Organic SEO Consultant

Having been in this industry for a very long time, I come across the same situations over and over again in regards to the cost of an SEO campaign. You here the same questions and concerns from clients. You here the same complaints and stories from them too. Everyone thinks that they can save a few bucks and go with a cheaper SEO campaign, after all its not rocket science! Well, in reality there are very few people that know how to do it right.

Only about every 2-3 years do I see something new in SEO that I have never seen before. I’ve just been around too long and worked with too many clients. I say this not to toot my own horn. I say these things in order to help you understand where I, and many other SEO peoples, are coming from. The ideas I am putting forth in this post are the same things that my SEO brethren all experience too.

Photo Credit:imnotadoctor

Cost of SEO

I can’t even remember how many people have decided not choose me for their SEO campaign and that end up going for a cheaper package elsewhere. Maybe it’s from India and maybe it’s your nephew who says that he knows SEO. Most likely it’s your web developer or hosting provider that say, “SEO is easy, don’t pay those guys that much, I’ll do it for half that!”

What ends up happening is that the client comes back to me after having wasted their $1000/mo, or $500/mo, for the past 6-12 months and are left with no results. Or at least not the results that they wanted, expected, or needed. Had they just taken my advice in the first place, or gone with a different reputable SEO consultant they would not be 6-12 months behind their competition and would also not be thousands of dollars in the hole. Had they spent just $1000 more per month they could be seeing an actual ROI by now.

But instead they rolled the dice and crapped out. And their money lost has now become part of the cost of SEO, putting ROI even further out of reach. But to me the worst, and most costly, thing that happens in these situations is that valuable time has been lost.

Time Cost of SEO

This can be extremely expensive. The time cost of SEO is heavily influenced by what your competition is doing while you are not. But there are many things that influence the time cost of SEO. Imagine all the sales you have missed out on in the past 6-12 months because you are not ranking. Imagine all the market share that your competition has taken from you in the past 6-12 months. What if your competition has been spending more money on their efforts, with real professionals? Then you are really screwed.

How to Know if You Have a Good SEO Campaign

I’m not just going to carry on about how you need to spend more and choose good people for your SEO campaign. I actually have some ways that can help you understand if you are getting a good campaign.

First, do research on the person or company that you want to work with. Google their names. See if they are referenced in any reputable industry websites. Look for video of them too, its always nice to put a face with a name. See if there are numerous complaints on consumer sites. But be careful here because almost all of these “consumer advocate” sites (Ripoff Report, Complaints.com, etc) allow anyone to anonymously post whatever malice messages they want, and without any warrant of authenticity. But if you see many complaints from what appear to be different people (you can usually tell by the tone and the story that they tell) and on different sites then you can pretty much be sure that the company is bad news.

Get a third party to do an SEO audit of the work being done by your consultant, agency, or in-house people. Now this also comes with a word of caution because everyone has varying opinions of what is most important to the right techniques when it comes to SEO. So you have to take the SEO audit with a grain of salt. I recommend doing this so that you can get an “idea” of whether or not you are getting totally ripped off. This is not for you to nitpick at every little thing that the person auditing the SEO disagrees with. You have to be weary of the auditor wanting to steal your business away. If you can get a few different people to do the audit and that should be plenty to let you know whether or not you are getting totally ripped off or not. I will do another post on SEO audits at a later date so subscribe to my feed for that update when it comes.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that I can think of handfuls of reasons not to skimp on your SEO efforts. But most importantly is the huge cost of not getting a good SEO campaign. So please, if you are in getting ready to launch an SEO campaign make sure that you perform due diligence and that you not be afraid to spend on your SEO efforts. After all, SEO is still THE most effective form of online marketing. So if you spend hundreds of thousands on TV, radio, and print you should be spending even more on your SEO. Spend in the areas that have the best chance for an ROI. And nothing fits that bill better than SEO.

Thanks to the trusty weekly roundup at the eVisibility Insider Blog this week I found this great piece on Google Caffeine from the Erick Schonfeld at Tech Crunch. It is a nice update on what Caffeine will bring.

The overall jist of it is that Caffeine’s main goal is to increase the speed of its results as well as integrate more “real time” results from sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

But this is an SEO blog, and I am an SEO consultant, so we don’t care about Google getting faster or stuff like that. We want to know how this is going to affect our rankings. Right? Right!

Thank goodness that Summit Media conducted an independent study on Caffeine’s impact on rankings. They compared Caffeine results against current Google results for over 10,000 keywords.

They saw that on generic search queries news sites and social media sites were being given a bit of an advantage while other niche sites were ranking well for longer tail searches.

Most sites should not expect to lose many rankings, there were not many fluctuations, but sites with older content have a greater chance of losing out.

No changes to any one sector or niche over another. All changes seem to be across the entire index.

Domains with exact matched keywords had less emphasis

So overall not much to riot about. Things SHOULD be fairly stable as far as rankings go. But I’ll tell you this much, with the recent Page Rank update and Caffeine rolling out, things have been fluctuating. And if any of you use Google Alerts you will notice many more alerts coming through erratically and for content that is super old in many instances. I noticed this phenomenon right after Google integrated Real Time results. Seems that these changes did not mesh well with Google Alerts, which really has not been working well at all for the past year anyways.

With the blossoming of social media, it has never been easier for brands to monitor their brand and how it is perceived. This is indeed a hot topic right now because many brands still do not understand how to leverage social media properly. Heck, many of them do not even have a proper understanding of what social media even is!

I was recently asked to contribute to an article for iMediaConnection.com explaining how brands can use review sites to monitor their brands better. I found it a bit odd that the word “review sites” was being thrown around. To me, “social media sites” would have been a better vernacular because it would encompass all places a conversation was happening online.

This was an excellent article because it utilized a great number of experts to give their perspectives on how to monitor brands online. I wrote a great deal more than was used in the piece but I feel that I had some good coverage in there. Thanks goes to Neal Levitt, the author, for inviting me to the discussion.

I think that the quick points at the beginning of the article pretty well sum up the consensus amongst all those involved. Except I feel that advertising in areas where your brand is getting negative attention is a waste. I also feel that one of the most important points was not emphasized enough. The idea that when you find a person not happy with your brand or service, that you reach out to that person in a very public way and make amends. This puts a whole new spin on the negativity, shows the community that you care, and fuels a great PR victory that you can promote the heck out of. There you have, you have now turned a nightmare into a dream come true! There are not many chances in life for that kind of turnaround, opportunities like this are worth their weight in gold!

Lorrie Thomas over at Web Marketing Therapy put this exceptional video up today and I was so inspired by it I just had to put it up here for all of you. The premise is that the greatest people in history had been miserable failures at some point in their lives. You have to fail in order to succeed!