I would imagine that almost everyone reading this will, at some point have received postal, telephone or email marketing. Many of these would have been totally unsolicited and many, regarded as using forceful Marketing techniques.

Unfortunately, Internet Marketing is not without these companies. A safe browsing experience is becoming more and more difficult to achieve these days. Website visitors need to be wary of virus infections, malware, adware and random pop-ups. Now to add to the confusion some Internet Marketing companies are promising, what in my opinion are services that they cannot provide.

Both organic and pay-per-click services are being targeted.

For the purposes of this article I will explain a method to beware of related to Google Adwords:

There are 5 main variables/settings to a Google Adwords advert. There is the addition of the ‘Negative’ parameter but I have excluded this here so as to not confuse matters:

1) Keyword/Keyphrase - The keyword or phrase within the title of an ad. Some terms are more expensive than others. Take for example the phrase ‘Cheap Insurance’ being highly competitive would be more expensive per click than say ‘Aylesbury Plumber’.

2) Broad term - This setting dictates that the ad shall show if any of the words in the keyphrase are searched for, in any order.

Example: ‘Cheap Insurance’ would show for searched for ‘Car Insurance’ and ‘Cheap holidays’. As you can imagine, this is not remotely targeted to a specific audience and can be highly costly.

3) Phrase term - This setting slightly more restricted. It will show the ad where the keyphrase is listed within a search.

Example: Will show for ‘Local cheap insurance’ or ‘Cheap insurance broker’ but not ‘Insurance cheap’ or ‘Insurance that is cheap’.

4) Exact - The ad will show for only your specific keyphrase, nothing else.

Example: Will show for ‘Cheap insurance’ only, nothing else.

5) Location targeting - Allows ads to be shown within specific areas, towns/cities or distance from one of more points. This is very powerful as it allows advertisers to target their Internet Marketing campaign only to specific areas.

Example: An Aylesbury based electrician advertising to say a 20mile radius of the town of Aylesbury in Bucks. Ads shall show only to search users searching for those terms within that geographical area.

Internet Marketing practices to beware of:

Now I have explained the basic of how Google Adwords works I can now highlight some ways in which a number of Internet Marketing companies take advantage of Google Adwords for their Internet based Marketing. Whilst I must say that in most circumstances, these companies are not lying nor are they being totally fraudulent. They are in my opinion not highlighting some very important aspects of Google Adwords that I feel they definitely should.

I personally have had experience with such a company via one of the clients of SEO Howto. I received a telephone call from one of the partners, WFL-Works (www.wfl-works.co.uk) asking my opinion on a sales call they had just received. The call came from ‘Lavora Marketing’ (www.lavoramarketing.com) promising first page Google listings for £149 a month. The sales agent was very convincing and had our client rather eager. Luckily for them the partner of WFL-Works is actually a relative therefore did not hesitate in asking the question. Luck for them I think that they did!

WFL-Works gave my contact details to Lavora Marketing so that I, as WFL-Works put it ‘can talk techie’ to them. Mere minutes later I received a call from Lavora Marketing. To WFL-Works knowledge, a completely unsolicited sales call. The sales agent sounded to me as if she were reading from a script or at the very least a number of bullet pointed sales lines.

WFL-Works are in the Kitchen & Bathroom Fitters trade located in Aylesbury, Bucks. She claimed that Lavora Marketing was ‘one of four main companies working directly with Google to put local companies exclusively on the Google first page’. For a sum of £149.00 a month WFL-Works had been selected to be in this prime and exclusive position for five specific and relevant keyphrases of their industry.

I was at the time in the middle of reconfiguring the office firewall but as soon as the internet connection was back up during this call the first thing I did was ask for their website address. I asked a few pointed questions and got immediately passed on to the Lavora Marketing director, impressive I thought for apparently ‘one of four main companies dealing with Google marketing’, to be put straight through to the director.

I proceeded to have a lengthy discussion with this gentleman regarding Google Adwords. He explained that they had an agreement with Google whereby they purchased marketing availability from Google directly and managed it for their clients.

They claimed to have been running for 3 years yet a whois domain registration lookup comes back with August 2007 meaning 2 years ago. This may be related to a domain change or faulty whois data so can be possibly be ignored. Looking at their website www.lavoramarketing.com they, at the time of writing have a PageRank of 0 and according to Yahoo has 27 inbound links. Again, something in my opinion that seemed a little odd considering the relationship with Google that they seemed to be indicating towards.

Speaking further with the gentleman from Lavora Marketing we then got on to the subject of the ‘exclusive keyphrases’ that would work for WFL-Works. He came up with one which was ‘bathroom fittings of buckinghamshire’. Now remember, WFL-Works is a Kitchen & Bathroom Fitting company. They do not sell bathroom fittings, they install entirely new bathrooms. If I refer you towards the top of this page, what I expect they would be doing it setting an ‘exact’ keyphrase match on ‘bathroom fittings of buckinghamshire’ within the regional specific area of Buckinghamshire. According to the Google keyword analysis tool below, a search phrase with an expect local search rate of zero (meaning they have no monthly search data on it, not necessarily that it would never be searched for ever). The expected starting cost per click of this keyphrase was £0.04p. Yes, that is four pence per click. Even if you say that by some feat of skillful keyphrase analysis this phrase was searched for 20 times a month, this would possibly cost Lavora Marketing £0.80p, 80 pence. And they were aiming at charging WFL-Works £149.00 for the service per month, maybe leading to £99.00 a month on a rolling contract.

To this point I must stress that Lavora Marketing have not lied at any stage. They do technically have an advertising relationship with Google as does anyone else with a Google Adwords account. They may even possibly be one of four companies in their local area offering such services perhaps.

Their claim that this advertising position is exclusive to WFL-Works for a limited time is also possibly totally true internally to them. It was claimed that the position would go at 5:30 that day (2 hours before the end of the day was when the calls were made). What I expect they may be meaning is that they could blanket companies in a specific area each day. The following day for example they could be moving on to companies in Hertfordshire maybe.

By not taking up their offer, it was claimed by the gentleman at Lavora Marketing that he thought WFL-Works were not serious about their business nor marketing. He proceeded to repeat his sales pitch and what seemed to me like numerous persuasive techniques. When I still declined to give any payment details at the end of the call he firmly thanked me for my time and stated something along the lines of, ‘we are only interested in doing business with serious companies’, upon which he hung up.

Whatever their business model I would say that in my view this company is setting the expectations of small local companies rather high for quite a premium price. Taking into account the basic information at the top of this post together with many other ‘How to’ SEO articles available on the Internet, any business can use Google Adwords for much much less.

I am sure that companies like Lavora Marketing have their place in the Internet Marketing field somewhere. Quite where is, to be honest beyond me but then that is as I said just my opinion. It is my belief that any company looking to promote their Website do so with a company they fully 100% trust and get as much in writing as possible. Any company offering premium position on Google with an expiry time on the positions availability should, I suggest be strongly questioned!

Please take note: All information related to the example company Lavora Marketing is based on personal experience with their sales team and information passed from WFL-Works on their experience/opinions.

© 2009, SEO How to. All rights reserved. Upon republishing this post you must provide link to original post/author.