Category: Search Engine Optimization

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Paying Monthly for SEO Services? What Exactly Are You Getting?

Now that you have had your website optimized and you are improving your organic search placement, it’s time to ask your service firm exactly what are you getting for your monthly service fee.

It is not uncommon for a business that has had optimization done by an SEO firm to be paying a monthly service fee of anywhere from $300 to several thousand dollars a month. But what are you really getting for this monthly service fee? Do you even know?

For $300 a month times 12 months that’s $3,600 a year, not an insignificant amount of cash, it is important to know what you are getting. To find out, it is key that you ask the right questions to evaluate the answers in order to identify if this expense is warranted or is just an income stream for your SEO firm that they are hoping you will not challenge.

Here are the pointed questions you should ask your own SEO firm:

  1. What is my monthly fee paying for? If this is for link work, how many links did you get me last month and the month before?
  2. If this is for your code to remain on my web page and is just a monthly subscription fee to keep the code there let me know this clearly. What happens when I stop my services with you?
  3. I understand that no one can pay their way to the top of Google so if I am paying you $300 a month and $3,600 a year exactly what am I getting for my money? Anything?
  4. If you say you are tweaking my code weekly or monthly for my $300 investment. I would like to see what tweaks you actually did last month and the month before. Were these done only to my home page?
  5. If I stop my services with you what exactly on my home page will be changed if anything?

Pretty pointed questions if you ask me, but questions that you as a business owner should ask and know the answer to, to make sure that you know exactly what your SEO investment is doing. It is important for you as a business owner to know that many SEO firms have this model for pricing and that they do not do much on a monthly basis to help you retain or improve placement after their initial work is done. This is an income stream for them and they just hope you are not asking the questions to pin them to the wall to really tell you, if they even will, exactly what they are doing monthly for you for this payment.

I would be highly surprised to hear that the things that an SEO firm does to earn the $300 for a monthly subscription fee is actually worth the actual cash value if your webmaster billed you by the hour to do the same things. Especially if your SEO worked does not include blogging, content creation, or any changes you can notice on your website. You may simply be paying $300 a month for a “feel good” report at the end of the month to encourage you to continue to pay monthly services.

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Social Bookmarking Not My Favorite Way to Boost SEO

I do like social bookmarking for some clients as a way to build one way inbound links, but I feel that there are better ways for other clients. Social bookmarking works great to build links for website and blog content that is timely, well written, and a hot web topic.

For the majority of business sites that focus on their own services, more mundane topics (although they could be of interest to a specific audience), social bookmarking may simply be too much trouble for the results that it generates. One big caveat is that if you have a well developed social bookmarking profile and many followers, you may have much better success than just opening an account and starting to bookmark away.

I find that if you are going to really invest time in building links a faster more sure way is to write article pieces and syndicate them on newsletter and content sites for others to grab while keeping in your bio block and link information. Even better is to see if you can guest write for a professional organization in your industry. The key here however is that any article you provide must be informational in nature and not focused on your own particular services.

Do I feel that social bookmarking has a place? Yes, absolutely, but it is labor intensive and best used for certain topics, content, and specific clients.

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SEO As We Have Known It Is Dead

Yes it is true, with the advent of personalized search where everyone sees a different search results page based on their accumulated search history and social media site interaction, search engine optimization as we have known it over the years is dead.

In fact, it is so dead that we have dropped our subscription to WordTracker and removed SEO services from our website. Yes, that means it is really dead. There is no more keyword stuffing, over optimization, or special code massaging that provide organic search placement. Now it is about building content that is focused on your services and building “web authority”.

In fact, with personalized search the keyword research tools that we previously used to assist in identification of good keywords to cover and niches to target have all pretty much gone away. WordTracker used to be one of the best, but is now in my eyes simply a keyword discovery tool and the AdWords tool does a pretty good job at that for free.

So what’s the key now to good organic placement? Well, first it is important to know that what I see in the top ten will not be what you see and so on and so on. There are some results that Google seems to show consistently for all  search users, but it is not as it was where if you were in the number three position, we all saw you at number three. Those days are long gone.

What we recommend now for organic placement is that make sure your website works for you and focuses tightly on your products and services. Using brainstorming techniques and results from your website analytics program to identify your keyword targets, build content and backlinks activity, get blogging, do quarterly press releases, and do a white paper or feature article once or twice a year. If you are not active in Facebook now, make sure you have a Facebook Fan Page in the next six months. All these things working together for you build your site and insulate you from organic placement drops that sometime previously popular SEO tactics, when they fall from favor, may bring.

You can still place organically, but not using the same tactics that we used to use before. That’s for sure!

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Web Authority – How Do You Built It?

Web authority with search engines is built based on authoritative content that is unique and informative. The content you create for an authority site should not only clearly and transparently detail your services, but should provide more in-depth informational content on topics that dovetail with your service offerings.

Search engines reward large content-rich websites with organic search placement. This depth of content is not built over night, but should be considered a work in progress with new pages added on a monthly basis. For new websites we recommend that a client start with a minimum of 25 pages of content and immediately start blogging three days a week on site launch.

Over time as your website grows, you naturally establish authority on your selected topic as you build keyword density. For many websites, in a year or less, they will start to see good organic improvement. Continue that process for years and your website can grow to over several thousand pages of interesting unique informational content that is targeted around your service offerings. Not only does this make a better website for readers, but search engines reward these sites with better organic placement.