I was hired in the middle of Q4 2008 for a sales position at eVisibility, and I wanted to write a little about the experience of coming from a place where I thought I had a good grasp of online / search engine marketing to joining this group who actually lives and breathes it. My previous job was with a company that put design first, where I had to learn fancy acronyms like LAMP and try to decipher the limitations and functionality of programs like Drupal and Joomla, and development tools like CSS, PHP, HTML and Ruby on Rails.

When it came to online marketing, it was a highly nebulous concept for me; and the training that I really needed was not forthcoming. I read some things about SEO and Paid Search, but I did not have enough foundational knowledge for it to really gel. Nevertheless, I was able to sell it somewhat successfully as part of a project because clients were completely lost on the subject. Flash forward to now, and a quick discussion about SEO and what I see in my job.

Now, at least, I know what I don’t know. SEO in and of itself is fantastically complex, although now I have a strong conceptual understanding of it, and a much tighter grasp of the value of the moving parts which all coalesce to create results within a well managed campaign. I can talk on and off page and give you articulate explanations of each facet of organic optimization as they relate to the way we have our deliverables and pricing set up. This is a huge departure from “yeah, we can do SEO and PPC, and we will just roll it into the price for development.”

Unfortunately, my world is complicated from a sales perspective. Potential clients coming to us have very often been burned by some company (and there are many out there) which has taken significant money and given the client results ranging from nothing to almost nothing for their investment. This happens for two reasons, the first being that there tends to be an attitude from the customer perspective that SEO is SEO, that it is a commodity like groceries or gasoline. This leads to a lot of price comparison but inexplicably almost a total lack of focused effort to really compare the deliverables from one company to the next. The devil is really in the details when it comes to organic optimization, and Internet marketing in general.

Vigilance on the part of the customer within this aspect of the sales process would almost certainly eliminate the second reason that this happens. A large number of companies in this space are either unscrupulous or they just do not have the human capital assets or top level expertise to do everything necessary to create results that justify the customer expenditure, and more of them would be eliminated if potential customers were more informed, knew what to look for, and were prepared to pay a fair price for the actual value of the expertise and deliverables that achieve results.

At the end of the day it really pays to deal with a company that trains its front line sales reps to understand this stuff at almost the level of a sales engineer. From this one can extrapolate that the people involved in the actual day to day campaign administration are extremely qualified, and well worth the $2,000-$10,000+ per month they are asking for. With the right exposure and placement, your ROI will eclipse those numbers anyway. Never has the phrase “you get what you pay for” been more appropriate.