If you’re trying to figure out how SEO is charged, and how much it’s going to cost you -what you need to understand from the beginning, is there is not necessarily a direct correlation between how much you are paying for SEO, and how much it costs you….

Confused? You soon will be

First of all lets discuss how much SEO consultants & SEO companies are likely to charge you & how they charge:

SEO is a service, it’s not a product - therefore it’s all based on man - or woman - hours.  So your SEO consultant / freelancer / contractor / company / agency,  should work out your SEO costs based on how much time needs to be put in, and what their hourly rate is.

SEO hourly rates can differ hugely. Very generally speaking SEO freelancers / contractors tend to charge in the region of £30 - £75  ($50 - $130) per hour, SEO companies tend to charge somewhere between £50 - £100 per hour. ($85 - $170) but the rates can go much, much higher than this.

In fact, there are SEO consultants & companies out there who charge way over £100 per hour, some over £200 per hour - in fact there are some who charge over £500 per hour for SEO consulting. SEOMoz for example, are well known SEO experts who offer SEO tools which many in the industry utilize, and they use their status within the SEO world to allow them to demand an incredible hourly rate of $1000 per hour!!

Is $1000 per hour a rip off? No, not at all. They’ve been around a long time and as far as I’m aware, their clients who pay this kind of money for their SEO services, keep on coming back to them because of the return they’re getting on that investment.

Which leads us to the next factor - we now have a rough idea of what SEO consultants will charge you - but this isn’t what SEO will cost you….

You see SEO, as with all marketing services, is all about return on investment. The price of SEO can only actually be determined by the return, not what you’re being charged. If you pay £1000 and get a return of £500 - then obviously your SEO has COST you £500 - and this is £500 wasted, because in marketing we’re investing in order to bring about a return.

You may think you’re getting a great deal because you are paying £10 per hour for SEO services, but if you spend £100 per month on SEO, and that £100 does not result in more than £100 back, then your SEO has cost you money - rather than being an investment which has brought you a return. On the other hand, if you invest £3,000 per month on SEO, and you’re seeing a return of £5,000 per month - then you have invested well & you’re seeing a return.

So - don’t just look at what you are paying for SEO, what the hourly rate is - you need to keep in mind that you’re not buying something, you’re investing with a view to gain a return, so how much you are paying isn’t what determines how much SEO will cost you - it’s the return which will determine that.

Your return on investment however, cannot be the sole responsibiliity of your SEO consultant / freelancer / contractor / agency / company - it is their job to generate targeted search engine traffic to your website - but then if your website is not working to convert this traffic into enquiries, sales, bookings - then you’re not going to get a good return on your investment regardless of how great the SEO is which is being carried out on your site.

Personally I offer a sperate service which I recommend my clients have me perform prior to starting SEO activities (if these are clients who’s websites I have not being involved in designing & developing - because if I was, these elements would all already be in place), to go through the website & make suggestions for increasing the ability of the website to convert visits into profits.  I look into the effectiveness of sales copy, the use & effectiveness of calls to action, the inclusion of a list building & marketing system to allow higher conversion rates to be achieved, the use of images, pricing points, product descriptions, ease of use, the ease of making an enquiry - and many other factors which can all have an impact on conversion rates.

So hopefully this gives you a bit of a clearer idea of what people charge for SEO services - and what SEO will cost you, and that basically SEO shouldn’t cost you anything - if your site is working to convert, and if the SEO services being carried out are effective, you should be seeing a return on your investment.

Marketing services which actually COST money - meaning that they have not brought a sufficient return to cover the cost & make a profit, are not helpful to your business.

I’ll just close this by making a suggestion based on what you’ve just read - that you review any marketing methods based on input & return, it can be difficult to know exactly - but try to get as good an idea as possible as to which marketing methods you’re employing are not bringing a return - and weed out ineffective marketing methods.

One marketing method that is in most cases inefficient - is PPC, pay per click, Google Adwords (or Yahoo & Bing, etc) sponsored results.

This maybe a slightly controversial thing to say - but the fact is that the majority of people  paying for PPC advertising, are spending too much per click based on their websites ability to convert traffic into profit. This is a fact which can easily be spotted by using PPC research tools which can tell us how long an advertiser has been investing - and the fact that most businesses after a while come to the conclusion that they’re actually losing money on PPC - and stop investing.

