Unlisted SEO Fees

Many SEO firms don’t list their prices, instead requiring you to contact them for a price quote.  In some ways this makes sense since all websites have different service needs, but it is also often intended as a tactic by SEO’s to have you get in contact with them so that they can begin a conversation with you with the aim of convincing you to engage their services.  Talking about your site with you before offering a price is certainly not a bad thing and it’s always important to determine what will be required to get the site the visitor traffic that it needs but, when you contact an SEO with unlisted prices, be sure that the focus of the discussion is on identifying your specific requirements and that you are offered pricing and services which are well-suited to your needs and your budget.  Often, SEO’s with unlisted prices turn out to be priced very high, usually unjustifiably so.

“Free” SEO Services

As the saying goes, nothing in life is free, at least not really.  Some SEO’s offer “free” or “pay for performance” services which require you to pay only if they achieve agreed results on search engines for your site.  That sounds great, a real, risk-free “no-brainer” of an offer, right?  The problem however is that, to offer their services in this way, SEO’s need to handle the project in ways which might not be in their clients’ best interests.

They may need to enter into a contract with the client in which specific benchmarks must be achieved in terms of certain keywords or keyphrases acquiring agreed rankings on search engines, goals which will then be targeted to the exclusion of all others.  The SEO will target keywords which they know will perform well in terms of rankings on search engines, but not necessarily the most effective keywords in terms of delivering quality visitor traffic from people who are seeking what your site offers.  It’s one thing to boost rankings on search engines, but another thing entirely to boost website sales, sign-ups and conversions.  With that service model, the SEO’s focus is more on getting you to pay for their services than on getting visitors to your site to pay for yours.  They may work hard to acquire the agreed rankings for the agreed keywords, but there is little incentive for them to do more than that or to explore and capitalize upon other opportunities to advance the aims of your website. And, if they do offer more comprehensive services beyond what was initially contracted, these services will generally be charged outside of that agreement.

SEO’s with “pay only for rankings” services also need to account for those clients who, despite having their site optimized and seeing its rankings and traffic improve, may simply choose not to continue with the SEO beyond the free stage.  That is, they may choose not to pay the SEO even if the agreed goals have been met, perhaps simply because the resulting improved rankings did not convert into increased sales or conversions.  The SEO needs to account for these losses and you can bet that it doesn’t come out of their pocket, but is instead embedded in the fees that their ongoing clients pay.  This results in higher than necessary fees for those clients who do continue paying.

While “free” SEO’s seem like a safe and obvious choice, it’s important to realize that nothing is free and that engaging one of these services is not necessarily as wise or risk-free of a choice as it might seem on the surface.  This is also the pricing strategy preferred by SEO’s who are new to the field and have not established themselves with a large number of happy customers, or are not specialized in the required skills and offer the services only as a sideline to their main field of business, and that is all worth bearing in mind when you’re considering this option.

SEO Price Range

Search engine optimization, done thoroughly and properly, involves a huge amount of work and expertise.  Anyone can learn about it and do it successfully for their own site, but it takes time both in terms of implementation and experience.  Because of this, be very wary of SEO prices that are suspiciously low.  There are no quick fixes or “magic bullets” when it comes to optimizing a site for high search engine rankings.  Search engine submission is a commonly offered low-cost service, but it hasn’t been necessary to submit sites to search engines for over ten years.  All of the major search engines, including Google, will find your site on their own without it being submitted for inclusion.  With a new site that has not yet been indexed, there is no reason to not submit it, but even then it is not a service worth paying for, however low the price may be.  Most website designers and developers also often “include” SEO when they are building a new site, and this is usually a minor add-on to their other fees, but you should make sure that they are explicit about what exactly they will be doing for this fee.  Again, if it’s only a small fee, it’s unlikely that they’re doing anything that will benefit your site on search engines as much as thorough and specialized optimization.

