• Johnon.com , Friday, August 1, 2008 4:15 PM

John Andrews digs into Marchex's latest announcement that it is now offering small business owners comprehensive local online marketing and lead generation services--including paid search and SEO'd site development. He throws up the caution flags however, arguing that handing all of said business over to one company (or two, if you include the agency that initially creates an SMB's Web site) is foolish.

"You must own your website and your lead gen channel, or at least own a point of leverage for that channel," Andrews says. "You must control your public profile, and you must own the revenue stream from your search marketing."

Entrusting the breadth of one's online marketing efforts may seem like an ideal situation for SMBs, but as Andrews uncovers, it can also result in lackluster campaigns and poor ROI. As an example, Andrews follows up on the example that Marchex cites in its own marketing materials, a dentist in Washington State.

"If you look more closely at the dentist website, you see it has been 'optimized' for local search via keyword stuffing of alt tags and title tags," he says. "The content has clearly been 'made accessible' to search engines via readable text HTML versions, but those are presented via techniques which fail usability tests - the intent apparently to satisfy search engines, not users." Lastly, Andrews also says that the dentist's original site wasn't optimized properly to start with, so the SMB could likely have increased leads without resorting to another third-party.

Read the whole story at Johnon.com »