It’s also very easy to explain how this happens. Initially PPC advertising was a lot cheaper than it was today, and in many markets the average cost per click was very low, only pennies. When Google introduced minimum bids - that changed, and many keywords cost in excess of £0.50 per click - there are many search terms which cost £1 per click or more - (in fact I’ve regularly seen  cpc of over £20 - £30 per click!!) - so for most search terms, most websites can not convert at a high enough level to make that pay.

OK, lets even reduce the average & say you’re paying just £0.20 per click on average.

It’s difficult to give an average conversion rate across all industries, but this is thought to be around 0.25 - 1%. This means you need from 100 to 400 visits to make each sale.

So, if you’re achieving at the low end, a 0.25% conversion rate, your cost per sale with PPC advertising, is £80. If you’re achieving at the high end of the average, a 1% conversion, your cost per sale is £20.

So - lets say that you make a profit of £10 per sale - you can easily see how you might easily make a loss with PPC advertising….

Now if we get more realistic & say that average cost per click is £0.50,  based on the average conversion rates your cost per sale are between £50 - £200 - and this is the reason that most businesses are making a loss with PPC marketing.

The first thing many will argue when faced with the above (especially those selling PPC services) is that your conversion rates are much higher. Sometimes this is fair comment - but then your question should be, “exactly what conversion rate is my site getting for PPC traffic?” - you’ll know this if conversion tracking is being used  - so figure out what your conversion rate is exactly, look at the average CPC, and work out whether or not your PPC spend is, or ever can, be profitable. If it isn’t - work out what you can spend per click , maximum, based on your conversion rates & profit per sale, and only focus on search terms which you can sponsor for this cost per click - which will often mean sponsoring long tail terms, exact match only terms - which will mean you’ll get less traffic from PPC, but what is the point on buying traffic if you’re buying it at a loss?

Hope this helps - if you have any questions or you’re interested in my SEO Services then drop me an email

Green light for go - SEO

What is Kev going on about now??

I’m simply sharing my opinion that search engine optimisation (SEO) is safe, but pay per click marketing can be a real money pit.

I’m not suggesting that you can’t lose money with SEO - in fact, there are plenty of firms out there operating a services which have been branded a scam by previous unhappy clients - but what I’m saying is if SEO is done properly, either by yourself, or by a decent & honest SEO consultant or firm, it’s very unlikely to be money down the toilet. The benefits of SEO can last for a long time, if done correctly - PPC on the other hand ,the minute you stop sponsoring keywords - the traffic stops, so it’s a gamble, if it doesn’t pay off, then you have to cut your losses.

The only time I would actually recommend risking losing money on PPC, would be at the beginning of an SEO campaign. If PPC is set up correctly, you can actually get some very valuable keyword data, conversion data in particular. So it’s often not a bad strategy to start off a PPC campaign with a fixed amount of money to play with - with the understanding that this money is being invested in finding out which keywords are the ones that convert - and any money made back on the adwords campaign is just a bonus.

With many markets / niches,  I have no idea how people manage to run successful PPC campaigns, when you work out the cost per click, and the average profit per sale the business is likely to be making, the conversion rates that would be needed to make it pay are often impossible, or at least highly improbable.

If you’re using PPC to gain subscribers, and build up an email list - then you may be able to take the view that you’re investing as long as the list is building - as long as you’re confident that you can successfully then sell to your list over time. But other than this, in most cases I struggle to see how people make PPC pay, and I suspect that in most cases, it’s  not paying, and the advertiser just hasn’t figured out yet that they’re making a loss.

With SEO - as long as you’re focusing on search terms which you can rank highly for in the not to distant future, and you’re not solely targeting very competitive search terms, then it’s likely that you’ll keep benefiting from your SEO for a long time.

This isn’t to say that you can do SEO for a month, and then stop & that’s all that will be required - in fact the chances are if you carry out SEO activities for a month & then stop, it’s unlikely you’ll achieve much. Google expect to see continued efforts over a period of time, an increase in content, an increase in backlinks, in an ongoing manner.

The trick is though, to conduct SEO efforts which are cumulative - for instance, article writing & submissions will keep working for you for some time once you submit them (as long as you’re submitting to the right article networks & directories), creating link bait in the form of well written, interesting & useful web content, is likely to make people within your niche want to link to you - and in general, SEO success breeds more success, as your site gets more of a buzz due to your SEO efforts,  the snowball gets bigger & takes less effort to get it rolling down the hill.