Some SEO fees on the other hand are ludicrously high.  I have encountered some SEO’s who quite happily want to charge many tens of thousands of dollars (or several thousand dollars per month!) to optimize a site for search engines.  In most cases, such an extravagant fee cannot be justified.  It is certainly possible to engage in enough work to account for fees like that, but it would have to include everything from on-site optimization of every page, optimization of the site architecture, copy writing, social media marketing, press releases and essentially everything that can possibly be done to improve a site’s exposure on the web.  Even then, such high fees are largely arbitrary and simply aimed at those online enterprises that think nothing of dropping that kind of money into their marketing campaigns.  The big SEO firms that offer exorbitant fees do so themselves to finance their own large marketing budgets and to pay their dedicated sales forces, rather than operating efficiently with a focus on service delivery.

The Bottom Line on SEO Prices

SEO takes work and you should expect to pay a reasonable fee for the service, but be cautious when choosing an SEO whose prices are suspiciously low or unjustifiably high.  Any SEO should be happy to offer you a price that fits your budget, your goals and your requirements.  If you are given a generic price, expect a generic solution that may not address the specific needs of your website, the unique opportunities and challenges it presents, or your budget.

1. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

This is the easiest and fastest answer to the “more visitors” question.  It’s also the most expensive.  If you’ve got the budget, you can send a ton of targeted traffic to your site – though you will, of course, be paying for every single visitor that arrives.

Both Google AdWords and Bing/Yahoo’s pay-per-click programs are very effective and fast, but they’re not cheap.  If you’re new to PPC, start cautiously.  It’s easy to over extend yourself financially with these programs if you’re not paying  attention.

2. Blog

No matter what your site is focused on, there’s bound to be something related to it that you can blog about.  Blogs are a proven way to bring visitors to your site, and can be an excellent source for gaining direct return traffic, new links. and improved organic search results.

Consider adding a blog to your site and committing to adding fresh content to it on a regular basis.  Your effort will pay off in visitor traffic.

3. Social Media

This is where the people are.  Let them know about your website by sharing your content and networking, then watch your visitor count increase.  You have to put yourself out there.  “If you build it, they will come” takes too long.

Create a Facebook page for your site.  Create a Twitter account, too.  Submit URLs to your site’s most interesting content to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and Delicious.

Have video content?  Create a YouTube account to represent your website and upload your videos.  Photos or artwork?  Create a Flickr account and share with the community there.

4. Join A Community

Whatever niche your site falls into, there are bound to be 2 or 3 websites with forum based communities built around them that are considered the hubs or “authorities” of the field.  Join them, and represent your site in the community.

They’re not just your competition, they’re a tool you can use to increase your visitors.  Join, take part in discussions, and become acquainted with your peers.

5. SEO

Is your site search engine optimized?  Implementing basic SEO principles can improve your organic search engine rankings dramatically, bringing many new visitors to your site.

If you have the budget, consider hiring an SEO company for website optimization.  If you don’t, read up on the basics and best practices of SEO and start optimizing your site.

Unfortunately there are small businesses who were around ten years ago who are reluctant to embrace these new necessary efforts. To compete online in this decade you definitely need SEO – but you won’t thrive with just SEO.  There are things SEO CAN’T do for you!  Like the following…

Link Building

If you’re not actively seeking possible back links all the time, you’re hampering your success. If your competitors have substantially more high quality backlinks than you, it doesn’t matter how spectacular your site’s content and SEO efforts are.

If you ignore link building, they’re going to keep beating you in the search results. SEO can’t fix this – links can.

Conversions

SEO does not make sales. It’s your content, your design, and your pitch that are going to make conversions happen on your web site.

Some SEOs will want to share in the process of improving your site’s conversions, if you’re willing, and work with you to determine what targeted keywords are going to bring the most convertible visitors to different pages. But at the end of the day, it is your responsibility to ensure that the actual conversions take place.

Networking

Networking and marketing are not the same thing. Networking is YOU making connections and engaging while representing your business – with other professionals in your field and with potential customers.

If you don’t have the time or desire to do this, hiring someone to do it for you is certainly an option. Pretending it’s not important is not. With many businesses now reporting that they receive more traffic from Facebook than Google, it’s simply absurd to take a stand that networking and social media presences aren’t important for your particular business. No amount of onsite SEO can make up for a lack of it.

Like it or not, you need to network.

Content Creation

The O in SEO stands for optimization. The problem with SEO is that you actually need a decent quantity of quality website content to optimize. If your site is 5 pages in total, and contains more images than text, your web site optimization potential is limited. The more content you have, the more chances you have for useful traffic. Adding a few articles on related topics can work surprisingly well. Or commit more fully to content creation and add a blog to your site, featuring posts relating to your field and your business.

