Posts Tagged ‘pricing’

Over the last dozen plus years, unscrupulous SEO’s have given the entire search engine optimization industry a bad rep. It seems like every few months some high profile person in the Internet world says something about how SEO is snake oil, sending ripples throughout the SEO community.

To be fair, some of the complaints about SEOs are deserved. Not for the entire SEO community, but for a small segment of “SEO providers.” Unfortunately, like sleezy lawyers, it only takes one to ruin the whole batch, perceptively.

I’m sure many readers have either heard about, or know someone who has had (or have themselves had) an extremely negative SEO experience. I talk to many business owners who are skeptical about SEO because their last SEO didn’t perform as expected, either over-promised and under-delivered, dropped out of contact, or just wasn’t doing the job as promised.

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Pricing out SEO services can be a challenge for any business looking to invest in their online marketing efforts. It’s difficult because there is no one-size-fits-all pricing metric. It seems that, no matter where you turn, you’re comparing apples to oranges when it comes to pricing and services offered between SEO companies.

Ultimately everything comes down to hours. How many hours are involved in doing the tasks at hand?

To figure that, you have to know what’s required in order make your site successful. And, that’s the rub. When comparing quotes between SEO companies, the price is only a reflection of two things: 1) What services are going to be provided, and 2) How much does the SEO get per hour. Each service will have an estimated number of hours attached to it. Some will be one-time hours, others will be ongoing hours, some tasks will require a lot of hours, and some only a few.

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Over the past few days, I’ve been playing around with Google Instant and reading a lot about it. There is a pretty broad range of opinion, and I’ve been drawing some of my own conclusions. Will Google Instant change the face of SEO or PPC? Will it save us time searching? Will people adopt or reject it? Anybody offering opinions on these questions is merely speculating. I’ve got my own speculations, and I’ll share them here.

The questions posed above are yet to be answered, and really, only time will tell. But, since I’ve had a few clients ask my opinion, I thought I’d provide some of my thoughts here where they can be “programmed, categorized, or easily referenced.”

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In the first six parts of this series we asked questions related to in-sourcing your search marketing efforts. Specific areas addressed were for those considering doing SEO themselves, subbing out SEO to another person, and hiring an in-house SEO with and without SEO experience. In Part V we addressed issues of outsourcing your SEO campaign completely, asking questions regarding related to hiring an SEO consultant vs. hiring an full-fledged SEO firm.

In this installment we move into the realm of pricing and asking questions related to costs versus return on investment. When outsourcing your SEO to a firm or consultant it becomes a bit more difficult to control costs than it does when you hire-in house. But that’s not to suggest that cost cannot be controlled and you cannot get a return on investment. It’s all a matter of knowing how to manage the campaign, expectations and the budget that goes along with it.

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Every now and then I get calls from prospective clients asking for some kind of pay-for-performance arrangement for SEO. Usually these are one-man start-up operations with “a great idea” and very little money. Sometimes it’s a more established company just scared of entering into a long-term contract that will produce unknown results. Either way, the desire for such an arrangement is certainly a valid one, but not always one that can be implemented as easily as it sounds.

While I don’t think the pay-for-performance pricing model is entirely unworkable, I think the cons far outweigh the pros. Logistically the tracking needed to ensure fair and just compensation for performance adds additional layers to the total process, depending on the metric used for “performance,” quite possibly making the entire solution unwieldy for productive SEO.

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Choosing a SEO to manage your website marketing has never been easy, but during these tough economic times it’s more important than ever to choose wisely. No one wants to be the guy at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, who chose the wrong chalice. You’re site will be nothing but a shell of it’s old self with the Knights of SEO standing over you saying, “He chose… poorly.” Uh, yeah… “Information that would have been helpful yesterday!” (to mix my movie quotes.)

If you’re a small business shopping around for the right SEO to help you out, there are a lot of things you need to consider before jumping in and hiring a SEO subcontractor or firm. Even if you’re on a tighter-than-normal budget–and really, who isn’t right about now–you can’t shop for SEO simply on costs alone. That’s like buying an economy car when you really need a mini-van. You just need to find the mini-van that offers the best features at the right price.

Not all SEO providers are the same and not all sites require the same type of SEO service. All thing must be taken into proper consideration. Here are five things that are relevant to the overall pricing and success of your optimization campaign.

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