Of course - you could just hire an SEO consultant to do it for you

A question commonly asked on SEO blogs & forums, concerns Dmoz, and whether or not it’s still worth submitting to Dmoz.

[By the way - check out Brad Callen's FREE Directory Submitter]

My opinion, is that yes - it’s still worth submitting to Dmoz. No - Dmoz submission isn’t instant, there’s no fast -track, you need to be patient, but it’s still well worth doing.

What I suggest, is that you put in a carefully done submission, taking care that you’re submitting to the perfect category & that everything is spot on correct with your submission - if it is, then it’s likely to get in one day, may take 3 days, 3 months, 3 years - but it will probably happen. If something it wrong with the submission, or it’s the wrong category, or the site just has no value & looks spammy - it won’t get in. Dmoz editors usually have huge backlogs, they’re not going to bother trying to correct or to let you know about problem submissions.

Once you submit to Dmoz - as long as you’ve taken care with it - just forget about it, and get on with other things, don’t keep checking, you’re likely to get frustrated, as most people find it takes many months to get in to Dmoz, at least.

No one can really tell you exactly how long it’s likely to take for a successful Dmoz submission, it depends on which category & which editor gets your request & how big their queue is.

I think we’ve all heard stories about corruption & back-handers with Dmoz, about some editors being willing to fast track Dmoz submissions in return for cash - but personally I have never experienced this, and I’ve never spoken to anyone who tells me they have experienced this directly - so I’m inclined to believe this is just rumour started by frustrated webmasters

So - that’s my two pence worth anyway - do submit to Dmoz, but do it carefully - and then forget about it.

A common question amongst webmasters, concerns the usefulness of directory submissions.

[By the way - check out Brad Callen's FREE Directory Submitter]

Because most of the free directories also offer paid submissions, and because many  directories are not passing any link juice as a result of having a paid backlinking trail, it would make sense that the free submissions, as well as the paid ones, are often useless in terms of SEO benefits. Google are unlikely to discern paid directory submissions to free ones.

So for this reason, free directory submissions are less valuable than they once were, in terms of SEO benefits.

Does this mean directory submissions aren’t worth the effort?

No - not in my opinion - it just means that directory submissions should be done with attention to the traffic value, that is - you’re submitting to a directory for the direct traffic from that directory - not for the link juice that may or may not be passed on.

With this in mind - directory submission is done slightly differently - in that we’re more likely to take more care to submit to better quality, more relevant categories - if we’re doing it with direct traffic in mind rather than linkjuice.

This isn’t to say that directory submissions will have no SEO benefit - in some cases it will have some benefit at least to some degree - but if you do it with traffic in mind, and only submit to directories you believe will refer targeted traffic, then any SEO benefit is a bonus.

So, look for industry specific directories, and if you’re submitting to more generic directories - make sure you submit to the relevant category - and don’t waste too much time submitting to general interest directories that don’t appear to have much traffic.

As I’m getting quite a lot of SEO questions - I’m creating this post as the place to ask any SEO questions you have.

To ask a question- just do it in the form of a reply. Don’t worry about sounding silly, it doesn’t matter how basic or advanced the question is - ask away & I’ll let you know my thoughts.

Start asking

Google submission, Add URL, Google Submit…. Can’t believe people are still searching for this stuff…

A client told me yesteday that they had “done the Google Add URL stuff” and was still sat twiddling thumbs weeks later, waiting to appear on Google - minutes later I got their website into the Google index - like Magic!

It’s not rocket science - any web marketer reading this will think it’s really obvious - but to many people it’s not, and judging by the amount of people who still try to get their website on Google the old fashioned way, the info out there isn’t all that great.

If you have a website, and you just want it in the Google index fast - email me for more info.

I’m writing this post today in response to a comment made to my blog post titled “Who Cares About Google Pageank?

industrial adhesive Says:

interesting perspective on pagerank. it is considered by many to be the “currency” of the internet due to its far reaching influence. but i do tend to agree with you that it is somewhat overrated. what really should be the measuring stick to a site’s success is the relevant traffic it draws.

I’ve replied briefly to this comment, just to say that PR shouldn’t be seen as currency, as a currency it’s losing value even faster than the pound is at the moment - but I just wanted to delve deeper into why Google pagerank is no longer a currency worth investing in.

Firstly - Google pagerank is NOT ours to buy or sell.

