Category Archives: SEO

 
22May

Why I think outsourcing SEO is pointless

If you work in the SEO industry I think it is safe to assume that you will of received at least 1 or 2 offers to outsource your work to other SEO companies. Most of the time these companies are offshore based work claiming they can reduce your costs due to the lower wages/cost of living in these countries. A lot of the companies will also be UK (or US) based and they then outsource the work themselves to these cheaper countries.

I actually have an old work mate that works for one of these UK based companies that white labels the SEO services and he is constantly offering me his services when he finds out how busy I am and that I am turning away work. Now the problems I have with outsourcing my work are:

  1. When outsourcing things like web design or programming you will likely pay a deposit or use escrow services. When the work is complete you will receive the code/design one final payment. If you don’t like it you complain and try and get it fixed or whatever, worst case scenario you drop that person/company lose a bit of money and find another person to do the work for you. With SEO this is not so easy, the SEO needs to work directly on the site straight away it is not really possible to do the SEO else where then transfer it over to the site (though I guess you could do a 301). You most likely will pay monthly and if after 6 months you don’t have the results you wanted well tough shit really. Some companies will even offer guaranteed rankings but this is just bullshit, you will either get obscure rankings that provide no return on investment or they just won’t get them. Then there is the worst case scenario, the company actually gets your clients site banned from Google. Now this is bad news for anyone but if you are an SEO company the methods you practice get client sites banned from Google it can be a fatal blow. The client is not going to stick around and you are running the risk of some serious reputation issues.
  2. Can I really trust an SEO company that can seemingly take on infinite amounts of work, and not just from me but all the other companies that must deal with? The SEO industry is booming, as far as I can tell a lot if not most good SEOs are turning away work because the demand is outstripping the supply. There was a 29.8% growth in SEM during 2007 in the US with spending reaching $12.2 Billion. So it makes me wonder how these white label/outsourcing companies can take on so much work? Surely if they were so good they would have to much work on? I don’t know about everyone else but getting a member of staff that really knows how to do SEO well is quite difficult therefore it leads me to believe these outsourcing companies churn out very low quality SEO work that requires little skill to do.
  3. More a follow on tot he above point but why do they need to take on other SEOs work? If they can do the SEO themselves surely it would be more profitable to have their own web site and develop their own brand rather than let other companies take the glory for their SEO work?

The only areas of SEO that I would say are worth outsourcing are the low skill time consuming things such as directory submissions or anything coding related. However directory submissions are typically crap so there is little point even doing that.

20May

A successful 301 redirect to fix other peoples mistakes

As always I won’t mention names as I do not want to upset anyway.

Anyway when I first got my own SEO company it was more me just taking over an existing company as no-one else could do the job. It was actually a more web design orientated company that also did SEO. Unfortunately the other web designers f**ked off to set up a new company. At the time I thought I was quite lucky I had avoided the situations of starting out completely fresh and I had a residual income from the remaining clients. However what I did not realise was all the f**cking mistakes I had to fix because the old people were incompetent. Looking back in hindsight it probably would of been better to start a fresh company.

Anyway one of the mistakes I had to fix was done by using a 301 redirect. Now I know ever SEO in the world knows about them but at the time I had never actually implemented 301s for more than a couple of pages here and there.

The problem I faced was the old designers had won a web design contract for a company which I will use Yossarian Designs for an example. Now Yossarian Designs already had a domain called YossarianDesigns.co.uk which worked with exchange etc and all the branding was for that domain. Somewhere along the line either the old designers or the IT people at Yossarian Designs decided they could not host the site on YossarianDesigns.co.uk because it would require transfering the domain and them breaking the exchange email.

Instead they put the site on Yossarian-Designs.co.uk and YossarianDesigns.co.uk mirrored the hyphen version. Now this unfortunately led to both domains being in Google’s index with exactly the same content so when the site started to become a little more popular it was smacked down with a penalty for dupe content.

After an hour or so of panicking I contacted the company explaining the situation. I told them they either had to host the site on YossarianDesigns.co.uk ont heir own servers or they could change the A Record to my servers. Surprisingly they changed the A Record with no problem. I say surprisingly because at the time I assumed it would be an idiot IT department that cause all this problem by no having a clue what an A Record was. It turns out it must of been the old designers who had no clue about it!

The other little problem I had was the site was developed in ASP and therefore on a shared IIS server, and some of the pages were in HTML. So I couldn’t actually 301 each individual page as I had a problem with the HTML pages so I had to change the whole sever over to Apache and then use the htaccess to 301 the pages for me using the following code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.YossarianDesigns.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

I am not really a htaccess geek so I was quite happy when it all started to work. I was even happier when a week later the original rankings (before the penalty) were transferred over to the YossarianDesigns.co.uk so overall I was quite happy with the result. It was just a shame that it had to happen in the first place.

