Determining the Value of Your SEO Service

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Determining the Value of Your SEO Service


Every once in a while--and probably more often than we should--we find ourselves reviewing our SEO pricing models. Pricing SEO has always been a real sticking point for me because there is no one-size-fits-all pricing metric. As I began our most recent review of our pricing something really starting to become quite obvious; search engine optimization is requiring more and more research and analysis than it ever did before.

After doing SEO for several years (since 1998) I recently put all of our regular SEO duties into a spreadsheet and noting the amount of time spent on each activity on a one-time basis, monthly basis, and a per-page basis (both one-time and monthly). This format allows me to quite easily see the man-hours and costs involved in each distinct duty that we perform over the course of an SEO campaign. It also allows me to see the changes that occur in our SEO processes.

A year ago, the bulk of our optimization occurred in the set-up phase, with the monthly optimization consisting of a few hours of link building, rankings monitoring and on-page tweaking. Now, the set-up is just a mere fraction of the hours that go into each optimization campaign. The continual analysis performed on each account every month does not exceed that of the set-up, but add a couple months worth of optimization together and it does. Expand that to a six or twelve month campaign and the man hours of research and analysis performed far exceeds the initial set-up process. And believe me, we do a considerable amount of research up front!

Differing Pricing Models Between SEO Companies

SEO providers come in all shapes and sizes. We often have potential clients come to me price shopping. They are not comparing our services with our competitors, but they are comparing our pricing with our competitors. In that battle we lose almost every time, and the reason for that is because there is always an SEO company that will work for less. With SEO, however, you usually get what you pay for. If you want a cheap service, youll get cheap results.

But isnt SEO all about top rankings? If firm X can provide top rankings for less, shouldnt I go with them? This is standard fare from bargain shoppers, but the basic questions to ask yourself is this: do you want top rankings or do you want more business? Most SEO companies are in the business of achieving top rankings and everything else is not their problem. Even still, it is rare to find inexpensive SEOs that can achieve top rankings for competitive, high ROI terms, maintain those top rankings through constant algorithm changes, and continue to beat out your competition which are optimizing for the same keyword phrases.

If youre paying someone only a few hundred or even just a few thousand dollars each year to work on your site, how many man-hours do you really think they are giving you each month? When your site gets dropped or rankings mysteriously crash, how much time do they spend trying to find potential issues and problems? Even the best sitesand those optimized by the best SEOs in the worldcan suddenly disappear from the search engines. Sometimes its a temporary issue, sometimes its because of something the client did, and sometimes its due to other external factors. Whatever the reason, the SEO needs to thoroughly investigate so the issue can be corrected.

Continuous Optimization Services

Recently weve changed our overall outlook on the month-to-month SEO services we provide. This is largely due to the number of clients that come to us each month after having been penalized by one or more engines because of previous SEO work performed which ran afoul of the search engines. Rarely do these cases allow for a quick fix which puts them back into the top positions overnight. With the suspected Google sandbox, over-optimization penalties and aging delays, many of these sites must go through a rather lengthy period before they are placed back in the index and allowed to perform well in the search results, long after penalization issues have been resolved.

We look at what we provide similar to having an investigator on retainer. Our job, each month, is to continue to seek out potential problems that may now, or in the future, be keeping our clients sites from performing as best as they can possibly be. If our clients are not in the first page for all their targeted ROI phrases, then our job is to find out why. And then if they are not in the top 5, our job is to analyze what it takes to get them there. And if they are not in the top 3 then we need to see what the competition has going for them that our client doesnt. And if they are not in the Pole Position, our job is to find and eliminate all potential external barriers, no matter how small. And all of this must be done while maintaining the integrity, usability, and performance of the clients site.

Sometimes all this is as simple as finding a duplicate URL somewhere that we didnt know about and other times after months of research we find that a client links out to sites that link out to other sites using spammy techniques. These types of things have to be under constant analysis, even if a site performs well. Heading off problems before they occur is a big part of the SEO game, and plays heavily into pricing.

Pricing is a big deal for the average business owner and it should be. However, pricing alone should not be the deciding factor in which SEO provider you choose. Find out what services youll be getting. If you get the impression that the SEO is done after a few hours of up front work, you may not be getting enough investigation for potential or existent, yet unknown, problems. This can cost you later on.

On the other hand, just because someone charges huge fees does not mean theyll do you well either. This is a symptom of many very large SEO companies. Do your homework and find the company that will treat you as their only client. If you get that kind of service, you will undoubtedly reap a very significant return on your investment.

Stoney DeGeyter is president of Pole Position Marketing, a professional search engine optimization and marketing firm based in Reno, NV, providing quality SEO services since 1998. Stoney has is also a moderator in the Search Engine Forums and Small Business Ideas Forum. You can read his SEM blog at (EMP) E-Marketing Performance. You can email him with any questions at stoney@polepositionmarketing.com

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Content Management Systems and search engine optimization (SEO) used to be mutually exclusive terms. But the SEO community has been driving the developers of Content Management Systems to integrate more SEO-friendly methodology within their systems.