When Google started to show us an indication of link popularity with the toolbar pagerank tool, they weren’t intending this to become currency, encouraging higher PR sites to sell backlinks to anyone willing to pay & thus effectively wreck their system of algorithmically determining the value of a website.

So Google have been working hard to devalue PR as a currency, they do not want PR being used to encourage backlink selling.

As the reply rightly states, the true currency online us TRAFFIC.

If you have a high traffic site, then your site is valuable, traffic IS yours to sell, and you should sell links based on the traffic you’ll pass - this is what Google want, and this is why they state that sold links should be NoFollow.

You may look at backlink from a PR5 website as being worth a lot of cash, due to the amount of currency there in terms of pagerank - but this website may actually be passing nothing at all.

The pagerank may drop significantly at the next PR toolbar update, or it may not - just because it doesn’t drop, doesn’t necessarily mean its still passing PR.

So - I would recommend that you stop looking at pagerank as currency - see traffic as currency, and see the pagerank toolbar as a pretty little decorative green line at the top of your browser if you like looking at it - or better still just get rid of PR from your toolbar.

When looking for backlinks, yes it is worthwhile looking at the PR of potential link sources - but remember that what you’re looking at is our of date, you don’t know if the site is actually passing PR, and if you’re just going for high PR sites & ignoring PR0 PR2 & PR3 sites, you may be actually ignoring PR3 or PR4 sites, because what you’re looking at is out of date info.

So look at a potential backlink source based on relevance & the quality of the site, and the quality & quantity of the backlinks into that site, and the number of outbound links on the page your link is likely to appear  - and focus on the quality of your site so that high quality sites will link to you even without you requesting - but don’t be lead astray by the little green bar!

Cheers

Kev

This is just a quick one..

We all agree that Twitter is a good SEO tool?

For those who’re not sure - I’ll write another longer post shortly about this,  or join my search engine marketing tips newsletter (form over there on the right hand side) but basically, getting your URL into tweets doesn’t have immediate SEO benefit as the links have the NoFollow tag on the tweet, so the search engines ignore it - but, there are a couple of places that these links do actually go to, that don’t have the nofollow attribute, and that do have an SEO benefit.

This is one of the reasons you should make your tweets as good as possible, and the pages / blog posts you’re including in the tweet, as high value as possible, so more people will re-tweet.

Anyway - for now just know that there is an SEO benefit from including your link in the tweet.

But, if TinyURL is used (either automatically, or manually) this SEO benefit will still come, but it will take longer to come - this is because the tinyURL 301 re-directs to your site, so the search engines will pick this up & pass any pagerank that is flowing, to your site - but using a tinyURL it’ll take a bit longer for this to flow - also, if you want to create a brand, you can’t do this using tinyURL, all you’re doing is helping to build someone else’s brand.

So - consider registering a much smaller domain name, and either building a new site on this domain, or 301 re-directing this domain to your longer domain name.

What I’ve just done, is I’ve registered a smaller domain - s-e-o.tv & I’m now using this to link directly to my blog - and as the latest blog is always at the top of the blog, I don’t really need to link to a specific page, just linking to s-e-o.tv will do.

OK - you can still say that there will still be a delay in any flow of link juice through the smaller domain to my main domain, and that’s true in this case as I’m just 301 redirecting it to my blog, but A) I could very easily just build the blog on the smaller domain - and B) even if I don’t do this, using a smaller domain that I own, to re-direct, instead of a tinyURL, means I get the benefit of any branding that is done via my tweets.

That’s all for now folks

Kev

A  flash designer has just replied via twitter to an article I wrote some time ago, to say that the info is 10 years out of date, as flash is fine for search engines.

So, as well as replying to that message via twitter, I thought hmm this guy does have a point, so I’ll write a post about it.

Firstly, it’s not ten years out of date, haha, talk about exaggerating, it was only towards the end of last year that Adobe made a real breakthrough in making flash more SE friendly, and it’s still not perfect, there are still limitations. But I do have to admit, there have been a lot of developments since I wrote the article, so it is slightly out of date.

But having said that - do I think that it’s a good idea to design sites completely  in flash?  No!

Why?

Well - first of all, I went to view the website of the flash designer who sent me the twitter message, and guess what - I can’t view his site….

It tells me it was designed for Flash version 10, and that I need to upgrade to this version to view it.

