While the question is legitimate, it has no real relevance when applied to a web services firm. For example, for a business in London or New York, all that an office with a certain number of workers at a particular location indicates is that a company is carrying what appears to be a substantial overhead. And that a large amount of client facing business is conducted from the location under consideration.

In certain situations, we mistake people for employees. Take a real estate company for example. Most employees in a real estate company are freelance and do not get any payouts unless they make a sale. So does having a large number of people at one location indicate anything? Actually in the case of real estate agents, only a company with a large number of listings would consider having a large roster of agents. So in certain situations, maybe having a large number of agents does serve as some indicator to a company’s size and success.

But in other service sector industries the more employees one sees at an office location, the more you can be assured are the overheads for the company. It is also a certainty that the cost is being passed on to the consumer.

In the networked world today, having a large office and large overheads is a bad idea and unless absolutely necessary, is a sure path out of profitability and existence. The reason is that there is someone out there who is competing with you and operating with a smaller cost structure than you are. And if this competitor’s quality of service is equal to or better than your services, how can you compete?

Enter Virtualization
A few years ago, a software development company that wished to maintain a few different servers running different operating systems for testing or deployment purposes, had to invest in multiple servers. With the advent of virtualization software, most notably from VMware, where one powerful server running virtualization software can emulate the services and operating environments of multiple discrete systems simultaneously, companies now had a cost saving tool that produced immediate results. And without any downside.

This concept of virtualization can be expanded to create highly nimble companies that supply niche services. For example, one can create a virtualized company with small sales forces in key cities and back-office operations in countries like Ukraine or India. Depending on the skills required to accomplish tasks, talent can be located anywhere. While using Ukraine or India as an example is probably obvious for reducing manpower costs, having a talented programmer or graphic artist anywhere in the USA as a virtual part of a company is a very real and worthwhile idea. Often having access to the right talent is worth more than the cost savings.

To unify geographically dispersed teams, all that is really required is a unified communication and knowledge sharing mechanism. This can be achieved by VoIP phones that allow one to network people all across the world onto a single phone system. For example extension 100 may be for a project manager in California and extension 101 may be a network engineer in Belgium and 102 may be a programming team in India. All of this is easily done these days (For example check out products from Talkswitch or Packet 8 or Fonality). In addition, having a few shared corporate resources like a centralized project management software system, a file sharing system, several staging servers and a corporate email and messaging system make such an arrangement as effective as a traditional brick and mortar company.

In reality, this arrangement reduces costs, increases productivity by reducing commute times, ensures productivity round the clock exploiting different time zones, reduces manpower costs and also gives employees more time for themselves by not having to visit an office everyday.

More importantly it brings the best global talent to an employer.

Virtualization is also a very practical solution. Today web services is a huge and very fragmented field with a considerable amount of new technologies on the verge of branching out into a distinct category of service such as mobile applications. A web services company may get a few mobile application development orders in a year. These orders may be on different mobile phone platforms such as the Android and the iPhone that require specialized expertise.

The volumes of such orders may not justify retaining a full-time staff. In this situation a contract employee is the best bet and easily accomplished with a virtualized communications setup which enables a company to make a number of niche alliances with individuals with specialized skills without the overhead.

The bottom line of such a setup is reduced cost to the consumer. A virtualized company can be 1/3rd the cost of traditional companies who often tend to lose their employees to other companies or just downsize and let people go. The people who tend to suffer the greatest are customers who depend on services rendered by these companies and are usually left with systems that are unmanageable.

Virtualized companies are ideal towards highly professional services such as high tech and programming services where niche talent plays a key role in accomplishing a task. This method of work opens up a global talent pool that otherwise may have been restricted to a geographical location. While the role of traditional brick and mortar office setups cannot be totally replaced, the future will see a substantial chunk of market share being taken away from these companies by nimbler counterparts.

All things being equal such as the quality of the service, the only thing that matters in the end is price. And that’s a fact.

The problem today with SEO and SEM is that both are complex topics. Performing basic SEO and SEM is easy but will usually result in no business advantage unless performed scientifically and over a period of time. Far too many SEO service providers provide one-time services ranging from $9.99 onwards that make little or no sense but which do satisfy the basic definition of SEO. These services consists of adjusting a few keywords, a few meta tags on websites and creating a few inbound links and generally satisfying some of the basic tasks of the business of SEO. There are similar problems with SEM. There are far too many companies, including large ones, that are happy to manage SEM budgets while providing very poor feedback and information that allows a customer to make scientific adjustments to their advertising budget and how it is spent. Essentially these companies take an advertising budget and advertise on exactly the same search engines and content networks where a client could have expended their advertising budgets themselves.

