In today’s digital age, having a robust online presence is vital for skilled trade business success. Search engine optimization (SEO) and Google AdWords are indispensable tools for driving traffic, generating leads, and boosting sales. However, some marketing companies, often firms who target specific industries like plumbing, HVAC, Electrical, etc. use strategies that can lock these businesses into their services, making it challenging to switch providers without significant lead generation disruption. One common tactic involves using proprietary servers to host landing pages and blogs on subdomains outside of the client’s control. This article explores this issue in depth and offers practical advice on how to avoid these traps.
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The Problem with Proprietary Hosting and Subdomains
When an industry specific marketing company hosts your landing pages and/or blogs on their own servers, using subdomains such as yourbusiness.marketingcompany.com
, they effectively control a crucial part of your online presence. This setup can lead to several problems:
- Loss of Control: You don’t own or necessarily have direct access to or control your website’s content and infrastructure. If you decide to switch marketing or SEO providers, you will likely lose all the content hosted on these servers, leading to significant downtime and disruption.
- SEO Challenges: Subdomains can dilute your SEO efforts. Search engines often treat subdomains as separate entities from your main domain, meaning the SEO value of primary website might not benefit from the content hosted on these subdomains.
- Dependency: By relying on these marketing company’s servers, you become dependent on the provider’s uptime, security measures, and overall reliability. Any issues they face could directly impact your online presence, potentially leading to lost traffic and revenue.
- Cost Implications: Transitioning away from such a setup can be costly and time-consuming. You may need to recreate content, restructure your website, and implement new SEO strategies from scratch.
Under these types of conditions you are essentially ‘renting/leasing’ the SEO value you are paying for, much like PPC advertising. When you quit paying for the SEO or Landing Page services, the tap to any successful ranked content or pages is turned off, and you are now back to where you started, with no long term benefits that you most likely believed you were investing in.
How to Avoid Vendor Lock-In
To protect your trade-based business from being locked into a marketing service provider, consider implementing the following strategies:
- Maintain Control Over Your Domains: Ensure that all your content is owned by you and hosted on domains you control. Use your own hosting provider and manage your own domains to maintain full control over your online assets. This approach ensures that you are not dependent on any third-party provider for your website’s functionality and content.
- Opt for Transparent Providers: Choose marketing companies that offer transparent services. They should provide you with access to all your data and content without any restrictions. Look for providers who are open about their processes and who prioritize client control and autonomy.
- Check the Fine Print: Carefully review contracts and agreements to understand the terms regarding content ownership, where it resides, and overall control. Avoid any clauses that limit your ability to move content to another provider. Ensure that you retain ownership of all content and that you have the right to transfer it as needed.
- Invest in Your Infrastructure: While it may seem easier to let a marketing company handle everything, investing in your own website infrastructure can save you from headaches in the long run. Setting up your own cloud based server, hosting, managing your domains, and using content management systems (CMS) like WordPress can provide you with greater flexibility and control.
- Backup Regularly: Regularly back up all your content and data. This ensures that, in the event you need to switch providers, you have all your information readily available. Implement a robust backup strategy that includes automatic backups, offsite storage, and regular testing to ensure data integrity.
Benefits of Keeping Control
Maintaining control over your SEO and AdWords efforts by using your own hosting and domains offers several advantages:
Flexibility and Independence
Flexibility: When you control your own hosting and domains, you have the freedom to switch providers, make changes to your online strategy, or implement new technologies without losing valuable content or having to start from scratch. This flexibility allows you to adapt to changing market conditions and business needs more effectively, ensuring that your online presence remains dynamic and responsive to industry trends.
Independence: By maintaining your own infrastructure, you are not tied to any single service provider’s ecosystem. This independence means you can shop around for the best services and prices, negotiate better terms, and avoid being subject to the policies and limitations of a third-party provider. You remain in control of your own destiny, making decisions that are best for your business without outside interference.
Consistent SEO Benefits
SEO Consistency: By keeping all your content on your main domain, you ensure that all SEO efforts benefit your primary website. Search engines recognize and reward consistent domain authority and backlink profiles, leading to improved search engine rankings. When all your SEO efforts are focused on a single domain, the cumulative effect of your content, keywords, and backlinks is more powerful, driving higher organic traffic and better visibility.
Brand Cohesion: Consistency in your online presence reinforces your brand identity. By hosting all content on your main domain, you create a unified brand experience for your visitors. This cohesion helps build trust and credibility with your audience, making it easier for customers to recognize and remember your brand.
