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 sore point for me, because there is no one-size-fits-all pricing metric. When 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 ever 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, monthly, and a per-page (both one-off and monthly). This format allows me to easily see the hours of work and costs involved in all the different duties that we do in the course of an SEO campaign. I can see the changes that occur in our SEO processes.

A year ago, most of our optimization occurred during the set-up, with monthly optimization consists of a few hours of link building, monitoring and charts on-page tweaking. Now, the set-up is only a fraction of the hours that go into each optimization campaign. The analysis continues performed on each account of each month does not exceed that of the set-up, but add a couple of months to a value of optimization and it does together. Expand that to a campaign of six or twelve months and the man-hours of research and analysis performed far exceeds the initial set-up process. And believe, we make a considerable amount of research on the front!

The pricing models divergence between SEO companies

SEO providers in all shapes and sizes. Often potential customers come to me shopping price. I'm not comparing our services with our competitors, but you are comparing our prices with our competitors. In this battle, you lose almost every time, and the reason is because there is always a company of "SEO" that will work less. With SEO, however, usually you get what you pay for. If you want a service at a low cost, results are obtained at low cost.

"But not all top SEO rankings? If firm X can provide top rankings for less, I should not go with them?" This is standard fare from bargain shoppers, but basic questions to ask yourself is this: would you rank higher or want more business? Most SEO companies are in business to achieve top rankings and everything else is not their problem. Even today, it is rare to find cheap SEO that can achieve top rankings for competitive terms, high ROI, maintain those top rankings through constant algorithm changes, and continue to beat the competition, which are optimized for the same sentences keyword.

If you're paying someone only a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars every year to work on your site, how many man hours do you really think you are paying each month? When your site gets dropped or rankings mysteriously crash, how much time they spend trying to identify possible problems and issues? Even the best sites - and those optimized by the best SEO in the world - can suddenly disappear from search engines. Sometimes it's a temporary problem, sometimes it's because of something the client did, and it is sometimes due to other external factors. Whatever the reason, the SEO needs to be thoroughly investigated so that the problem can be corrected.


Optimization services continues

We recently changed our overall view of a monthly SEO services that we offer. This is due to the number of clients who turn to us each month, after being punished by one or more engines because of previous SEO work that ran afoul of the search engines. Rarely, these cases provide a quick fix that puts them back in top positions throughout the night. With the suspected Google sandbox, over-optimization penalties and delays aging, many of these sites must go through a rather long period before being placed back in the index and has permission to do well in search results, long after the penalty problems have been resolved.

We look at what they provide similar to having an investigator on retainer. Our work, every month, is to continue to look for potential problems that may now or hereafter be holding the sites of our customers to play the best it can possibly be. If our customers are not on the front page for all their targeted ROI phrases, then our task is to find out why. And then if they are not in the top 5, our task is to analyze what it takes to get there. And if you are not in the top 3 so we need to see what the competition has going for them that our client is not so. And if they are in pole position, our task is to find and eliminate all potential external barriers, no matter how small. And all this must be done while maintaining the integrity, usability and performance of the customer's site.

Sometimes this is as simple as finding a duplicate URL somewhere that we knew nothing about it and other times, after months of research it turns out that a client links to sites that contain links to other sites that use spam techniques. These types of things should be under constant analysis, even if a site performs well. Heading off problems before they happen is a big part of the SEO game, and plays heavily into pricing.

The price is a big problem for the average entrepreneur and should be. However, price alone should not be the deciding factor in which SEO provider you choose. Find out which services will always be. If you get the impression that SEO is done after a few hours the work front, you can not always be sufficient to survey potential or existing problems, still unknown. This may cost more later.

On the other hand, just because someone charges huge fees does not mean that you will do well either. This is a symptom of many large SEO companies. Do your homework and find the companies that treat you like their only customer. If you get this type of service, no doubt you will reap a return on investment very significant .......