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Cutting SEO costs, one bubble tea at a time

07 Jun 2021 🔖 web development
💬 EN

Table of Contents

Fact: My Huong Kitchen on “Eat Street” in Minneapolis (Nicollet Ave) has the best bubble tea in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA region. Always fresh-blended from frozen fruit, never powdered. The savory food is also delicately well-flavored, in case you care about more than your sugar rush.

The store is tiny – it’s the kind of precious hole in the wall you find through word of mouth – much harder to see than Quang, their famous neighbor across the street. Why is why I was really upset to see a phone number and domain, registered on April 16, 2020 (in a panedmic!), were on their Google My Business and ranking in search results.

Sadly, they’re out thousands of dollars they really shouldn’t have paid as business plummeted, and I don’t think there’s anything I can do to get it back to them, other than by asking all of you dear readers to tell every friend you have near Minneapolis to support Mỹ Hương Kitchen by trying every bubble tea on the menu and grabbing some bites to eat. (Seriously – please do that!)

I’d feared the worst – one of those fly-by-night SEO ranking-renter / GMB-hijacker protection rackets that prey on local businesses.

Luckily, while I won’t say that Ad.IQ isn’t in a really morally gray-zone business of rank-and-rent, and while they did change the Google My Business listing’s phone number to their own phone number after talking the business owner into delegating GMB privileges to them, they are a serious company with many different people giving excellent customer support over the phone. Here’s what I’m doing, on a volunteer “will-work-for-bubble-tea” basis.

Rank-and-rent

So – Ad.IQ definitely engaged in a rank-and-rent “SEO-optimized domain” business model. They put together city name + keyword that local businesses might be popular for and came up with minneapolisvietnamesefood.com. They’re better at SEO than the author of the official myhuongkitchen.com was, so when I searched my huong kitchen, to check their hours when planning a trip to Minneapolis that was intended to include a stop for their bubble tea, I saw their phone number and web site.

Luckily, if a business sticks with them for 12 months or more, they have a policy of letting the business take over the domain they’ve ranked. That works out to several thousand dollars, when a .com domain is usually $10, but at least if you’re in too deep as a business, you’re not ransomed for the rest of your life, paying a monthly fee to keep them from substituting the name of your competitor across the street into the landing page.

According to the customer service rep who answered the phone, normally, they prefer to initiate the process of domain transfer upon account cancellation, but Steve, AdIQ’s quality assurance manager, called me back and spent half an hour with me walking through all the steps I’d like to take. I didn’t want to advise My Huong Kitchen to stop paying the bills and end up losing the domain name – I’d rather work through all of the challenges of in-housing the work they’d been doing while still paying them.

Steve wrote down my GoDaddy account number and sent it to AdIQ’s content team so that they could initiate the transfer. He warned me that they’d be taking the site they’re hosting offline when they did, so work fast.

I was ready to work fast:

  • I’d already built a quick landing page myself with 11ty, imitating all the techniques I’d seen in AdIQ’s site. I threw it up on Netlify.
  • I’d already practiced making sure I could put a new site into a custom domain for Netlify by making robertbellevents.com in hopes of experimenting with landing domains for print advertising (I saw The Scout Guide at an art festival, and I totally hope I can find out how much an ad would cost to take out, because it was super glamorous).

Sadly, I’m sure that AdIQ will come up with another domain, rank it, pick a competitor to My Huong Kitchen, and start the same cold-call all over again. And when they outrank me (because that’s what they know how to do), I’ll have to avoid getting angrily competitive (note to self: do NOT squat 10 domains), and I’ll also have to avoid getting upset at the idea that another great Minnesota business might be overpaying for minimal management of free/nearly-free services. I’ll have to breathe deeply, pat myself on the back for doing my job and keeping minneapolisvietnamesefood.com itself from going to the competition, and focus on the rest of my life.

Within 24 hours, Ad

Google My Business

Steve audited all of the “online profile” listings that were in AdIQ’s management portal and broke them down into 3 categories for me:

  1. Ones AdIQ had created on behalf of My Huong Kitchen
    • I’m grateful that a company with actual customer service squatted these instead of someone more nefarious. 🤷
  2. Ones My Huong Kitchen had created before they became AdIQ customers, had never authorized AdIQ to manage, and that were merely listed to ensure that they were included as outbound links in the footer of the landing page.
    • In other words, there’s nothing we need on the way out the door from AdIQ for these properties.
  3. Ones My Huong Kitchen had created before they became AdIQ customers and had authorized AdIQ to help manage (or, in AdIQ’s words, “optimize”)
    • Google My Business
    • Bing Places for Business

      Steve even went so far as to use his management privileges to help re-invite the business address that was on file as a Bing Places owner, since I couldn’t figure out how to get in. That was friendly.

Obviously, I wasn’t thrilled that AdIQ had “interrupted” My Huong Kitchen’s path from customers to phone with their own number in GMB, but it was simple enough to change the details back once I was logged into GMB. As I write this, it’s been a month and a half since I changed it back, and they haven’t tried to change it to their phone number again or anything like that. I can see in GMB Insights that Customer actions of Visit your website dropped to 0 when I changed the web URL a month and a half ago, but eventually, hopefully, I’ll get to help edit myhuongkitchen.com as well and be able to set My Huong Kitchen up with proper GMB->web conversion data.