Enhanced Data Security
Data Security: You have direct control over the security measures protecting your website and data, reducing the risk of breaches. Implementing your own security protocols, such as SSL certificates, regular updates, and monitoring, ensures that your site remains secure. You can customize security measures to meet your specific needs, addressing vulnerabilities more effectively than a generic third-party solution might.
Privacy and Compliance: Managing your own data helps you comply with privacy regulations such as GDPR or CCPA. You can ensure that data handling practices align with legal requirements and industry standards, protecting your customers’ information and your business from legal risks.
Cost Efficiency
Cost Efficiency: Although there might be an initial investment in setting up your own infrastructure, it can save you money and hassle in the long run by avoiding costly transitions. Owning your hosting and domains eliminates recurring fees for proprietary platforms and reduces dependency on third-party providers. Long-term control over your online assets can lead to lower operational costs and improved return on investment (ROI).
Scalability: Investing in your own infrastructure allows you to scale your online presence according to your business needs. You can upgrade your hosting plan, add new features, or expand your website’s capabilities without the constraints imposed by a third-party provider. This scalability ensures that your online presence can grow alongside your business, supporting increased traffic and more complex operations.
Improved Performance and User Experience
Website Performance: By choosing a high-quality hosting provider, you can optimize your website’s performance, ensuring fast load times and reliable uptime. This improved performance enhances the user experience, leading to higher engagement, lower bounce rates, and better search engine rankings.
Customization and Optimization: Controlling your own hosting and domains allows you to customize your website to meet your specific needs. You can implement advanced SEO techniques, use custom plugins, and optimize your site’s structure and content for better search engine performance. This customization leads to a more effective and efficient online presence, tailored to your business goals.
Data Ownership and Analytics
Data Ownership: When you control your own hosting and domains, you own all the data generated by your website. This ownership ensures that you have access to valuable insights and analytics, enabling you to make informed decisions about your marketing strategy. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track user behavior, measure campaign performance, and identify areas for improvement.
Enhanced Reporting: With full access to your data, you can create detailed reports and analytics to understand your audience better. This enhanced reporting helps you tailor your SEO and AdWords efforts to target the right customers, optimize your campaigns, and achieve better results.
Long-Term Stability
Business Continuity: Maintaining control over your online assets ensures that your business operations are not disrupted by third-party issues. You are less vulnerable to changes in provider policies, technical failures, or service discontinuations. This stability is crucial for maintaining a consistent and reliable online presence, which is essential for customer trust and business reputation.
Legacy Content: When you control your own domains, your content remains accessible and useful over the long term. You can update and repurpose old content to keep it relevant, ensuring that your investment in content creation continues to provide value.
How to Implement a Controlled SEO and AdWords Strategy
Implementing a controlled SEO and AdWords strategy involves several key steps:
- Domain Management: Register and manage your own domain names. Use reputable domain registrars and ensure that your domain information is kept up-to-date.
- Hosting Solutions: Choose reliable hosting providers that offer the features and scalability you need. Look for providers with strong uptime records, excellent customer support, and robust security features.
- Content Management Systems: Use a flexible and widely supported CMS like WordPress. WordPress offers extensive customization options, a large community of developers, and numerous plugins to enhance functionality.
- SEO Best Practices: Implement SEO best practices on your main domain. Focus on on-page optimization, high-quality content, link building, and regular performance monitoring to ensure that your SEO efforts are effective.
- AdWords Management: Manage your AdWords campaigns directly or through a transparent third-party provider. Ensure that you have full access to your AdWords account and that you can make changes as needed.
Conclusion
Choosing the right marketing partner is crucial for your business’s online success. By maintaining control over your domains and infrastructure, you can avoid the pitfalls of vendor lock-in and ensure that your SEO and AdWords efforts continue to benefit your business without unnecessary interruptions. Always prioritize transparency, control, and flexibility when selecting a marketing company to support your growth. By taking these steps, you can protect your business, enhance your online presence, and achieve long-term success.
I did, I'm Kyle Bailey and with over 30 years of successful experience in digital marketing, and enterprise-level brand strategy, I now work with select skilled trade businesses. Most small business owners realize that Marketing is f*cking difficult™ and so I offer an initial 60-minute, no-obligation consultation to showcase my value right from the start. Buying me a coffee at Starbucks or a drink at Cactus is a small investment that can help get your company where you want it to be in the next 5 years.
I can't work with everybody, so If your competition calls first, you're out of luck.