Still Throwing Money at Old Technology?

By Alex Repola

Businesses and IT support specialists are notorious for continuously shoving money into old and outdated technologies. I believe that the real problem is that the saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" has been passed down generation by generation.

What business owners everywhere aren't realizing is that putting a band aid on a machine that you rely on to assist in running your business is a horrible idea. We all know what happens after a few days, the band aid falls off and we are stuck searching for another band aid that sticks better or we say screw it, I'll work through the pain. This is no way to run a business, and eventually it will hurt your organization.

QeH2 has taken a century of IT support and business experience and built a model completely different than anything in the greater-Denver area. Designed from the business owners perspective, QeH2 has created a very different way of doing business. By leveraging and implementing best-of-breed technologies within every department, QeH2 has set the standard by taking a proactive approach to IT support in Colorado. Being on-site, working right along side the business owner and the employees, QeH2 is able to address issues and concerns before it effects business. Instead of putting out fires, we are preventing fires. This is where the majority of IT support companies fail to deliver. Stepping outside of basic maintenance and preventing technical issues from hindering day-to-day business transactions is how QeH2 does business.

Stop shoving money into old and outdated technologies. Let QeH2 come in, no obligation, to assess areas they can work with you to improve on your business processes and really, let you do what you do best. QeH2 has the proven track record within the IT support industry to truly grow your organization.

For more information, visit us at QeH2.com.

Customer Satisfaction is Worth Fighting For

by Alex Repola

Anymore, business owners are watching the way they spend money; that's obvious. When we decide to make a purchase or enlist someones service, our experience is what may make all the difference. Bad experience may mean a complaint call, a bad online review... or two, maybe even lose a customer. A good experience results in much more desirable results. Ongoing business transactions, long-lasting relationships, and word-of-mouth referrals are all be tied to customer satisfaction.

We all like to think that customers only remember the good experiences they have with us and share those with their friends and family, but that is no always the case. Far too often, consumers remember the times you forgot to hold the mushrooms, correct that billing error, or respond in to an emergency later than expected.

Instilling a revolutionary customer service model and using it day-in and day-out, sets the tone for all customer transactions. Part of why the QeH2 "formula" is so successful has to do with our continuous focus on customer service. The QeH2 model was created by looking at everything that was wrong and negatively associated to the IT support industry. After four years of business, we have joined the ranks as one of the top, smallest businesses in the Denver-metro area.

By continuously evolving our model to fit changing technology trends and more importantly, budgets, QeH2's service is hard to match. Our guaranteed response time, free break/fix, and exceptional customer service is what's setting us a part in the IT support industry.

With no contracts, stop paying for crappy IT support and allow us to partner with your organization and get business done.

IT Support vs. Tires

by Alex Repola

I recently went through the process of selecting tires for my '05 Outback but caught myself shopping the tire company itself instead of for the cheapest tires. Of course, I hopped online to find local tire shops here in Castle Rock for a set of inexpensive tires. I had a budget and I wanted to sick to, a very tight schedule to work around, and a level of service I expected. I gathered a few online quotes as well as some in-store estimates. focusing on my budget. I was in the neighborhood of the Goodyear tire center Coloradoland Tire & Service on the north side of Castle Rock and stopped in to get one last quote. These guys were friendly, competitive, quick, and trustworthy. They were able to work with my budget but made sure to bring to light the fact that tires are an investment and cutting corners could end up costing more down the road. I had them put tires on my car and walked out of that shop this afternoon knowing I paid for great service and a great product.

For small-to-medium businesses, investing in things that will elevate your company's production capabilities is not something you think twice about. Implementing best business practices and solutions that move your organization forward can really set you apart from your competition. QeH2 has been providing business IT solutions along the Front Range for the past four years. With a very similar customer service experiences as Coloradoland Tire & Service, QeH2 provides friendly, honest, and revolutionary IT support with your entire buiness in mind. Looking at how technology can help, and hinder productivity and efficiency around the office, is a daily routine for the QeH2 team. Our Say-Do philosophy keeps our focus on performance and reliability, a defining characteristic of QeH2. We have the rack record to prove it.