The only difference is that the client is now losing some money for using a middleman.

The typical company will spend a few bucks on SEO per year with little or no improvement in traffic and will blindly spend their SEM budget on a marketing plan that is not constantly monitored. I have come across many cases where an advertiser on Google or Yahoo advertises their services in a geographic location that they have no chance of servicing. Recently, I came across a Florida car dealership’s advertisement showing up in New York city based searches. This type of advertising mismatch seems to indicate that the advertiser is more or less wasting their advertising budget.

On contacting this dealership’s marketing department informing them that they should not be throwing their money by incorrectly running these advertisements, I received no reply. Which indicates to me that this business was not in sync with their online marketing campaign.

To succeed with SEO and SEM and to mine the web for sales leads and customers, one has to have an effective SEO strategy that is then expanded with an effective SEM strategy. The strategy has to be implemented over a period of time rather than a one-shot approach. The strategy has to evolve based on data gathered and  has to be opportunistic.

For example, if you have a fixed advertising budget where the objective is to get as many leads nationwide as possible using this budget, one has to be pro-active in examining how traffic tends to click on internet advertisements and the correlation of the cost per click versus many variables. These variables can be location, time of day, keywords, advertisement position etc.

The objective should be to pay the lowest amount to get the maximum number of sales, inquiries. One easy way to weed out unproductive visitors/clicks is to make the advertisement very specific. For example a shoe manufacturer who only manufactures shoes sizes 10 and above, should clearly state in their advertisement that the advertisement applies to only people with shoes sizes 10 and above. More often than not, advertisements are too generic. Visitors click on their advertisements, cost the advertiser money and reach the website only to find out that the product was not intended for them. The same is true about differentiating with price. For example if a CPA provides  tax services but charges triple the amount as that of a typical CPA, he/she should try to indicate that that is the case and there is a reason for it. For example this CPA could be a tax appeal expert and has represented several millionaires. It is preferable to stop people at the gate rather than let them into your website and then let them out thereby costing you money in wasted clicks.

Another example of effective SEM is to be aware of local conditions. For example how many advertisers for luxury services turned off their advertisements in affected areas after hurricane Katrina? How many advertisers turn off advertisements before long weekends where people tend to be engaged in other activities and postpone making real decisions till the next working day? For SEM and SEO success, an advertiser has to have an intelligent person with an IQ that allows that person to make assumptions based on data collected and run multiple experiments to prove of disprove such assumptions. This is usually not the case when a low-ball company is used for the purpose and in a lot of cases even larger firms whether the person in-charge of managing the SEM budget really does not care.

Having an intelligent and motivated company or person behind an SEM strategy is even more important when the advertising budget runs into millions of dollars. Small tweaks to the strategy applied with such budgets results in definite business advantage.

Often people ask why SEM is required along with SEO? The answer is that SEM is a way to drive traffic to ones website and accelerate the lead generation process. Getting the word out or getting traffic to a website via organic searches is cheap via SEO but the traffic is going to be a slow trickle and especially so in areas where there is significant competition. Having an SEM budget in place increases the flow of traffic to your website and if the traffic is targeted and the information on the website is compelling, there will be a potential lead. Without an advertising budget SEM cannot happen.

Sometimes rather than targeted traffic to a website the goal is to just get the word out. For example a free online video service. Visitors to such services tend to come back and spread the word about a website if there significant free content. In such cases, I have observed advertisers blow significant budgets buying up targeted traffic when low cost low quality traffic would have sufficed. This is especially the case when advertisers get too involved with a single online advertising source. Its in the best interest of advertisers to use multiple advertisement serving networks to make best use of their advertising dollars. Capitalizing on cheap traffic is possible for the right product.

You need to provide:
a) Logo
b) Copy

Cost: $4000 One-Time

Cost: $500 Per. Month

Cost: $1000 Per. Month

Most Common Result: Targeted traffic starts coming to your website at no additional cost.

You need to provide:
a) List of 10 keyphrases that best represent your product/service
b) FTP access to your current website

Cost: $500 One-Time