The numbers in the screenshots from AdIQ’s self-service portal largely match numbers I can find in GMB Insights, so I feel confident that My Huong Kitchen has full analytics available for those things.

Oh, also, I just checked out GMB Users and noticed that My Huong Kitchen had been downgraded to Owner and AdIQ’s credentials set to Primary Owner. Luckily, I was able to rearrange it – also downgraded AdIQ to Manager.

Part of AdIQ’s the huge monthly fee includes running Google Ads in ways that allegedly boost local rankings, using the previous 14 month’s top-ranking search result keywords for the business. Things like “banh mi,” “boba,” “pho,” etc. They call it “hyperlocal marketing.”

I have no idea if they’re doing a good job of directing ad traffic to their landing page, but based on the conversion rates I saw in AdIQ’s portal … meh. At their prices, and at the lack of difference in foot traffic My Huong Kitchen feels like they’ve noticed, I think it’s best to just not take out ads for a while, period, and see what happens. Or for me to try a few things myself. Unlike imitating the old landing page, I won’t have an example to work from, but I’m pretty sure this won’t be a massive loss.

Update: AdIQ’s customer service did it again. This time, when I called, I got Jeff, who bugged the ads team when they were in a meeting with some of my questions, and they answered anyway. He pretty much walked me through a business plan for what it would take to do their job myself. The AdWords they’re taking out (roughly), how they chose them, which are performing, how they decide a keyword is performing, approximately how much they’re spending on them (he also alleged that 70-80% of the “budget” – I presume that’s the monthly fee My Huong Kitchen has been paying? – goes to taking out AdWords ads and offhand mentioned two “example” performant/underperformant cost-per-click bid amounts which tracked w/ the monthly fee & this month’s clicks so I think his numbers were about spot on), etc. I feel really well-educated about Google AdWords basics, if rankings tank in response to me replacing their landing page with my own design, I have a plan to help recover it.

I now feel educated enough to advice My Huong Kitchen to cancel their services with AdIQ, and it was AdIQ that helped me get to that point. I really appreciate that. I feel prepared to help My Huong Kitchen take out a few ads herself if traffic tanks after ceasing to pay the advertiser. But we’ll go ad-free for a while. I’m pretty sure My Huong Kitchen depends more upon word-of-mouth, being such a hidden hole-in-the-wall right across the street from Quang, one of Minneapolis’s most well-known Vietnamese restaurants, and My Huong Kitchen didn’t notice any increased foot traffic after beginning the relationship, so … I think it’s safe to try just going without ads and keeping the monthly fee in their pockets for a while. Playing with a mailing list, the Facebook page, coupons that fans can share with friends, etc.

Maybe a small ad budget, because AdIQ said that while ad clicks are rare, they help boost your organic SEO ranking, and there’re a lot of Vietnamese restaurants in Minneapolis, so showing up on page 1 certainly isn’t a bad idea if you can do it cheaply enough. But it’s got to be cheap enough. And this price per month, when already shelling a similar amount out to Yelp and such, just wasn’t making for a balanced budget. Probably the best SEO boost would be to make sure people who do boba-tea-offs and such know to include the restaurant’s web site as a backlink. For example, they’re in luck that Sean from “I ate 9 banh mi sandwiches in 5 days” went up and down Eat Street first, which meant a high placement in the article, and comes with a glamour shot & a backlink.

Ads probably can’t be completely ignored, but it’d be interesting to let them die for a little while (the restaurant’s been around for a decade w/o them until last year) and see what can be done by making sure the next blogger like Sean knows that My Huong Kitchen’s bubble tea is one of the few bubble tea shops in town fresh-blending fruit instead of relying on powder.

Cancellation

My word, these people really go above and beyond on the customer service. I talked to Jacob in cancellation, who literally took the time to review the replacement landing page I’d made with me, running its Lighthouse, pointing out I’d forgotten to hyperlink back to the main site, pointing out I’d accidentally dropped the meta keywords, etc. Just because he wanted it to be a successful transition away from using their services.

Conclusions

Personally, I feel like there has to be a more dollar-effective way to hire help with online presence than AdIQ.

It will always bother me that I feel like they took advantage of the pandemic decimating local businesses by cold-calling one and promising tons of feet in the door if only My Huong Kitchen would just pay them a handsome monthly sum.

(To be fair, Yelp totally does this too, and has scammy practices if – heaven forbid – you ever stop paying their ransom. But at least Yelp controls, well, Yelp … so you’re getting something from your monthly bill that has no free alternative.)

That said, I cannot express better what a pleasure the people of AdIQ were to work with as I asked what the service was about, audited what they were doing, and talked about the possibility of leaving.

AdIQ’s business model kind of reminds me of a really great car mechanic’s shop that honestly knows a lot about cars, and does their repairs correctly, but always tells you that you need fixes that maybe you don’t quite actually need. The whole premise of getting business in the first place feels a bit scammy to me, but … it’s a legit shop full of people who take their jobs seriously.

If your local business is going to get hit by signing up a confusing cold-call from a a rank-and-renter / social-squatter, pray that it’s AdIQ, because at least then you have a chance of getting out in good shape if the cost isn’t making sense.

And if the time comes that you need to leave, because you’ve found cheaper help (I’m still working on that part – I don’t really want to be webmaster forever, but I’ll keep the Netlify site up until I get around to making a decent Squarespace site), I hope this diary has helped you figure out an exit plan that’s safe for your local business’s online presence.

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