How do you chose who your going to pay for service, whether it's IT support or tires?

QeH2 Interviews Strategic Local Partner Seogon Technologies

by Alex Repola

Up until just a few years ago, very few people knew what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was. Up until even a year ago, people that had heard of SEO didn’t even know what it meant. Seogon Technologies, a Denver based SEO and Internet marketing company, has spent the last year changing the way businesses reach out to prospective clients through the World Wide Web. With nearly a decade of Internet marketing experience in various industries, co-owner Stephen Christopher prides himself on ethical business practices and customer service when designing marketing campaigns for organizations. I have worked with Stephen on many occasions and have learned there are right ways of doing SEO and there are wrong ways; Seogon Technologies takes those extra steps to ensure complete customer satisfactions through ethical business practices.

Q: Tell me a little about yourself, Stephen.
A: I grew up right on the water in Pensacola, FL; went to school at the University of Florida, home of the Gators; excited that the Denver Broncos picked up Tim Tebow. I fished a lot growing up and enjoy being outdoors camping and sitting by the pool since its summer.

Q: What past experiences and knowledge led you to Seogon Technologies?
A: In 2003-2004, when SEO really started to hit the market, I co-owned a mortgage company for real estate investors. We had a really great website and a ton of clients but couldn’t figure out how to get people to find the site, specifically, new customers. We started to do some research and found this thing called SEO. We Google-ed it and saw how cool this tool really was. People find you; there are ways to move up pages on Google for specific terms. It’s great. At this point in time, in 2004, a lot of people didn’t know much about SEO. Even today, a lot of people really don’t know what SEO is or that it even exists. If they have heard the term before, they generally attribute it to the Internet. Rarely do they know what it actually does. We realized we needed to be found for these specific terms that we were marketing for within the mortgage industry. We ended up hiring this one guy that worked out of his basement and he did a few things to our site in regards to optimization. I watched him for a month or two and started to pick up on it; I noticed how many things this guy was missing. I started to learn more and more about SEO and we shot up to the first page of Google for terms like ‘investment property mortgage’ and ‘income property mortgage’ after some time. We were beating out companies like Wells Fargo, Countrywide, and other big-name organizations. We did great for a couple years then the whole mortgage industry bottomed out.

That’s where I gained the majority of my SEO training. I then went into the data recovery industry and did SEO; I knew what I was doing, which was more than most people in the SEO industry. Studying new SEO trends, testing it, implementing it, and figuring out which word should be bold or italicized and how that impacts results. A number of my colleagues started to ask me to optimize their sites on the side, I began to see a niche for SEO and no one was doing it correctly.

Q: What is the premise of Search Engine Optimization?
A: It can be defined as being able to manipulate the rankings in an honest way, promoting your business or a client’s business online. That’s it in a nutshell; it’s not a difficult concept to grasp. Raising your organic ratings for certain key words or key phrases is all it is.

Q: Can you elaborate on why it’s so important to perform SEO in an ethical manor?
A: There are a lot of unethical SEO companies out there; we happily take business away from these companies every chance we get. They are doing the industry a disservice by overpromising and under delivering. These types of companies will get you blacklisted on all the search engines, Google being the first that picks up on unethical practices. Once you are blacklisted, you have to manually submit request to Google to be removed from this list. Generally, we’re able to submit a letter saying we’re a new company handling SEO, hand them the revised code, and hope we can get things back on track. There is a correct way to do things, a right way to do things, and if it’s not followed, there are repercussions.

Q: What search engines are seeing the majority of internet traffic these days?
A: Google, Yahoo, and Bing (formerly MSN) are really the top three search engines that get the most traffic.

Q: If you aren’t ranking well on these sites, what does that mean?
A: It can mean one of two things; one, your site is not built correctly and/or being optimized incorrectly. Two, you did something unethical and you’re not showing up because you’ve been blacklisted.