Content Management Systems (CMS) are a hot topic right now with many corporate websites are turning to these systems to handle thousands of pages of dynamic data that they need to update regularly. Content Management Systems allow information to be added, edited or deleted automatically over the entire website. This can save hundreds of hours in manual updates. Pages of content are generated on the fly using a template driven system.

When Content Management Systems were first developed, most had little regard for the requirements of search engine optimization. For some Content Management Systems this still holds true. Most CMS's, however, now have workarounds to accommodate those wanting to perform search engine optimization on their websites. The workarounds in the Content Management Systems involve two areas: writing search engine friendly URL's and creating individualized title and meta tags per page.

Writing Search Engine Friendly URL's

Some search engines (SE's) and directories like Google and Yahoo! can now read dynamic URL's but there are still a fair amount which can't or can only partially read them. The SE's like to see pages that have unique content per page and may limit the number of variable strings (i.e. ?, =. &) in a URL to assure unique content.

By using a web server module called Mod_Rewrite it is possible to remove the stop characters from the URL string, thus making it more SE-friendly. To do this you will need to add a rule to the .htaccess file. For more information, see the following article on the Apache website: http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html

Creating Individualized Title and Meta Tags

Some Content Management Systems such the latest release from Hot Banana Software boast full integration with SEO performance such as offering Conversion Tracking tool, Robots.txt and Meta Tag Management. Other CMS's such as PostNuke.com is struggling to catch up and offer workarounds to make their system more flexible and SE-friendly.

PostNuke.com says that their next version (.8 release at this writing) will be fully SEO compliant. Until then, they recommend the pnMeta module, which will give control over the title, keyword and description tags over an individual page. Dynamically generated meta tag information, however, is not recommended. For more information see: http://www.miragelab.com/News+article-sid-19.phtml

What Does CMS Mean For SEO's?

Search engine optimization experts and others using SEO techniques will need to work closely with Webmasters and developers who use Content Management Systems on their web properties. This collaborative effort is necessary to insure that URL's are SE-friendly and that unique title and meta tags are severed up for each optimized page. A large website with tons of valuable content, should rank well in the search engines according to the SE's guidelines and the CMS technology would do well not to inhibit this, but rather would do well to promote good search engine rankings for large websites.

Copyright 2004 SEO Resource Search Engine Marketing Specialists

Kevin Kantola is the CEO of SEO Resource, a California search engine optimization company, and has published many articles over the past 20 years.

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Complete Web-Site Optimization For Search Engines (Part 1)


SEO or search engine optimization strategy now becomes widely popular among online business operators. Nothing strange about it as it allows to substantially increase your gross income, as a result of growing traffic or visitors flow.

That is why one point should be stressed out - your business return on SEO is directly proportional to the results your business have now. It means that SEO strategy, unlike marketing optimization, directed to boost quantity, not quality. If your business enjoys 1% response rate for any action you demand, whether it is sale, subscription, feedback or other it keeps on having similar response rate after SEO will be accomplished, although the response will grow in absolute numbers as a result of increasing traffic flow.

As you see SEO is not a panacea. The highest and the most efficient return on your SEO campaign as well as business investment may be reached upon one condition. Only when your current business model and marketing campaign has already been optimized and reached high level or response rate and efficiency, it is smart to grow your business "in quantity".

The reason for such attitude lies within the next speculation as well. Having inefficient business model under conducting web-site SEO will force growing number of visitors to turn your online business down for good. The obvious reason is that too few people actually return to the site once they left it for any reason, so having low response rate will substantially decrease your SEO result!

Let's draw an example. With previously mentioned 1% response rate from every 100 visitors you get, would mean that 1 visitor only takes desired action. Suppose SEO campaign increased the flow of targeted traffic to 1000. Using children's math we can easily come up with 9 new people, who would start to express their interest in your offer every month.

Now what if your, as some marketers say, "conversion" rate is 10% (10 visitors from every 100) and the SEO helped to bring the same 1000 targeted traffic. You now have 100 desired actions per month! In other words, your net SEO achievement is 90 new people. Compare this to 9 people with 1% conversion rate and it all becomes clear. That is why SEO is mainly about quantity, while response rate is mainly about quality.

I haven't intentionally mentioned about high quality of traffic search engines generate. Many experts would probably be skeptical by now for my evening-out the quality of traffic and focusing on quantity only. The explanation is simple - the quality of SE traffic is an Individual parameter.

Unlike many marketing and SE experts I cannot tell you how "quality" visitors coming from SE will be for your particular business as I don't know your present promotion methods. That is why the quality of traffic SEO campaign brings may be neutral, slightly positive or even negative. Yes, it may be negative.

I anticipate a small shock among online marketers, who were taught for their whole internet business career that search engine traffic is the most quality traffic they may have. It is not true under some conditions. If banner or classified ads were the only ways of generating traffic for you, then SEO will surely bring a quality improvement to your business response, on the other hand, imagine, that your present visitors are interested readers of your books, ebooks, reports, articles and other publications. Do you really think that "response quality" of people coming from "Description tag" of your search engine listing will be higher? Hardly, you can surely expect a slight decrease in response rate of SEO campaign, despite the unquestionable quantity growth in accordance with our previous example.

