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22

Jan

Are Big Bucks SEO’s worth the money?

Posted by stuart as , , ,

SEO is a service industry. Service industries survive on one of two basic principles:

  1. The average punter is incapable, due to any one of a number of factors, including (but not limited to) skill, knowlege, physical strength, availability of tools and materials, and many more, of doing the job required.
  2. The punter is capable, but it would be financially inefficient for him to do the job himself. ie he could do the job, but he’s better off concentrating on his core competencies, and contracting someone else to do the work.

So for the average business owner, where does the Search Engine Optimization of their online presence fit into this paradigm? (yeah, that’s right, I said paradigm)

Well, once again, there are two types of business owners:

  1. Those who understand search engine optimization, and…
  2. Those who don’t

After watching the fallout from Shoemoney’s post about 95% of SEO’s being slime, I’ve given a bit of thought to the big end of town SEO’s, and what value they bring to their customers.

There’s no doubt that top ranking for your main keywords is of great benefit to your business. But how much is it really worth?

The narrow minded view would be something like this:

“As long as I get one dollar’s more worth of conversions from my SEO campaign than I spend, it’s been successful”

…but isn’t that a little like saying to your kid as he drives your new BMW to work on his first day:

As long as you earn one dollar more than the total of the damage you do to my car, I’m in front, so that’s OK

The equation is not about making just a little more than you spend, it’s about maximizing the difference between spend and income.

There are two ways to widen the gap between spend and income:

  1. Decrease the spend on SEO, whilst acheiving the same results, or
  2. Increase the conversions whilst spending the same on SEO

I’m going to talk about decreasing the SEO spend rather than increasing the conversions, as I assume you’ve exhausted pretty much every avenue to convert the traffic you’re getting.

This is where the questions need to be asked of the Big Boys of SEO.

What value are you providing me?

If the answer is anything other than “Getting you the highest possible ranking for your chosen keywords at the lowest possible cost”, I believe that your SEO is on the wrong track.

Yes, they may provide monthly keyword ranking lists, but do you really need them? Chances are you’re targeting something in the vicinity of a dozen keywords or less. Sheesh, pay someone on digitalpoint $25 to write a script to track your rankings, hell, pay me $25 and I’ll write you one! (or just use the free keyword ranking script here)

Yes, they may provide you with multi-page briefs outlining their strategy, but do you need them? When you employ a printer to do a job for you, you don’t ask them how they’re going to do it for you, you just want to see the results.

Yes, they may have access to a pile of high PageRank sites where they can drop links to your site. But what happens when you stop paying them? Do the links stay? Or do they disappear, taking your rankings with them?

Yes, they may have some kind of “fast indexing” strategy. But what’s that really worth, that can’t be achieved by linking to your site from a frequently spidered blog?

So let’s break the whole SEO thing down to its basics. Three (controllable - there are others such as domain age which can’t be controlled) factors influence how a page ranks for a specific keyword:

  1. On-page SEO. This is all about getting page titles, H1, H2 etc, and file names/URL’s right. There’s a lot to be said for quality, CSS driven design here as well. Making pages easily spiderable certainly isn’t going to do you any harm.
  2. Page Copy - Good, original copy, targeting the keywords in question.
  3. Off-page SEO - link building. Getting links from authority sites, varied but targeted anchor text backlinks etc.

I’m thinking that these are all things that the average reader of this blog could do standing on their heads. (You are, after all, an intelligent bunch, are you not?)

So next time you read your company’s hired SEO talking in their blog about attending some great SEO conference, lunching with Matt Cutts, or understanding the Google algorythm, ask them what they’re doing for your organization that’s not included in the three above points.

20 comments so far

Cedar Sauna Kits says January 23rd, 2008 at 3:38 am

I think there is a current trend about bashing SEO’s as a form of link bait. That being said, there are quite a few bad SEO companies out there. Anyone hiring an SEO should seriously consider whether they can trust the company!

Vegas Rob says January 23rd, 2008 at 3:14 pm

I think it’s a current trend because there are so many bad seo companies out there. The sad reality is that most of these so called SEO Companies have no clue as to what it is they are doing.

I get at least a call every week or so from some company saying they are going to help me get to the top of the search results. The problem is if they were so good why are they cold calling me? Wouldn’t I find them when I type in SEO?

stuart says January 23rd, 2008 at 4:38 pm

I think you’re being a little harsh there Rob ;-) SEO is obviously one of the most competitive terms on the web. There’s only ten spots on the first page of the SERPS.

As far as there being a lot of bad SEO companies out there, I think it’s a matter of cost. SEO is not rocket science, but it is a lot of really hard work. There’s no magic bullet, just lots of link building and on-page work.

I think I’d actually be tempted to stay away from an SEO who I considered “too” cheap, as I’d not be sure that they understand the amount of work involved.

GSM simlock verwijderen says January 24th, 2008 at 2:47 am

I think SEO’s are not worth the big bucks. Therefore I have some reasons.

