Hey, I know. I've been where you are. In 2003 I spent about $8000/month on pay per click advertising with Google, Overture, and several smaller ones. I did it all profitably but something started going wrong. My spending went up but my sales went down.

Huh?

At first I blamed it on savvy competitors finally figuring out the paid click ad model. But after analyzing my traffic I realized that I was getting tons of hits from outside the USA but I had my ads set to only run inside the USA. What? Yep, you guessed it, CLICK FRAUD.

After fighting it for a year, I finally turned to natural SEO. I made a lot of mistakes and learned some valuable lessons but within 2 years my website (www.Sprysoft.com) ranked in the top 5 in Google for EVERY relevant keyword in my business. (Go ahead and try it: Search for academic software in Google.)

Telco Data is a phone system provider in Austin, Texas. They spec, build, deploy and support phone systems for businesses of all sizes including the Austin Ice Bats and KXAN TV.

When we first starting working with Stacy Tallent, the owner and founder of the company, their website hadn't been updated in more than a year. Additionally, much of the site was rendered in Flash that was basically invisible to the engines.

"It was time for a fresh start," said Tallent, "But we had so much great content and I didn't want to lose it."

Leigh Watson is a mural artist in Austin, Texas. She designs mural art for nurseries, salons and businesses. She had a beautiful website but not much traffic.

After meeting with Leigh in early March 2006, we decided to target the keywords "nursery design austin" and "mural art austin". She was not showing up in any of the search engines for those terms.

We went to work! First we evaluated her site and made several changes to the text and structure. Then, we made sure she was showing up in all the major engines and directories. Finally, we started our ongoing linking campaign.

As of June 2006, here are the results: