Yesterday e-consultancy featured an interview with Mitesh Patel from Lenstore Contact Lenses discussing how they are marketing their business.
Mitesh mentioned a lot about affiliate marketing but Lenstore.co.uk seems to have not allocated a budget for 3rd party digital agencies to run organic SEO. We decided to ask Mitesh a few questions to see what the SEO industry needed to do in order to convince clients that search marketing is a better proposition than affiliate marketing.
We managed to speak to Mitesh by phone yesterday although he was very busy fielding 60-70 phone calls from other UK agencies trying to sell him SEO services!
Whenever I hear of a company that has investigated SEO, had pitches from agencies and not chosen a supplier I always want to know why. What did those agencies say to put the client off?
Below are the questions I asked:
You have focussed extensively on building a brand and carrying out affiliate marketing despite having listened to proposals from a number of SEO companies. What were the factors that steered your company away from SEO as a marketing tool?
We do think that natural search is very important to any ecommerce business and are working on our natural search effort in house. The challenge is that an industry full of mediocre people with no access to more in depth knowledge than anyone with an internet connection has sprung up. Digital agencies charge a fortune for basic services such as link building. They manage to charge hefty fees by maintaining the myth that natural search optimisation is a dark art.
Actually, we believe there is a lot of common sense to natural search.
It takes a long time definitely. Often ecommerce businesses are resource constrained (which is a good reason to use an agency). There are some brilliant agencies with truly innovative employees. However, these are few and far between.
How do you think the SEO industry should improve the way they approach potential clients?
It’s about the clients they approach. Pure play ecommerce companies need to have natural search capabilities in house (it’s a core competency). SEO agencies should be approaching brick and mortar retailers for whom ecommerce is a small part of a multi channel play.
Pitch as experts to brick and mortar players. Pitch as the solution to a resourcing problem to ecommerce players. Digital agency fees should differ to reflect the different value adds.
At present the site is well optimised but doesn’t have enough quality links to rank on Google. Is this something you are addressing? Have you worked with any SEO companies on link acquisition in the past?
As you say, the structure of our site is optimised for SEO. I agree that Lenstore.co.uk does require many more high quality inbound links. The trouble is allocating resource to such a low level task on our side. It would be great if an digital agency were able to pitch to us at a reasonable price point as a solution to our resource constraints.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I see where Mitesh is coming from, but these two quotes just don’t make sense.
“Digital agencies charge a fortune for basic services such as link building.”
Then,
“I agree that Lenstore.co.uk does require many more high quality inbound links. The trouble is allocating resource to such a low level task on our side.”
If it is indeed such a ‘basic’ service, then why aren’t the in-house staff able to manage this? Surely it’s for exactly this reason that people outsource, time, knowldge and networking constraints?
A media room would seem to be a good resource for the site to have. Link building is merging with PR to an increasing degree and getting into a mindset whereby you are regularly publishing releases that solve a particular customer problem is an excellent way to get links.
Digital Agencies charge a fortune for link building because it is a very time-consuming and resource-intensive process!
Fair point though about targeting the proposal to the requirements of the client.
I don’t understand the people who try to pretend that SEO is a “dark art” as you call it or that it cannot be explained to the client. The more they know about what we do and why we do it, the easier they are to work with and the less they complain about the costs and the more realistic their expectations.
“Pure play ecommerce companies need to have natural search capabilities in house (it’s a core competency). ”
This is much easier said than done, as people with the knowledge required for organic SEO are still in very high demand. Many SEO companies are unable to fill vacancies themselves with quality candidates. Therefore how do you gain the knowledge required in order to successfully manage in-house search campaigns? Outsourcing is often the only viable option in order to access the knowledge required.
From his interview by e-consultancy “We’ve beaten our sales forecasts and have become a six figure revenue company.”
I’m sure with such figures they can spend some to digital marketing agency to test their Organic SEO & LinkBuilding skills to see if its cost efficient and find if their ROI increases in return.
I guess Lenstore have been doing quite well having few competitors and indeed the marekt seems to have low online penetration.
Some of the bigges currently..
- VisonDirect (1998)
- ContactLenses(1998)
- LenseCatalogue (2004)
- LensWay (2005)
- Sainsbury Contact Lenses (2006)
- LensPlanet (2006)
Certianly Lenstore seems to be better appealing and unique in their offering! Good luck Mitesh Patel & his team.
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