Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

I don't think there's a right or wrong answer based on what you've told us. If you have a five-page site and you're selling a couple of basic services, then I'd say $30,000 is a lot of money just for SEO, especially if you're handing the off-page stuff yourself.

However, if you have 1,000 products and you rely on people finding you to make a living, then $30,000 could be cheap.

I think you need to determine what are your goals for this effort, how likely is it that SEO will help you achieve those goals, how much return do you need for this effort to make it worth $30,000, and how likely is it that your vendor can do this for you correctly.

If you thought you'd increase your net income by $500,000 in a year, I'd say $30,000 is peanuts. Would't you?

Remember, you're not paying someone to turn a screw. You're paying them to turn the RIGHT screw. $30,000 could be a ripoff, or it could the bargain of the century.

Share a few more details, you'll get some good response.

You might have 94 pages, but that doesn't mean you have 94 pages that people could realistically use as a doorway to your site.

How many search terms are you going to be gunning for?

Why not take your top 5-10 and perform your SEO magic on those and see if you get any bump at all? Is your service even the kind of thing that people are searching for? Can your service be pulled through the channel by the customer, or is it more often pushed through by you?

Meta tags, keywords, image tags, and page titles (don't forget those)...that's child's play. It's also only a small part of the process. Inbound links are huge, as is the content, internal link structure, and so forth. As you've said, you're already planning on doing most of the importany heavy lifting on your own.

Wait here for a response from Greg at Trininty. He's an SEO expert here and will set you on the right path.

So far, I'm not seeing anything that should be worth $30,000 to you, but I could be wrong.

A $30,000 investment to optimize the site is not unreasonable. On an annualized basis this is $2,500 a month - which is pretty much the industry average for a small to medium websites these days.

It is also important to realize that you are paying an SEO for their knowledge, experience and opinion.

Although you are developing the content, a good SEO will guide you through the process of deciding what type of content and how much content needs to be produced.

For example we provide clients with Latent Semantic Indexing tables that describe the other words and phrases the content should contain to target the main keyword phrase. Doing so not only aids in obtaining high rankings, but it enables you to target all the other keyword combinations and permutations (a.k.a. tail terms).

Without this guidance, you could spend time develop the wrong content that will result in lower traffic, lower lead volume and a higher cost per lead for your site.

Although you are developing the inbound links, a good SEO will guide you the best practices of link development – such as developing the links at a certain rate, associated anchor text, link sources (directories vs. articles vs. blogs), PageRank sculpting, etc.

Without this guidance, you could spend time develop links too fast or too many links from the same source and get banned for the appearance of purchasing links.

A good SEO will research, analyze and recommend changes in your Site Architecture and Page Construction. They will also perform on-page optimization and edit the site accordingly.

They will also address best practices at the web server configuration such as Robots.txt, XML and other Site Maps, and Canonicalization.

While technically SEO is not brain surgery, these and other things are why a $30,000 investment to optimize the site is not unreasonable.

It would be useful to understand what their proposed deliverables are and the tactics they employ. It doesn't sound like they've explained this fully. If they can't do so I suggest that you look elsewhere. Transparency is a key component to trust, receiving good value, and will help you to avoid shady practices.

Without the above information it would be difficult to determine the value of their offering. They may be proposing a great deal or a big ripoff. If you'd like, please contact me-I'd be happy to take a look and help you vet out the offer (with no sales pressure from my end).

As far as what SEO can do for you, I believe the most benefit comes from strategy. A good SEO will help you to determine your best audience and align your offering with their interests, thereby attracting qualified visitors to your site. This is often difficult to do for yourself.

There is also a misconception that SEO is about Meta Tags and Keywords. While those are considerations we typically also work with clients on myriad other factors including but not limited to, and in no particular order, the following:

1. Qualifying traffic
2. Strategy
3. Technology (there is a lot to this one)
4. Conversions
5. Content
6. Exposure
7. Internal Linking
8. URLs
9. Moving and reconfiguring sites
10. Duplicate content issues
11. Link development
12. And hundreds of other on-page and off-page considerations.
13. Code
14. Etc.

The budget for a campaign should be based upon a number of factors:

1. The competition of the online space you wish to occupy (this relates to keywords)
2. The potential ROI. Clearly if your expectations are small then your SEO budget must be as well. Conversely, if there is a lot at stake, then your budget must be higher.
3. The breadth and depth of your offerings.
4. Your budget (this one's kinda important :-)

There are other factors as well but my brain is fading (need snack ;-)

I hope this helps.

-Greg
(Formerly TrinitySEM, now excellira-thank you Paul for your comments)

Your quote is fairly consistent with the quotes that I have seen from past SEO engagements. They tended to be all over the board, but the 30K is at least in line with those that made the most sense to me for a comparable size site.

Two things I would do prior to signing the contract:

1. Learn as much as you can about SEO if you haven't already. You need to be able to speak the language of the SEO vendor in order to do this right. I highly recommend Hubspot's Inbound Marketing University (which covers more than SEO) as well as the content on the MarketingProfs site.

2. Only choose a vendor that you are comfortable will let you learn from them. SEO is an ongoing process. A year from now you may still want to leave it in your vendor's hands, but you shouldn't be completely ignorant of what they are doing. If you aren't comfortable that they can speak your language and respect your "need to understand" then look elsewhere.

I highly recommend outside help for SEO because the rules for search engine optimization seem to change constantly. It helps to have someone who lives and breathes this stuff holding your hand.

Good luck!

Melissa