I know – you’re an electrician/caterer/jewelry maker – not a writer and you don’t want to do this.  Lucky for you, content creation is easily outsourced. Copywriters, guest bloggers, and other writers for hire aren’t hard to find. It sounds like a lot, but if you don’t have any relevant text content on your site, your potential for search engine success is severely handicapped.

Even a small amount of effort in these areas will increase your traffic and the success of your onsite SEO. Period. If you want the car to go you have to put some gas in the tank. Remember what SEO can’t do for you, and then reap the rewards of what it CAN.

If you sell products on your site, you want to be listed here. But unlike Google’s organic search results, you have to deliberately add your site’s items to Google Shopping to be featured in the Product Search results. Luckily, this is quite simple to do.

First you need to create an account at the Google Merchant Center. You can use an existing Google account or set up a new one.

To add your site’s products, you will need to create and upload a Data Feed to Google.

If you are using any kind of shopping cart software to run your website, there will probably be a way to do this within the cart interface. If not, there is probably a plug-in available to enable this for your particular software.  If you are selling a large number of different items, this is definitely the way to go.  Once it’s set up it should be maintenance free, updating your changing stock automatically.

But, suppose you have a smaller number of products for sale on your site, and don’t use shopping cart software? Then you can easily create your data feed by hand. Google accepts both XML and .txt data feeds. While creating an XML feed requires some technical know-how, anyone can set up a .txt feed by following a few simple steps. All you need is a basic spreadsheet program like Excel or Calc and the product data that’s already on your website.

Register a feed name with Google first. You can call your feed anything you like as long as it ends in .txt, but something like mycompanyname_feed.txt will make it easy to find.

Creating Your Feed

Now, open a new spreadsheet document to begin creating your feed.  Every product you include will have its own line of data in the spreadsheet, with each column being a different attribute field for the listing. There are a huge number of attributes accepted, but only the following 6 are required by Google: id, title, description, price, link, and condition.  Do not leave any fields blank.

id – A unique identifier for each item
title – Item name. (Include your most important keyword  for the product in here) 70 chararcter limit
description – A useful keyword rich description of the product.  (Google says you can include a 10000 character description, however only about 160 characters will be selected and displayed as a snippet in the results if you do.)

link – A direct link to the item in your store.  (Double check these for accuracy, this is how the customer gets from Google to you.)
price – The item’s price (Numbers only, you’ll select your currency when setting up your account.)
condition – Only 3 values are accepted here: new, used, and refurbished

The image_link attribute, while not required, is pretty much essential as well. It will be very difficult to compete against other similar products with images if you leave this field out. Link directly to the full image file on your server, Google will resize it for you.

You can view the full list of Google’s other “recommended attributes” here . They’re not indicating that they’d like you to use all of these, they’re suggesting you NOT use any attributes that aren’t on this extensive list.

When your spreadsheet is complete, save a working copy for next time. You’ll need to manually update your feed every time you add or discontinue products, or change prices, and it will be much easier to do that from a spreadsheet than from the .txt feed we are about to convert it into.

To upload to your feed to Google, you’ll now need to save this document as a tab delimited text file. How to do this will depend on which spreadsheet software you are using. When saved correctly, you should end up with a text file that looks something like this:

Uploading Your Feed

Finally, go to your Google Merchant Account and find the feed you’ve registered. In the “Upload Schedule” column you’ll see a link that says “Create Manual upload”. Click it, find your newly created .txt feed on your hard drive and hit “Upload and process this file”. It will take Google some time to process the data. If there are any errors or problems with the feed you’ve added, Google will let you know within an hour so you can correct them. If all’s well, your products will slowly begin appearing in the Google Shopping results over the next couple of days.

IMPORTANT!
Your feed will “expire” in one month. As you are manually uploading your feed, you’ll need to remember to return to your account and re-upload your feed – even if nothing has changed in your product line. If you don’t do this before the feed expires, all your items will be automatically removed from the listings. Google does this to ensure their Shopping results stay “fresh”.