Firstly, the work they do, I could do myself with some efforts and achieve the same results.

They earning money and usually they do the SEO of your website in name of a company. So they have to manage more clients than only you. So sometimes they don’t do their work well because of too busy with other essential clients.

And the latest reason is that they making money with SEO and I not, but I have more experience and could do the same work like them, but nobody is asking it to me :(.

Daniel says January 24th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

no doubt SEO is a serious business. those who term it as a spamming business ought to looks at themselves. of course there r a lot of bad SEO companies but one should be careful of the claims they make.

stuart says January 24th, 2008 at 12:35 pm

Hi Daniel,

I think there’s some validity there when some people call SEO’s spammers. Once the on-page SEO is done, it’s all about the links.

Now link hunting is “un-natural” as far as the SE’s are concerned. They’re not links which the other webmaster has given you because he likes your content, they’re generally either bought, bartered, or blog comments left by the SEO.

Therefore, if they’re not natural links, are they spam?

What are your SEO rules? | PureBlogging says January 25th, 2008 at 6:43 pm

[...] least one blogger who responded to Schoemaker’s assertions seems to claim that companies can easily perform SEO [...]

Louisiana says January 28th, 2008 at 11:13 am

There really are a lot of rip offs in the seo BIG BUSINESS! Some seriously slimy people. I personally know 1 person on DP that I would trust 100% with seo. There are at least 99 more that I wouldn’t trust with a penny.

stuart says January 28th, 2008 at 1:49 pm

I have no doubt that a good SEO is worth their weight in gold. I’d just want to be sure I was getting value for money.

SEOcontest2008 says February 2nd, 2008 at 4:35 am

Just like any business there will be people who claim to be “experts” and will freely take your money regardless of if they think they can achieve any results. However, if you can receive a good return on your investment, the company can give you some type of money back guarantee, and they organization has a good reputation than why not consider their services? Obviously, whenever your shell out money online there will be scammers with their hands wide open. However, if you do your research and are careful whom you choose I don’t see why most SEO experts would not be worth the excellent service they can offer.

Halifax SEO says February 13th, 2008 at 5:19 pm

Hy stuart, good points on this post.
SEO’s spammers will alway exist. SO no need to argue about this.
Ethics comes when you care about you reputation as SEO. Some just care about making money.

I think it worth the big bucks, this industry had become important for many of business corporations that do want to make big bucks using SEO.

Pat C. says February 15th, 2008 at 5:34 am

As someone said earlier, good SEO are really worth the money spent.

penny stocks list says February 26th, 2008 at 11:49 pm

thats nice piece of info
thank you for sharing it
good job

SEO Certification says February 27th, 2008 at 3:56 pm

Come to think of it, SEO is basically just that if you are not going to be too granualar about how everything is done. That’s why I am also not surprised seeing neebies winning or doing good in SEO Contest. All they need to do is read and implement. And these people dont have much clients to work with and they do the contest full time.

free wesite sumission says March 7th, 2008 at 12:10 am

Nice article, thank you. It was ineresting to read this information.

web marketing says March 8th, 2008 at 8:06 am

I usually share most of what I know about SEO, which is fair. Most people don’t have the time.

It’s like Photoshop and HTML in the sense that most people given enough time, could learn the core of it. Knowing how to use Photohop does not make you good, or a good designer. Knowing good SEO basics does not make you a pro either.

Sure, you know about H1 tags, but do you know how prominence of the keyword applies to the h1 tags / title tags, and how to use h2 tags effectively, etc…

Sure, the average small business could do it themselves with a good SEO Book. And that’s what I tell them. Bigger business (competative phrases) may not as easily. Think about the work you have to do to convince a pr7 site to link back to you (without paying them). Think about the creative content you have to generate to pull real interest/visitors. But even lots of the small businesses just want to outsource stuff like this.

I must admit, I discover trends on my own that no other SEO talks about. I could use them if I actually did SEO for other companies (which I do not). Even the biggest names in SEO will tell you most of the rules are obvious, but there are handfuls that they keep to themselves (e.g. Eric Ward mentioned that recently on his blog); but again, that probably only applies to the top 10% most competative terms.

SEOcontest2008 says March 17th, 2008 at 6:03 pm

There are good SEOs that know they’re good.
There are bad SEOs that think they’re good.

Knowing who’s who takes some talent. Just do research, get several quotes from various companies and compare.

Lightsaber says March 21st, 2008 at 2:41 pm

There is only one SEO that I know that I would spend any money on. I met him at DP, and he is seriously incredible.

I like how you wrapped seo up in the 3 bullets in the end. That’s it in a nutshell Stuart.

George

imagechef says March 26th, 2008 at 3:12 am

There really are a lot of rip offs in the seo BIG BUSINESS! Some seriously slimy people. I personally know 1 person on DP that I would trust 100% with seo. There are at least 99 more that I wouldn’t trust with a penny.

Small Business SEO says April 9th, 2008 at 4:12 am

That was a really nice article. Not everyone can do SEO, but they still ltry.

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