A search marketing firm in Colorado added these two posts to this forum, and then defended their decision to do so after being contacted.

Therefore, since they “think it's okay”, we'll just add the posts here, and open it up for discussion.

The first one was posted to our Portland Job board…

1. From: peakstudios [jeremy@peakstudios.com]
Forum: Local Search Marketing Jobs
Topic: Peak Studios - Local SEM
Post:
Local Search Engine Marketing & Optimization

What is Local Listing Optimization?
There are four main types of SEO that can be used;organic,local,listingand pay-per-click. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Using anOrganicSEO takes a longer time to get top results, but results stay in place for a very long period of time and it is much cheaper.

Localsearch engine optimization & marketing provides excellent results that are confined to a specific area. Search enginelistingservices provides listings for specific search types (i.e. housing, services, products, ect.). Pay-Per-Click immediately lists the website but can cost much more and does not generally guarantee a top search position after ending or during the pay-per-click program.

Increase your web presence locally.There have been a ton of changes over the last 6 months to the submission and optimization of local search services. We have a new process of submission and optimization that will make paying to be included in the phone book or yellow pages a thing of the past.

Currently the yellow page companies get about 41 million hits a month for local searchers while Google alone gets more than 100 million local searches a day. Not even including Yahoo, MSN , AOL and ASK but just Google is doing over 60 times the volume of all the yellow page companies together. Some of our clients have seen such success that they have removed their yellow page ad completely - reducing their marketing costs by almost $100,000 a year!

Our service is simple and straight forward for clients.
The process is made up of 3 simple steps:
1)We help you select keywords and define your service area.
2)We create yourlocal listingsandvideos.
3)We do monthly maintenance and optimization.

While doing the optimization we do several things for the 1stfew months. We get your keywords extra ranking, by adding as much information and links as we can. The reason we do this is to create a greater web presence you and increase the keyword ranking at Google for the specific listing. After this is taken care of we rotate between the different search engines in a specific pattern to help keep top notch ranking across the local search industry, while continually increasing your presence on Google!

The greatest part of this processis that within 3 to 6 weeks (normally 3 weeks) you will see a ROI (return on your investment). There is no need to make changes to your site for our Local SEO process to work. We will not compete with our previously listed keywords. If you are the 1st company in a given industry and location we will not provide this service to your competitor for any of your keywords while maintaining updates.

Who else offers this service?
There really isn’t much competition out there with a like product. Most companies like yellow pages (AT&T) offer PPC advertising. They will tell you that this is the very first place that people look, which is true for English countries - people look in the upper left hand corner.

However people tend to look at pictures first. So if there is a map in the upper left hand corner of the page they will skip the PPC and look at the map and info next to it.

In addition Google is hands down the number one most used search engine out there! We target Google, though we also place you in the other directories and search engines, we optimize strictly for Google!

The Yellow pages offers you 100 clicks per month in PPC (on average they charge about $650/month, because you need other services to even get this service). Our clients on average get about 350+ clicks per month and that doesn’t include people who call the phone number they see rather than clinking on the site.!

People are using this as a phone book rather than looking at a site they just call!!!If you use PPC your phone number isn’t displayed in the same way as it is for our clients.

Local SEO perfected, in this video you will see a few premier listings (as described in video) that we created. Our clients not only show up as the top for their industry locally, but also nationally under their keywords!!

For more information please feel free to give us a call at(262) 327-4635or email us atsales@peakstudios.com.
I hope to hear from you soon!

The second one was added to our SEM Business forum:

From: peakstudios [jeremy@peakstudios.com]
Forum: SEM Business
Topic: Local directories optimization
Post:
local directories are a great way to market your comapny but are only truely effective if you know what you are doing. First you would need to know waht yoru goal is. Are you trying to reach new customers? are your customers just in your local area of nationally?

here is a tutorial about local marketingthat shows you a few listings that have been optimized. next you would need to know what components you should add to your local directory listng. Do you have a video you want added? Do you have Pictures? Should you add a logo?

Finally you will need to know how to optimize it. There are only really four options: do it your self, use PPC, pay an SEO Company (that specializes in local marketing), use directory services.

Each has a niche. Doing it yourself is free and also the least effective way, PPC is limited and if you use yellow pages or super pages you will end up paying 3 to 4 times as much for the same end results and will not be on the same part of the pages. By using a!n SEO compnay you are actually get the highest ROI just make sure they are not charging more than $300 per month casue if they are you are paying too much.

Finally using directory services, this option is okay however they only list you in directories there is no optimization it needs to be added to one of the other options.
Peakstudios.com

What are your thoughts on this type of marketing?

Read original blog post

If Peak wasn't crapping in our mess kit, their attempts at defending themselves would be funny.

Sometimes attitude and execution can tilt the balance between spam and a valid contribution. I post elsewhere for marketing purposes. But am very aware that if my contribution does not have value my post may be considered spam. In such a case spam is definitely in the eye of the beholder. The beholder being the website owner or moderator, not the poster.

Wonder if Peak Studios thinks much about online reputation management? Be interesting to see if this activity begins showing up in organic searches for Peak Studios. This being a wordpress blog and all.

Enough rope for several hangings.

-Tom Hale

btw, behind my man Scott H. 100% on this.

It's amazing how many of those 22 excellent reviews were by somebody named Jeremy or James…and done on the same day too…and those optimized keywords in the title…hmmm.