As long as there’s been the internet, there’s been this question – how do I get my website noticed fast online?  Unfortunately there’s really only three answers to it – spend a TON of money, do something excellent and outstanding, or do something shocking, unique, or hilarious.  Whether the last idea is the right step for your business is your call, most business owners are going to shy away from trying to be too outrageous.

So, suppose you do create something that is excellent and outstanding.  What good is it going to do if nobody sees it?  This is the conundrum that’s usually ignored by people proclaiming that “Content Is King”.  Yes, content is IT.  Without it, you’re nothing.  But without eyeballs on your content, it might as well not exist.  (If remarkable content is posted in the forest and nobody is around to…)  Creating great content is not enough – you also need to create a way to get it noticed.

In the video above, Matt Cutts (Google guy) suggests inventing a gadget (?) or being a cartoonist, which are… approaches I hadn’t considered for website promotion.  All joking aside, the point he’s making here is solid.  If you want to get your business noticed quickly, you need to do something beyond what you normally do.  Something that makes your business stand out.  Something nobody else in your niche has to offer.  The answer to this question may be YOU.  If YOU are your business, don’t be afraid to put yourself out there.  Nobody’s suggesting you make a spectacle of yourself, just don’t be reluctant to use your strengths and your personality.

How many sites do you visit every day that you’ve never visited before?  Probably not many.  What compels you to visit new websites when you do?  Look at your answers to that question and start thinking about how that could work for you.

If you maintain a business web site, you owe it to yourself to check this book out. It’s a fantastic non-technical guide to online marketing and search. Vanessa discusses every aspect of search marketing, how search engines work and how web sites can be best optimized to help them do their job. Online market research through search, finding niches, optimization, pay-per-click strategies, designing pages for conversion – it’s all in here. And, it’s all written in understandable, jargon-free language. Yes, SEOs and internet marketers will often pepper articles and conversation with bizarre buzzwords and acronyms that make everything we’re discussing confusing for the layman. There’s none of that here. This book, while certainly not “for dummies”, will help anyone who knows their business and their customers to succeed online.

If you’re looking to hire an SEO company, reading this book ahead of time will put you in a great position to make the right choice. You’ll know what questions to ask and what to expect. You can easily outsource the research and technical implementation confidently if you know and understand the basics of what needs to be done. Plus, your educated input will enable the SEO to better help you accomplish your goal – making conversions.

While the question Google’s Matt Cutts is answering here is about site age (how Google determines website or domain age, and how much that matters) what’s fascinating to me about this clip is something he mentions as an aside.

But let’s cover the question first.  Google determines a site’s age based on when it first crawled it, or when it first found a link to it, not when the domain was purchased.  In typical Google fashion, Matt doesn’t really answer the question about exactly how important a site’s age is, and mentions quality content and links again (Oh Matt!).  He mentions that Google acquired a patent on using historical data in search results 5 years ago, which might lead one to believe site age really matters to them.  Though Google has acquired an awful lot of patents over the years…

Either way, we do know that site age IS an SEO factor.  Having a domain that’s been up and running for 10 years is a definite boon to rankings.  Though not enough to cancel out the big two – lots of good content and quality back links.  Without those, the age of your domain is insignificant.

What particularly interests me is how Matt suggests buying your domain 2 or 3 months ahead of time and putting up a placeholder before putting your website live.  As you can easily buy a domain, upload your already completed site, and find it crawled by Google in a matter of days with no effort on your part, this is peculiar.  It almost seems like a validation of the much disputed “sandbox” for new sites theory that still rears its head from time to time.  This theory being that new websites would be indexed but were unlikely to be ranked for a period of time, which they would spend in a metaphorical “sandbox” created by Google.    Whatever it means, I think we should probably follow his advice on this one.  “2 or 3 months” ahead of time for new domains.

You want a steady stream of organic search traffic, but don’t want to redesign your website, create compelling content, build links, or spend any time social networking. It’s a lot like like losing weight. You want to lose 20lbs, but don’t particularly want to change your diet or devote any time to exercise.

Think about Oprah. When she wants to lose weight she hires a personal trainer and a personal chef. They’re paid to ensure that she works out and eats right. She loses weight, feels great, and then fires them. What does she need them for now? 6 months later, she’s gained weight, is out of shape, and feels lousy.

