Competition Sparks Questions

I decided to do a competitive analysis of related sites in the market. I was a little amazed at some of the findings.

Granted this is preliminary and requires further research, but based on some of the text ads I cannot believe these companies are even in the running.

In the Top 10 results on Yahoo! for a select keyword 2 of the top 5 had bad punctuation, incorrect capitalization, and pretty bland ads.

Another placed this claim: The Truth about Search Engine Marketing /
Is Search Engine Marketing for you? Read our honest review and...

A little forced maybe? It draws questions in my mind that the others did not immediately. Questions such as, who are you to say what's honest? Why should you be trusted? Just who wrote this "honest" review? What credentials do you have to even give such advice?

My belief is that an ad should intice wonderment, not skepticism and doubt. Sure these are questions to be asked once on the site and evaluting the company about their services, but to ask them before even seeing the site or speaking to anyone seems like they've missed their mark.

This one provides an interesting quarantee.


Get top rankings in 28 days... OK, but these must be PAID rankings, right? And at what cost to the client?

This one blows me away. I had to go to the website to see if it explained further and, yes, they do mean doorway pages.


I guess they are suckering people into believing doorway pages are still OK practice and reaping the benefits. I just hope most consumers are smart enough to do a little research on the products and/or services they shell out big bucks for prior to purchase or signing the dotted line. It would save a lot of us some grief. Especially since practices like creating doorway pages and hurting client sites leads to a bad wrap for us true SEMs.