On Tuesday I spent the day at Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2009, helping Max Haroon in the Society of Internet Professionals booth, I was was really surprised with the lack of foot traffic coming into the Expo Hall, I mean it was quiet.
During the times while the crowd were in the learning sessions I chatted to some of the other vendors. The common answer I heard was “there was 5 times the traffic last year”.
As I was working in a booth I could attend a seminar for free, so I chose ‘Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic’, last session of the day and it could have potential clients looking for SEO help. I walked into a 300 seater room to see 20-30 people attending, that’s a lot of empty seats and it’s not as though the content was bad, it was very good. The panel ruffled a few feathers with their comments, but they were honest.

What everyone is missing is, this is the time to win in the search engines, whilst everyone else is cutting their Internet marketing budgets and slowing down, your SEO company should be picking up and gaining that hard earned ground in the search results, this will pay off 10 fold when the economy picks up and you are at the top for your key words!

A potential new client emailed us saying that his new website just launched and the web company currently doing his online marketing had been bought out by another business who are ONLY interested in doing web design and he would like to know more about our services.
I almost fell off my chair, what company would ignore Internet marketing? Surely they go hand-in-hand. I mean, who has a website build today that doesn’t want it to be found in the search engines? Or am I missing something?

It gets better…
We had a good look at the potential client’s website, it was build using a custom CMS system, on the surface it looked okay. The web company had a great video showing off how wonderful it all was, drag and drop capability, ease of use etc. Looking at the code we can all pick holes, but the big shock came when we checked with Google.
If you type site:www.yourwebsitename.com in a search box Google will show you the pages it has indexed of the site.
The results showed 325 pages, but this was only a 40-page website!
When we looked closer there were only 3 pages that were actual pages from the website, the other 322 where CMS template problems. We got the client on the phone and showed him, he went silent with shock. We offered some solutions, which he asked to be emailed to him and he would take to the current provider.
Next thing his site is down with an ‘Internal Server Error’. Not a good sign!