You looked at your under-performing website and decided to outsource in the same way. You hired an SEO firm, they did extensive keyword research and mapped out a strategy. They consulted on a redesign, which you hired a designer to implement. You paid an SEO copywriter to create or edit content for your site. You consulted with your SEO about link building and and getting your social networking presence underway. It took time but your search engine rankings went way up and your traffic increased dramatically. Your sales increased, your brand was becoming known. You felt great!

The SEO company left. What more do you need them for, right? Things are going so well! Then you stopped doing anything. Gradually, like the pounds creeping on, your website traffic and sales started creeping downwards. Your links started dieing out, your social media accounts went without updates for months on end. “What’s going on?” you think to yourself, “I did SEO. We finished it months ago! What’s wrong?”

You got it – SEO is a lifestyle change for your website.

You need to keep doing it – SEO is never done. Search engine algorithms change, new competitors show up, your business changes. If you have a website, SEO needs to be a priority – always. It needs to be constantly worked at and monitored, or your website will get out of shape.

All it takes to make things difficult for any industry is a few snake oil salesman to show up and start making grandiose claims. As I said in a previous post about the signs of a bad SEO, the SEO companies offering “#1 at Google, Guaranteed!” are this industries snake oilers.

People WANT to believe these claims. The same way they want to believe they can lose 20lbs by Friday. Being #1 on Google for your most coveted keyword would be pretty awesome, right? Thinking that you could pay someone to make that happen for you in a reasonable amount of time seems so easy. Why isn’t everyone doing it?

Unfortunately it’s become part of our job as SEOs to keep pointing this out. To clients, and everyone else. YOU CAN’T GUARANTEE RANKINGS!

So, it’s nice to have this video to point to, and Google’s official written statement on the topic, here.

There are a ton of features included in Advanced Web Ranking that I’ll never use, which seems to be the case with most ranking software available.  I’m not particularly interested in any more keyword research tools, and I certainly don’t need a search engine submission tool.  But, what I’m always looking for is a fast and reliable ranking checker that will create white label reports I can provide to clients who want them. Let’s see if AWR can be that for me!

Setting up a report is simple and straightforward. You pick your engines, enter your keywords and URLs and get started. There are a ton of engines available, including local versions, but for this test run I went with the obvious Google, Yahoo, Bing set-up.

The “import keywords” feature is quite nice, with many options available. I would have also liked a way to simply cut and paste a list into the program, rather than having to make my way through Windows to the location of my text file containing the list I was after, but the “Import From File” option worked as intended.

For our example here, I’ve chosen to run a ranking check for Pandora.com. I’ve added some keywords you’d expect to find them with, and a few more obscure long-tail phrases just to keep things interesting. You can sort and organize your added keywords however you like – adding colours, rating them for importance on a numerical scale, and filtering them as needed.

At this stage you can also set up email and FTP options. You can use Advanced Web Ranking to automatically generate and  email completed reports directly to clients or team members, or have it upload them directly to a server to be viewed online.

Advanced Web Ranking checks your rankings quickly and accurately, as far as I could tell.  It isn’t a resource hog, which is very important.  It went to work quietly and unassumingly in the background, allowing me to go about my day unbothered while it was running.

My favourite thing about Advanced Web Ranking is the abundance of options for looking at, organizing, and presenting your data. You really can have it your way! You can start by taking a look at your data within the software through the many different kinds of “Interactive Reports”.  My favourite is this simple and straightforward “Overview” report, I’ve actually been looking for something this clean and simple for a long time.

But I am a minimalist at heart. If you’d like something more visual, you can access many different styles of charts and graphs – like this one:

You can also take a look at your competitors at a glance through the “Top Sites” tab.

AWR generates great looking reports that you can print, email or upload easily. You can go with a text file or spreadsheet, or make something a little more presentation friendly like an HTML page or PDF. Or all of the above! Generating a report is very simple, a few clicks and it’s ready. HTML reports can be customized to represent your company using XSL transformations, and you can add your own headers and footers as well.

So is Advanced Web Ranking what I’m looking for?  Absolutely.  I wanted a fast and reliable search engine ranking checker that could generate white label (customizable) reports for clients – and that’s what Advanced Web Ranking software is.