I received my latest bill from BT and no suprise found a BT Answer 1571 low use charge of £1.00. Since moving to Cardiff we decided that there was no point having a house phone as we never used it and when it did ring we’d never answer it anyway. So what’s the point?

Well according to my phone bill “To avoid future charges make 2 chargeable calls/month or more with BT”. To me, that seems a little unfair and stupid. I don’t want to make two lousy phonecalls from a house phone, I shouldn’t need to! 

What is fair is to say that BT have far too much grip on the phone lines of the UK and are holding us back. Will we ever get to the point where a bundle deal consists of just TV & Broadband package? No phone line just mobile phone calls.

BT Answer 1571 low use charge is just another way of getting their little hands on our cash for no reason and it really pisses me off. Rant over…

BT SearchSmart

It’s a rare moment when I mention the words ‘search engine optimisation’ in my blog (never mind blog about it).  So why change a habit?

After deciding to do a little boredom reading I decided to do a little search for ‘seo’ on Google just to see who’s ranking, who’s bullshitting & who genuinely deserves to be there.

Out of the top ten results; only two were informative about the query (Wikipedia & Google Support) with the rest being agencies + one forum.

However, what did catch my attention was the following PPC Ad;

SEO Management from BT

Professional SEO Consultation and
Management from only £74.99pm

www .BT.com/SearchSmart

When did BT enter the SEO consultancy market? Furthermore, they are also offering PPC & Analytic services? (worth noting that I have nothing against this whatsoever … good luck to them). So what have they got to offer?

• Keyword selection
• Comprehensive website audit
• Recommendations document
• In depth telephone consultation
• Unlimited email access to online marketing specialists
• Google Site Map production and provision for upload
• Monthly SEO reports position reporting
• Best practice SEO documentation & guides

• All the features of Option 1 plus:
• Unlimited 0800 phone-based support
• Link building via 3 bespoke articles (monthly)
• Directory submissions to up to 50 targeted directories
• Enhanced reporting
• Enhanced reporting of keywords & competitor link analysis

Link Building Package - £100 (ex. VAT)

Give your rankings a further boost by:

• Manual link requests to related websites - highly relevant content sites
• Manual submission to DMOZ
• Manual submission to selected UK directory sites
• Additional directory submissions where necessary
• All activity reported and results tracked on your dashboard

Additional Consultancy Call - £50 for 30 minutes (ex. VAT)

• 30 minute expert consultation with BT SearchSmart online marketing 
  specialist.
• Based on customers needs and questions, supported by a pre-call 
  questionnaire submitted by customer
• Post call report sent to customer
• Bookable online

And lastly, the also offer Analytics

• 30 minute expert consultation with a Google Authorised Analytics Consultant
• Set up of your Google Analytics account
• Implement Google Analytics code on up to 20 pages of your web site (and BT Tradespace profile).
• Guide on how to use Google Analytics to achieve business aims and maximise ROI

No disrespect to BT on their services, everyone has an opinion. In this case, I’d be questioning a number of features (but I guess I work in the field). The one that I will point out is the setting up of Google Analytics.

I’m all for promoting further advice on such Analytic products but offering to implement what is a free product on up to only 20 pages is a bit limited. I imagine your average website these days has way more than 20 pages - especially with Blogs becoming a common feature in most up to date websites.

The only question I’d ask is, does the BT SearchSmart team also do the SEO for the main BT website?