Hi George,
I was not going to respond to any of the posts, since I work with FootBridge, and did not want to appear as if I was promoting them, but when someone calls our consultant’s method’s “black hat”, and states that we only create sites that generate visitors and not customers, I felt the need to respond.
Our sites do not simply contain a company’s local, but has more content on the site of the client’s products and services then most companies, thus defeating of just getting visitors. Our sites contain more content and information for the consumer then their competitors. Our belief is to educate the visitor, not simply get the visitor.
We do not just say our clients do “exterior painting”, but rather go into the process, explain the product and give enough consumer information so they can make an educated decision on the service or product they are looking for. That is why we only specialize in the Home Improvement Industry. Please view the entire content of the site that you mentioned or any of our client’s sites and you will see this.
Each of our client’s sites has an education center that contains articles, newsletters and information for visitors to get. Each service they offered describes it in detail so the visitor can get enough information about the company and products they offer. Education is key in this industry when getting new clients.
In regards to your “Black Hat” comment, that method is NOT illegal with Google. They would be illegal with Google if we submitted each web page of our client’s sites, which we do not. We actually do not submit to Google, but rather are testing a BETA program that they are using.
The creation of Local SEO within your site to describe the “Areas That We Serve” has been around in the past 8 years. Major corporations have built extremely large sites and made millions doing this one specific tactic, i.e. Service Magic, Respond, Lending Tree, City Search, etc. But that is ONE PERCENT of our services. If you reviewed the entire site, like a visitor would, you would see an in-depth consumer information on services, products and selections that benefit the consumer regardless if they use our client or not.
Also since our programs are a monthly management, we actually add more content to the actual pages that you state are irrelevant, for example Los Angeles Home Improvement.
Websites are constantly growing things and cannot be designed once and left alone. That is the problem with most small company websites. Websites need fresh content each and every month, so they continue to grow and compete with the online competition. Service Magic, Respond do not appear above the local contractor because their site is more relevant, but rather because they have more content. We are trying to create sites for the local contractor to focus on their locality and their services so that the small contractor in can compete online with the big corporations.
If you would like to discuss this further, please feel free to call our office and any one of our consultants would love to debate SEO practices with you.
