When I met Dave my website was a site that nobody could find. I rarely had any visitors. Except for the term “Custom Ceramics, ” I was not located anywhere in the top hundred for my keywords. Dave and I worked together to figure out what keywords I wanted to target. He then did his programming magic and optimized my site to be search engine friendly. Dave showed me a few tricks of the trade that would help make my site even more search engine friendly. I had previously been told that it took at least 6 months to get to page 1 or 2 for your keywords. With whatever work Dave did, I quickly saw results in my rankings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Month by month my rankings have increased. I am on page two and page one for most of my keywords and for many related phrases pulled from the website’s content. The best part is that my online sales have increased. Dave is honest and does fabulous work. He totally knows what he is doing. I’d recommend his services to anyone.

- Traci Levinson, Owner, Custom Ceramics by Traci

We came to David with a problem that two other web site developers had tried (or said they’d tried) to solve, with no success at all.  The problem is that we sell a service that hardly anyone has ever heard of.  We offer very short-term knowledge transfer about acquiring and implementing a kind of complex business software called ERP.  When we get to tell people who use ERP software about it, most say it’s a very good idea, whether they have a current need for it or not.  But nobody goes out looking for it, because most people think they cannot purchase this kind of information except by hiring their own experts or through long term consulting engagements.  Some companies do go searching for the traditional kind of ERP consulting, but our best prospects know they don’t want that, so they don’t even look.  It’s terribly hard to be found by people who don’t know that they’re looking for you.  This is the problem we brought to David. 

Together we did quite a bit of brainstorming about what our natural prospects would be looking for, since they’re neither looking for us nor for long term consulting.  We knew that they’d be looking for information about ERP software acquisition and implementation practice, but how would they be looking?  If you’re selling tomato soup, you can do well by loading your web site with the keyword phrase “tomato soup”.  If you’re selling a new alternative to every currently popular kind of soup, that doesn’t work.  You could try alternative phrase like “new kind of soup” and the like, but what are the odds that anybody will search for just that phrase?  What David led us to is the concept of organic search engine optimization (SEO), where your message is delivered through meaningful content, instead of by simple keyword searches or (worse) by horrendously expensive “pay-per-click” advertising schemes. What we’ve learned from David is that recent developments in search engine evolution mean that search engines will find us if we just put enough meaningful information into our site and optimize it according to some principles that are only now emerging.  I just asked Google “how do I manage risks for ERP acquisition and implementation projects?”  Our site – which has been up less than two months – came up third, out of 740,000 sites returned.  We expect this to improve, as we are a long way from implementing all of David’s recommendations.

- Jon Fred, Principal, Adaptive Growth, Inc.