Do you wash elephants or sell portable heaters in Alaska?
Stay with me please.
A few days ago we received an email from a client’s web management company. The client is a doctor, a medical professional in a highly competitive field here in the Upstate of South Carolina. The web management company sends us an SEO report every quarter and this report showed our client physician as #1 or #2 in organic search results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
When they came to Jack Russell, they were spending a fortune on Google Ad Words in order to keep their website on top of local Google search results. Some of those clicks on their Google Ads were costing $25.00 per click. And that’s just a click on a web link which doesn’t guarantee a conversion to a phone number or a phone call. Four to five clicks, $100 to $150 a day. Oof!
If you’re not familiar with the way Google Ad Words works, it’s basically an auction.
Let’s say you’re in a competitive field in a saturated market. Suppose you sell portable heaters to first time cabin renters in Alaska. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of folks selling all sorts of portable heaters in Alaska. So you put up a website, post your heaters on Facebook and Twitter and wait for the phone to ring. Well, that’s not going to work because if you’re renting your first cabin in Alaska, you’re probably going to jump on Google and type in “portable heater, cabin rental, Alaska.”
The search results that pop up on page one are based on three things. Money, Location, and SEO, or search engine optimization. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are all search engines and we all use them to find stuff every day. Getting the right stuff to show up at the top of the results means that the search engine has been used to its fullest potential by that top listing.
The results with the little yellow “Ad” next to them are sponsored results and that’s where the money comes in. The company whose website has popped up first is paying Google to place them at the top. The more sellers (in this case, people selling portable heaters in Alaska) using those particular key words (portable heaters, cabin rental, Alaska) the more expensive each click becomes. If you’re not careful, your advertising expense can quickly eclipse your profit margins depending on your commodity.

Now let’s pretend we have an elephant washing business in Greenville, SC. That’s an industry with very little competition. Most of the year business will be quiet because there’s only a couple of elephants in Greenville. Then Barnum & Bailey rolls into town, their vet gets on Google and searches “elephant washing service, Greenville, SC” and boom, there we are. There’s no need to spend money or do any fancy SEO because there’s no competition.
Most of us aren’t washing elephants. We’ve got a product or service for sale, we have competitors and we don’t want to spend a fortune on Google Ad Words. The next best way to influence search results is with fresh web content and that comes down to either placing photos of kittens on your website every week, or a fresh blog post. And that’s where we come in. Our founder, John Malik, is a published author, a voracious reader and an award-winning writer that’s written for Air & Space Magazine, Chile Pepper, Bon Appetit Magazine, and the Huffington Post.
Our Doctor gets two blog essays a month posted to his website, people read his blog, share his essays with their friends, click through his website to read his reviews then schedule an appointment. And when our doctor gets compliments on his writing, he smiles and says “Thank you very much.” I know, we’re not doctors. Yet our essays are enthusiastic and knowledgeable, hand crafted to strike an emotional chord.
When he received that email from his web management company, he called and offered up his new Corvette to us for a long weekend.

And yes, my insurance is paid up.
At Jack Russell, we create engaging, timely, and relevant blog essays. We tag them with the client’s keywords then push them out on the client’s social media. And when someone reads a client’s blog post, the reader puts their eyeballs on the client’s website. We’re successful, affordable, and anonymous, which is why I don’t name clients in person. If you’d like to learn more, we will provide references in person. Just give us a call or drop us an email.
Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got a twisty road to explore.