When you’re searching Google for something, and you get a message that you have to upgrade or download something in order to view a site - do you have the time & patience to do that?

Probably not, you’re just as likely to click the back button & go back to google & find a site that works first time, aren’t you?  It’s certainly what I would do.

And if you get to a site that is completely designed in flash, and you do have the correct flash player to view it - are you going to wait while it downloads?

And then when it downloads, and you find that the navigation is “clunky” a pain to browse, a strain to find what you’re looking for through the OTT flowery design, at some point there’s a good chance that you’re going to get fed up & leave well before you buy anything or sign up for anything, wouldn’t you say?

Not to say that all sites designed with flash are over the top & hard to view - in fact I see some, and I’m just at a loss to why flash had to be used. A client came to me recently with a website with a black background, and a white logo, and some navigation - that’s it, and completely designed in Flash, it had cost him way over the top for such a simple website - he had been told that he was getting a state of the art website because it was designed in flash….

Why? I don’t get it, it looks like a standard text based site, so why design it in flash? weird.

The fact is, it’s still a lot better for lots of reasons, and mainly for user experience, to have the main content text based, not embedded in flash & images.

If a site needs something that flash can provide, then fine, have a flash header designed - having elements of flash to achieve something in specific is fine - but having a site designed completely in flash without any strong reason - I just don’t see the point. Am I missing something?

Please - someone tell me, am I really missing something here? I may be. If you know, if I’m being really stupid here and there is a really strong reason to design a site that could easily be designed without flash - please leave a comment & let me know.

For instance, the website of the flash designer who left the post on twitter correctly advising me that one of my articles was out of date (though over exaggerating on how out of date, 10 years, haha), when I finally managed to get onto it, after faffing about trying to get flash 10 to install on firefox, giving up & reverting back to IE (yuck!) I found a simple website, with a photo of a piece of wood, and his name, phone number & email.

Why build this in flash? I don’t get it. Knowing that a certain number of visitors won’t be able to view the site, - what is the plus of using flash to build a site that could be built in html in 5 mins?

Not putting the site down, it looks fine - but it would look exactly the same in HTML, I can’t see what using flash has brought to the table here - and it’s rare that I do when looking at a flash site.

There’s an obvious negative to using flash, in that a certain percentage of visitors won’t be able to view the site - and usually they cost more to have designed, so what is the benefit of using flash to design a site if there is no specific reason that html wouldn’t do it?

SO i quizzed the guy a bit more, trying to find out what the reason would be, his reason was that you can do a lot of stuff with flash. Yes, I understand that - but why use flash just because you could do a lot of stuff with it, if you’re not using it to do any of this stuff with the site in question?  So - I still don’t have an answer.

So, yes flash is improving in terms of SE friendliness, but I still wouldn’t go out of my way to have a site buit in flash, I would happily use some elements of flash in projects when required, but I wouldn’t have a site completely built in flash unless there was a good reason - and if there was, I would also make sure there was an HTML version of the site for those who don’t have the correct flash player & can’t be bothered messing about upgrading at that particular time.

You’ll more than likely of heard of URL canonicalization, particularly “Google URL canonicalization issue” but what is it, and what do you need to do about it?

It’s a big word used by Americans, they like big words, especially at Google, makes them sound all clever! (well, they are clever, so we’ll let them off)  ;-).

Canonicalization simply means making something canonical, and canonical means (According to the dictionary)  “conforming to accepted principles or standard practice.”

So basically URL canonicalization just means URL standardizing.

The most common requirement for URL canonicalization is with the home page.

For instance you could link from your pages to “site.com” or “www.site.com” or “www.site.com/index.htm” an so on - quite a number of options.

It doesn’t really matter which you choose, what matters is that you standardize, in other words pick one & stick with that consistently throughout your navigation.

You can  301 re-direct the other URL’s to the one you decide to make standard, so that if someone types into their browser “website.com” they’re re-directed to “www.website.com” this is good practise, it’s not crucial though - so don’t be too concerned with it. It’s one of those things that is definately a good idea in theory, and is certainly likely to help rather than hinder - but it’s very unlikely to make any huge difference.

So, if you’re concerned about URL canonicalization, just make sure you pick onr form of URL & stick to that as the standard - and if you want to be sure you pull out all the stops, then also use a 301 re-direct to redirect the other options to the URL that you choose to make the standard.

For more info see the Matt Cutts Blog