Q: What is the correlation between keywords and content?
A: Search engines are looking for relevancy. For example, if QeH2 wants to come up for ‘I.T. Support Denver,’ that would be your keyword. QeH2 wants to make sure the search engines can read through their site site, find plenty of relevant content that helps them get found for ‘I.T. Support Denver.’ QeH2 doesn’t have to have massive amounts of text, but the site does need to have a decent amount of content so search engines can see how relevant the site is for those key words.

Q: Is all the SEO done on your client’s, site or do you use other outside resources to help optimize?
A: There are two broad areas for SEO; onsite optimization, where everything is done to a customer’s physical website; things like Meta tags, making sure content is spread properly throughout the site and ties to the keyword strategy.

Onsite optimization accounts for about 20-30% of SEO rankings with search engines. Onsite optimization helps, but it may take 6-8 months to show up for certain keywords, and that’s only if they are non-competitive keywords. The other 70-80% of SEO is offsite optimization. These are things done out on the internet, or on other sites. You may have heard the term ‘link building’, which can be described as a popularity contest.

The more popular your website is, the higher you are going to show up on search results; links, referrals, anything that has a description about your site on someone else’s site is very helpful. Go do that a couple hundred times and that’s great for optimization. This is where the meat of SEO takes place. With link building, it makes a difference as to what site you’re linked to. If you have a link on Amazon.com, one of the largest websites out there, it’s going to hold a lot more value than 100 links on 100 no names sites. If you are linking to a blacklisted site, it’s only going to hurt your rankings.

Q: What are the benefits of Seogon Technologies SEO services?
A: We separate ourselves from our competition with our customer service and level of communication. A lot of companies say they focus on these aspects of business, but they really don’t. We have the referrals from clients that stand by the work we’ve performed. When we bring on a new client for SEO, we give weekly updates for the first 60-90 days. We are constantly communicating with the client what we are doing, what the next steps are, and even things we need from the client. Professional SEO is a very interactive process; we need participation from our clients. Outside of that reporting, we do a monthly tracking report update which includes a detailed written explanation of each aspect of Seogon Technologies' work. Too many times SEO and marketing companies will just hand you these large reports and expect you to decipher what it means. This is integral in assisting our clients with seeing the areas there has been movement and growth.

Q: With a lot of small to medium sized businesses turning to the internet to drum up business, are you seeing more business owners shifting towards helpful tools like search engine optimization?
A: There is a huge increase in the number of people that are learning about SEO, learning more about how it can help business, and starting to realize that it’s more beneficial to spend $2000 on professional SEO a month than $4000 in Yellow Pages pay-per-clicks. A couple of years ago, and even up to a few months ago, it wasn’t that uncommon for businesses to spend four sometimes five thousand dollars on Yellow Pages; that’s just not where online advertising is anymore. SEO lets the consumer find you for the specific product they are looking for. Lots of companies are starting to realize that they desperately need it. We are getting more calls now than this time last year of people asking questions and educating themselves on how professional SEO can help them.

Q: Where did you first hear of QeH2?
A: I heard about QeH2 through two different sources right around the same time. A close friend of mine mentioned Seogon Technologies and QeH2 as having very similar business models in the same industry. Not a week later, I was in a friend’s office and QeH2 was onsite providing I.T. support in Denver. I asked my friend about QeH2 and he had only great things to say. I called Eric Pratt, Director of Sales & Marketing, right after and we got together and talked. It’s all history from there.

Q: What is something that really sticks out about QeH2’s model and how they conduct business?
A: QeH2’s level of customer service really stands out to me. The ability to live and work in a technology-based industry and communicate with people outside the information technology industry is a skill that so few people and so few companies can do. Your entire staff can communicate on different levels depending on who they are talking to. I.T. support and providing solutions is no different than SEO. There are a lot of people that are good at it, but there are also a lot of pieces that need to be in place to be a successful company. I have heard only good things from your clients.

Q:What do you see the future partnership between Seogon Technologies and QeH2 looking like?
A: I see you guys getting a lot more leads through the QeH2 website. Our services perfectly complement each other. It will be a long-lasting partnership where we can continue to grow businesses within I.T. and SEO.