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Mango Himself
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SEO cost Urgent help required - 11/30/2006 12:05:59
Hi everyone
I need your help on the following:
I mentioned to a customer that SEO can be expensive. He asked me to 'define expensive'. How would you do it in few words? I am meeting withhin in a few hours and will detail more thoroughly the expenses involved but he needs some kind of an answer to his question before the meeting so he may go to his boss and brief him on it.
How would you define 'expensive' in few words? Meaning, what would the major expenses incurred be? Manpower? Monitoring? SE payment?
thanks for your help
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Mango Himself
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RE: SEO cost Urgent help required - 11/30/2006 12:28:59
My dear, if it were easy, I wouldn't be posting it here! LOL
Thanks, I'll look into it. You see, basically, I can detail all info if I am vis a vis but trying to define it in a few words, that's where it gets tricky!
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jaybee
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RE: SEO cost Urgent help required - 11/30/2006 12:35:30
Well there's a paragraph on his page that should summarise nicely, it also gets you out of having to quote there and then as it all depends on the outcome of your analysis. 
quote:
Typically before I can have a firm idea of what remedial SEO work might be needed on a site, I have to run tests. This uses my time and my resources. Once I've run through the tests I'm able to identify problems holding your site back in the ranks and advise on appropriate solutions. I will check variously for issues with areas like navigation, inbound links, outbound links, domain provenance, server check, spider test, doc-type tags, title tags, meta tags, charset, H tags, text content, internal linking strategy, validation, robots.txt, site map, canonical issues, Google sitemaps and last but not least, spamming.
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Reflect
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RE: SEO cost Urgent help required - 11/30/2006 14:15:08
It all depends on who you hire.
One company might do a whole site for $500.00. Others won't even answer teh phone for less than a $2000.00 commitment with a monthly fee that is mandated for followup/monitoring.
It comes down to thier budget and who you know.
Manpower is the major cost hands down. Next would be advertising budget for links pointiing back to the site from other content sites. Also in that would be directory inclusion fees, such as, for example joeant.com.
You can also take the fast route of PPC which again all comes down to how much of a monthly budget they want to lay out. I was talking with an affiliate person who is sort of mentoring me. She stated on one site she pulled in around 4K last month. However when diging out the details from her she sepnt around $1800.00 in PPC to promote the site. ROI: $2200.00.
Not really an answer but thats the way I see it.
Take care,
Brian
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Mango Himself
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RE: SEO cost Urgent help required - 11/30/2006 14:47:11
Hi Brian
I appreciate your help very much. Indeed, it is really subjective when it comes to SEO. I rather not get involved but it is a good client and I want to help him. My experience, however has taught me not to get involved in that field unless I am dealing with a very intelligent customer. It's not worth the 2,000-3,000 dollars I may make in exchange for 20 calls daily from an angry customer who expects immediate success.
I don't know if I really want to get into it again. I can do it in a way that the "Republic Of Ireland" is inviting, yet, the pressure is too much.
Jaybee
Actually, ROI is an acronym for Really Outstanding Idiocy (by customers)
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Mojo
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RE: SEO cost Urgent help required - 11/30/2006 15:29:24
quote:
It's not worth the 2,000-3,000 dollars I may make in exchange for 20 calls daily from an angry customer who expects immediate success.
That is an excellent point. One of the first things you need to do with potential SEO Clients is to control expectations. Speak to them openly and try to avoid industry terms. SERPs means nothing to 99.999% of the population. Give them examples of what has happened historically to make SEO a dangerous prospect if it is gone about the wrong way and also to show how the search engines change the rules continually.
A $500 SEO job is more than likely a 10 page or less report containing details about what the client can do to their site to help to increase ranking. It will likely be heavy "textbook" SEO and some competitive intelligence. Don't expect any SEO to give out anything that most people would think of as a trick or secret. When those tricks hit the open market the search engines shut them down quickly.
Offsite SEO (where the real work is at) can cost $1000 + per month.
Retainers start at $1500 to $3000 per month for most SEO professionals (for big names is will be 2 to 3 times that amount). With this you should be getting both on-site SEO advice and off-site help. Most SEO professionals that have montly retainers will also be involved in ROI or Conversion Rate testing using anything from gut feel (experience) to trackable Split Testing.
The biggest problems that I have with retained clients are scope creep, indecision and clients that don't want to follow instructions because they "think" they know what works.
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Mango Himself
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RE: SEO cost Urgent help required - 11/30/2006 18:07:40
Mojo
you hit it right on the nail!
Educating the customer is key! I also talk to them in layman's terms otherwise the message goes unheard. I don't kill their expectations but I curb them. Usually, I'll let them know that the criteria SEs utilize is everchanging. It requires close monitoring from an expert in the area.
A few days ago, a customer whose SEO I provide, called me to tell me his IT/hardware guy said he could do a better job. I wished him luck and told him I will no longer work with him. Idiocy is something that I have no patience for.
I hope I can convey the message loud and clear to my client since I don't want to invite trouble, no matter how much money they are willing to pay.
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