Today I read how Sam’s Club is offering search engine optimization services for $25 a month. Really $25 a month! At first I thought it was a joke, but apparently this company has been offering this service for some time.
Being an SEO, I decided to look into it further. It turns out that Sam’s Club has outsourced the work to Innuity, a publicly traded company that according to its most recent filing lost $925,000 in the third quarter 2007, which is better than the $1.7M loss in the third quarter 2006.
Anyhow, the SEO campaign Sam’s Club is offering through Innuity is called LeadConnect. After reading the Innuity website I am getting a better understanding on how a company can offer professional search engine optimization services for $25. My initial review suggests Sam’s Club is not really offering professional search engine optimization services but instead they are offering a service local businesses can implement for free – thereby saving $25 a month of $300 a year.
According to the Innuity web site, a profile is created with your business information such as hours of service, days of the week, location, etc. In some situations an enhanced profile permits information such as products, services and helpful business data.
This local business profile is then uploaded to Google Local, Yahoo Local, MSN Local, along with several of directory sites with the name Pages in their title that most people don’t use. The site then states, “Now search engines can easily find your business profile — and you’ll develop valuable back links to your website. Build strong natural search engine rankings for your business!”
Unfortunately this is not exactly true. Search engine optimization is process that involves optimizing both on-page and off page factors. Simply creating a business profile and uploading it to the search engines does not necessarily equate to strong natural rankings.
Worse yet Sam’s Club is charging you $25 a month for something you can do for free. If you have a small business or a business that you want foot traffic, you can create a business profile on the major search engines for free. Each search engine requires different information and some may require a validation step to ensure you are the proper owner of the website. For example for validation Google will call the business line where you need to enter a pin.
Here are the links to manually submit your local business listing:
• http://www.google.com/local/add
• http://listings.local.yahoo.com/
• MSN relies on a third party company called Localeze as it provider to gather the data http://webapp.localeze.com/bizreg/add.aspx
This entire process will take probably 5-10 minutes per search engine. In thirty minutes you will have saved $300.
When you are finished, take another 2 minutes and submit your site to Google, Yahoo and MSN. Guess what this is free as well but you will need to create an account on Yahoo.
http://www.google.com/addurl/
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
In the end the service offered by Sam’s Club and Innuity is not search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is a labor intensive process of optimizing the on-page factors (site architecture, page construction, content, and web server configuration) as well as the off-page factors (directories, blogs, social media sites, social networking sites, etc.). The truth is you can’t buy SEO at $25 a month. However, there is a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
