Online marketing has become a bright spot for businesses in this time of cutbacks, layoffs and government bailouts due to it’s high ROI.  On the other hand, the expectations given to the customers by some nefarious SEO companies looking for a quick buck…or those web designers who don’t want to lose the revenue but don’t want to take the time to learn the right way to manage organic and throw unknowing customers under the PPC bus.

I ran into a situation a week ago that still has me frustrated over what occurred.  The “web design company” (and with skepticism, the full service marketing company) I ran into takes the grand prize.  We had done a local (geo targeted no more than 15 mile radius) for a client about a year ago.  They were happy, we were happy and we have the documentation to show that the impact increased their business by a very signficant margin.  Almost a year later, their placement was still high and the traffic was still translating into revenue.

Enter the web designer.  No problem, we had recommended that they get a fresh look for their site.  However, the client calls me and is incredibly unhappy with them after realizing that the contract included online marketing as a part of the package.

After taking a look at the new site, it was immediately apparent that they’d been sold a boatload of kewpie dolls.  Let me give you a few examples:

• When updating the “new” site, they kept none of the local geo targeted optimization of the site.
• As the site was live, it seems that they forgot to do 301 Redirects so that all the listings that were in the organic went to a page not found.  They claimed later, this was just an inconvenience and told the customer that this was not a problem.
• They added on more charges than our fully managed SEO campaign with nothing to show for it.
• They designed the new site, eliminating the footer with contextual linking - which is an important element in maintaining critical focus of keywords and pages.

The client was duped.  I became the bad guy in pointing these things out, but yet everyday we talk to clients and potential clients about what they went through with these types of companies in the past.  A very real part of what we do is to reset the expectations and provide concrete evidence that online marketing is not for the faint of heart and or those looking to make a quick buck because the client doesn’t understand redirects, the difference in geo targeting etc.

In the end, my guess is that like many companies out there, they will be told that the only way to achieve first page rankings is to pay for it in ads.