Next vital point is to understand that before anything we, firstly, should have those web-pages, otherwise there would be nothing to optimize. That basic logic will lead to another obvious conclusion. The more theme-based web-pages you have the better SEO result you can achieve. If your online business represented by 3 web-pages (main sales letter, about the author and contacts), your initial SEO "resources" are too weak to reach any substantial goal. SEs look for information, that is why, content rich web-sites may truly enjoy advantages of SEO.

Secondly, your pages should have already been listed in SEs. If you haven't submitted your web-site to SEs yet, no point to optimize the SE listing position you don't have.

An important dilemma every business operator faces is the extent s/he allows to reach in desire to get outstanding SEO results. Here is what I mean. As we all know the basic rule of successful web-site optimization is focusing on keywords with low or very low competition. In other words, the less supply of internet resources for some particular keyword or phrase is, the more chances are for your web-page of being "noticed" and ranked high.

Here is the problem, if you want to get a maximum for your web-site SE position you should be prepared not just to rewrite or edit your web-pages, but to completely change the theme structure and priority of informational content!

There would undoubtedly be web-site sections or pages with extremely high competition that would stress the popularity and importance of that topic, so if you decide to keep it "as is", optimization will raise your listing, but somewhere from 796,021 place to 545,932. Does it help you?

The extent of your "flexibility" and how far you can go to look "pretty" from SE viewpoint is what should be decided beforehand, because there are always 3 parts: you/your business, target market/consumers and search engines/directories, between which about 90% of informational preferences are common, but the rest 10% differ and it is up to you to decide what themes you should focus on. Whenever you are implementing any of the SEO tactics mentioned in this publication, keep in mind your business and consumers' needs.

Having understood these fundamental features of SEO, could we make a step further into a complete web-site search engine optimization, expanding your business to the new markets.

Note that SEO, despite all mentioned above, is all about "asking for high ranking" and there cannot be any results guarantee as no one except for SE developers themselves control ranking algorithm and determine "who is where". More than that, SEO takes much time before effecting your listing positions and this timeframe may range somewhere from week to several months, so don't panic if your optimization efforts haven't resulted in Google #1 position by tomorrow morning.

Structure

Let's start from drawing a scheme of your web-site link structure very similar to one every web-developer draws before designing a web-site. Under other equal conditions, we will speak about later, it is also clear that the more theme based web-pages or even web-site sections you create, the more chances of being ranked high you have, no matter how optimized your competitor's single web-page is.

Each web-page of web-site section should represent a particular theme or topic. This way you can diversify your "keywords market", increasing chances of high rankings. Despite obvious visitors advantage your site is more likely to win market recognition.

For now try to have "horizontal" as well as standard "vertical" link connections between pages. If one of your pages got a high ranking position (Google Page rank) it may help to improve the rankings of web-pages connected to it as well.

Keyword analysis

Next step is to determine keywords, mainly, phrases that we would like to target. Talking about mentioned dilemma, I would like to point to the other approach you should know about, that is suggested by some experts. Let's call it SE-oriented approach.

According to this approach, before creating a web-site your first step implies searching for the best key phrases via competitive analysis on main SE and then starting to develop content around these keywords. It means that your web-site will get highest SE ranking, but the informational richness will be dictated by neither you nor your consumers. Under such conditions it is SE or, to be more specific, your compe tition will determine what kind of content you will have at your web-site. As you see, according to SE-oriented approach, the more competitive some key phrase and based on it topic is, the less attention you should pay to developing that theme at your own site.

My attitude is slightly different. I offer at first to create and evaluate your current web-site content based on your business preferences and your niche-market needs and then optimize those web-pages according to keywords taken from your existed web-pages, no matter how tough the competition may be. Of course, you are free to create new pages around keywords with low competition just for traffic building purposes, but the primary accent should be focused on your business development and marketing needs.

As for the keywords, the basic rule is to choose the most targeted phrases rather than single words for two reasons:

* Phrases could describe your web-page theme usually more precisely than a word;

* Phrases usually have substantially less competition in comparison with one-word.

Write down 3-5 the most targeted key phrases for each web-page or section we are going to optimize. Then by evaluating supply/demand ratio find the easiest keywords for SE positioning.

Standard procedure of determining your key phrase competition or, as i said "evaluating supply/demand ratio" is to look at their supply and demand at popular SEs. Supply is determined by results of searching them on SEs while demand can be found through query on PPC programs at Overture.com or Google.com's AdWords that have tool for discovering how many time keywords or phrase have been searched on them.

By doing so we are searching for the most prospective and promising for optimization key phrases. Having them allow us to go further and start optimizing the web-pages themselves.

(to be continued)

About The Author

Pavel Lenshin is a devoted Internet entrepreneur and founder of the entrepreneurship portal, where you can find discounted Internet services, FREE ebooks http://ASBONE.com/ebooks/, FREE reports http://ASBONE.com/reports/, and finally uncover innovative strategies through FREE "NET Business Magazine"

info@asbone.com

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