Affordable SEO
Posted on | February 19, 2009 | Comments Off
Um, yeah about that. I actually had some people come to me recently and ask if they could do SEO at $1,000 per month. My answer: not really. The reality? There are probably some very nice consultants who will work for that little, but I don’t know what their names are. Perhaps you might be better off getting a pro membership at SEOmoz.org and and doing the SEO yourself.
SEO requires some upfront work and then a long commitment to your website, both financially and in terms of time. Your website has to live and breathe the content, the subject and the traffic it produces in order to truly pull rank. You can’t pull people to a site that doesn’t drive conversions, otherwise you’re just losing money down the drain – and you can’t just put up an attractive website either – Google wants to know that other sites know you too.
So when you’re considering your SEO budget, think about the people hours that go into it – there’s a large, technical aspect of building the site in a way that appeals to Google and Yahoo, the deliberate and creative strategy that should go into place, especially if you’re new or in a competitive industry, and the ongoing offsite SEO campaign, “Where the rubber meets the road” as Boss Lady likes to say.
There are a few companies that work on the model of letting you choose the keywords that you want to rank for (in packages of 5 or 10) and then they just build links like crazy in hope that some of them stick. This strategy only works in the sense that they are sucking away your dollars. Links are not permanent, and sometimes they don’t even count towards your Page Rank. The questions you should be asking yourself are: What do people do when they come to my site from www.wherever.com? Do they buy my widget or do they surf away? Do they fill out a form or get driving directions? Do they hang around the customer services section for hours gettng frustrated? Do they fill up thier wishlist instead of their cart? (we may not be able to help you there . . . . .)
If you absolutely feel that you can’t spend more than $1,500 per month, ask yourself this: How is your outside advertising performing? Is your direct mail campaign going straight to the trash? These mediums have always had very low turnout rates, but consumers are turning to the internet more and more to do research, make purchasing decisions, and even make purchases. The other benefit is that SEO and PPC are trackable – Google Analytics and several other tools make it easy to see what’s working and what’s not, and the internet in turn is flexible enough that we can change our marketing plans even within a day if necessary. So if you’ve got a print campaign that’s draging it’s feel, maybe now is a time to reconsider where you are budgeting your advertising spend.
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—Miss Vapor Trail
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