When driving more traffic and business to a small business website, most small business owners dread SEO much like the plague, especially when doing SEO yourself.

I mean, really, where does a small business owner begin when doing SEO themselves?

Rather than determining the real pros and cons of do-it-yourself SEO, most small business owners opt for the traditional advertising methods of magazine ads, banner ads, newspaper ads, Craigslist, AngiesList, HomeAdvisor, etc.

But as the Internet and SEO progresses, your need and dependence on SEO to drive more business or even sustain a business is a looming issue that will not go away and must be addressed cost-effectively and timely.

It’s true that time, money, and labor always seem to find the small business owner holding the short end of the stick on one, if not all, of the previously mentioned.

For those of you that decide never to hire another SEO for anything again in your lives, today’s blog is just for you.

And for every small business owner unable to hire in-house SEO, an SEO professional, or an agency, this blog will help you attack the low-hanging actions of doing SEO yourself.

Let’s get started.

If you own, operate or manage a website, I’m sure you’ve heard the latest craze and buzzword, content marketing, tossed around much like a game of horseshoes or washers.

For some, content marketing has become a science of keyword stuffing their content in an effort to increase search rankings.

Content marketing has become a full-fledge game of creating keyword salad.

A dab of this or that with a pinch of that or this, and this magic combination of subtle keywords is suppose to bring about favorable rankings from SEO gods.

For small businesses that believe this keyword salad business of keyword stuffing is the most effective SEO, Google and other search engines think otherwise.

I’ve had the opportunity in the last two weeks to review the SEO efforts of some small businesses that have a local focus when it comes to SEO.

I received an email from a regular blog reader of Kickstart Commerce.

This person totally stoked about how they read my latest blog about finding and buying domain names.

They found an expired domain name to die for, let them tell it.

I was super excited, as I usually am, to hear from our readers about this reader’s good fortune find.

I was elated until I researched the readers’ good fortune domain name.

The reader did almost everything correctly based on their email.

The one missing piece the reader did not note was performing a search on the domain itself for negative or scam reviews using Google or another search engine.

Had the reader performed this simple step, the reader would have figured out that another company had used their so-called good fortune of an expired domain name to run a scam.

I was surprised and heartbroken for the reader when I searched.

Recently I was asked by a customer questions pertaining to page and domain authority.

I knew the end picture of where the customer was aiming and trying to arrive at was a website with increased organic search rankings and traffic for a long list of keywords.

Keeping that at the forefront of each interaction with the customer, I set out to help this customer understand the nuances of page and domain authority as it relates to SEO in general and organic search rankings.

Of course, both page and domain authority can be easily defined and explained.

However, the murkiness around both becomes obvious for those owning websites trying to obtain and sustain both.

Do-it-yourself SEO, also known as DIY SEO, is one of the most popular phrases tossed around in small business as it relates to small businesses bootstrapping their own SEO efforts.

It seems like every few months I field an email or phone call where a small business has had some sort of prior experience with an SEO professional or agency.

Sometimes they are looking to perform their own SEO in house, or they want to discuss and understand whether their small business should perform DIY SEO or hire an SEO professional or agency.

Typically, their reason for calling me is to have Kickstart Commerce to perform a free SEO audit of their current website.

They either heard from another Kickstart Commerce customer of our free SEO audit service offering, or they were performing a DIY SEO or small business SEO services search online and found one of our website or blog search results.

I realize that offering free SEO audits are somewhat an opportunity for companies to try and take advantage of the offer, especially when they hide the fact that they are looking to perform DIY SEO.

For some, their hope is that I will give away the SEO farm without them having to pay one dime, while others are willing to pay Kickstart Commerce to perform audit findings and without much disagreement for pricing at all.

But today, I’ll share with you an experience that happened not too long ago with a company that had champagne taste on a sprite budget.

In short, this customer that wanted sound SEO and all the SEO trimmings, but was not willing to pay for the results they wanted.

Once touted as the holy grail of SEO, ranking an exact match domain could put you on the map to receive instant search rankings and increased traffic for your website.

Often composed of highly competitive and costly keywords, exact match domains could help you get and keep an edge on the competition without much effort in terms of content.

The simple fact of an exact match domain containing keywords was enough to rocket a website to front page search rankings.

Hundreds and thousands of exact-match domain websites popped up overnight, and exact-match domains were strongly commanding search rankings across major search engines.

Deceptive exact match domain ranking sniffed out

But like previous SEO advantages that were deceptively used to rank, Google launched an exact match domain update targeted to lessen the preference of exact match domains compared to non-keyword specific domains.

However, the EMD update, as often referred to nowadays, would not penalize the ranking of an exact match domain if the website met and adhered to sound SEO ranking factors as other websites per Google’s SEO Guidelines and Policy.

Good, bad or ugly: The endless exact match domain arguments?

In recent years, there is much good, bad, and ugly conversation to be had about whether or not exact match domains still rank well in search engines.

There is the camp that says ranking an exact match domain has lost its step and way in search engines.

They consider exact match domains archaic as dinosaurs and ineffective as the US Postal Service.

Others argue and say exact match domains are still the greatest thing since sliced bread when used according to search engine SEO policies.

Regardless of which camp you belong to, I think it’s safe to say that owning an exact match domain still provides value and an advantage over a domain that does not contain keywords.

In today’s post, I’ll attempt to address some exact match domain concerns while giving insight into one of my latest exact-match domain experiences.

Pay for performance SEO services, also known as performance-based SEO, is nothing new under the sun. Some call it pay for results or pay for rankings.

Nevertheless, the goal of pay for performance SEO services is lessening the risk of standard SEO services by requiring customers to not pay until they have been ranked.

This sounds good at first glance, as pay for performance SEO services sounds like a no brainer that is sure to keep money in your pocket until SEOs perform their work.

I mean after all, companies have pay for performance pay structures that pay regular or bonus pay based on meeting certain company objectives.

So surely if it works for companies paying employees, then surely pay for performance can work for SEO services.

To some extent, we’ve all had an experience with some sort of pay for performance type of an agreement.

Some of us have had good experiences while others have had either bad or downright nightmares of being had by pay for performance agreements.

In this post, I share my top six (6) reasons why pay for performance SEO services fail for both SEOs and customers, and how both parties should go about structuring sound pay for performance SEO services and agreements to ensure a real “win-win” scenario and working relationship.