonder what kind of keywords she will come up with to reach that audience.  🙂

I told them I would be blogging about my SEO/SEM full service firm experience in order to help other entrepreneurs with their SEO decisions.   So check back often and feel free to share your SEO thoughts so others can learn as well.  I am looking forward to working with SpryDev and to making significantly more money than what I end up paying them!

Author: | Filed under: entrepreneurship | Tags: , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

6 Comments on “SEO Here I Come!”

  1. 1 Eric Doggett said at 2:48 PM on December 11th, 2007:

    This is interesting – I’ll be curious to hear the results of this new effort!

  2. 2 Aruni said at 4:42 PM on December 11th, 2007:

    Hi Eric – I’m so glad you delurked! 🙂 I’ll do my best to post about the process. Feel free to jump in with questions and I’ll see if I can answer them or ask SpryDev to answer them.

  3. 3 Rose said at 11:12 PM on December 11th, 2007:

    Interesting… I’m currently attempting to do some self SEO. I’ll be interested to hear how the paid SEO works. If you are interested in some free and actually useful sources for SEO training I’ve been reading summaries from the thirty day challenge:

    http://www.webventurer.com/blog/thirty-day-challenge-3/install-this/summaries-diary-articles-and-tips-in-one-place/

    I’ve learned some interesting and above board SEO tips reading that. I’ve watched some of the actual challenge videos and they are interesting but eventually I wanted the digest version.

    Good luck! (Saw your comment on IttyBiz and wanted to check out someone in the same general field as me.)

  4. 4 Aruni said at 1:26 PM on December 12th, 2007:

    Hi Rose – wow! Thanks for the link. It looks like there is a lot of great info there. I looked around a bit on doing some SEO work myself but then I realized I couldn’t afford to do it myself with regards to time. I’m doing about 10 other things. So I was stuck.

    I can’t afford to do it myself and I can’t afford to hire a full or part time marketing person to do it for me so I figured I’d try a firm who can take my company on as a project. It could blow up in my face…Yikes!

  5. 5 entrepreMusings » What They Don’t Tell You About SEO - Part 1 said at 7:23 PM on January 24th, 2008:

    […] some of you know we signed up with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm, SpryDev, back in mid-December.  It’s been a great process and I already wish that we […]

  6. 6 What They Don’t Tell You About SEO - Part 3 | entrepreMusings said at 3:58 PM on May 19th, 2008:

    […] I mentioned in my SEO, Here I Come post, I signed up with SpryDev because of their […]