19May

How much should an SEO charge / cost?

After my bitch about cheap SEOs I thought I should follow up with a post on how much SEOs should charge. Not that I actually have an answer to this as I find the cost of a decent SEO can vary dramatically depending on the situation.

I guess the correct answer should be it is not what the SEO charges but the ROI the client sees. Unfortunately that doesn’t really help answer the question unless work for a profit share rather than hourly/daily rates.

From my experience I have see clients expect to pay a one of fee of £200 and want to rank for hundred of generic competitive terms. I have also had clients happy to pay £1-2k per month and I strangely suspect they would of been happier to go much higher. Obviously the first example is just ridiculous and the client is either seriously tight fisted or completely mis-informed about SEO. If I could rank a site for hundred of competitive terms for that price I wouldn’t work for clients and just run hundred of my own sites out of my luxury New York penthouse. On the other hand it is quite easy to screw yourself out of good money by undercharging in order to guarantee work.

I also find by under charging you run the risk of sabotaging your own work. If you have 20 days worth of clients and you are undercharging it is very tempting to charge them the same, do less work per month on them, and maybe even take shortcuts so you can take on more clients. This can then lead to the client site not performing as well as it should or worse case scenario you take a shortcut and get penalised by Google.

Unfortunately for newer or smaller SEO companies it can be hard to win clients if you charge a bit too much. Companies like BigMouth probably can charge whatever they want as they have built that reputation and brand. However if I created Yossarian the amazing SEO company Ltd and quote £1k a month to a client and they then get a quote for £150 a month from a cheap (shit) SEO it is quite likely they will go with the cheaper SEO.

Randfish from SEOMOZ did the most thorough post of pricing that I could find. He created the following table to summarise some example prices:

Service

Low End

Mid Range

High End
Site Review + Consulting $500 $2,500 $10,000
Hands-On Editing of Pages/Code $2,000 $10,000 $50,000
Manual Link Building Campaign $500 $5,000 $20,000
1-Day SEO Training Seminar $750 $4,000 $12,000
Keyword Research Package $100 $500 $2,000
Viral Content Development + Mktg $1,000 $7,500 $20,000
Web Design, Development + Mktg $5,000 $25,000 $100K+
Monthly Retainer for Ongoing SEO $2,500 $7,500 $20,000+

Personally I think these prices look a bit expensive for the UK market and I think they may represent the more mature American market. It also largely depends on the exact work done. A monthly retainer on $7,500 is probably steep if you only do 2 working days per month, however if that represent 10 days work they it is probably very cheap.

The other influencing factor I have found with SEO is the your company itself. When I was a one man band charging £300-400 a day was ok as I had little outgoings and only myself to pay. When you take on staff, get an office, advertising etc the prices go up dramatically. The biggest factor of increased outgoings are staff and more importantly the members of staff that are required to run the business but don’t actually do the SEO or Web design that is being charged for. So if you have a sales team / account managers / secretaries etc they can make a large impact on what you NEED to charge to survive and without them you wouldn’t land new clients or the company would just fall apart from being so un-organized.

Another problem with undercharging / cheap SEO services is that I don’t see how it is a sustainable business model. Yes ok you can charge £100 a month and outsource that work to some Indian, but in order to earn a decent wage you need dozens if not hundreds of clients and I assume the retention ratio of clients must be poor so you need to be finding clients all the time! You then end up spending more money on sales people to cold call companies trying to win new clients all the time. Surely it is better to charge £500+ a day and keep the client numbers down and perform a good job on them all? I would say 90-95% of the clients I have worked on stay on an SEO campaign for at least 6 months. The other 5-10% tend to be idiots that pay for the first month then cancel the service or just cancel their cheque’s in some cases. So therefore to maintain the current turnover I would say we would need to sign a couple of new clients a month at the very most, and I doubt we would even need to do that as I have not seen our growth level out yet.

So anyway what does everyone else charge? I personally have risen my day rates from around £500 to somewhere between £600-800. Not actually decided the specifics again, and it does vary depending what actually needs to be done per month.

19May

Web Design Companies Offering Cheap / Self SEO

I think this is a pet peeve that a lot of proper SEO companies will agree with, and that is Web Design companies that try and offer SEO services when they clearly do not know what they are doing. I have noticed quite a few times that they either offer it considerably cheaper than what I would charge or even claim that you can do it yourself.

Now before anyone bitches at me, obviously you can do SEO yourself, it is not some mysterious skill that only a select few can master. In fact if you are in a non competitive niche and you are competent with computers it might be worth you doing the SEO yourself. However the example of self SEO I am talking about here is a company that basically installed a script onto the clients web-site that allows them to add articles to the site. The articles then use a keyword rich URL with the keyword in the title and a link to the article is placed in the site-map. The company in question then charge a monthly fee for this.

The first problem I have here is the fact that there was a monthly fee for a script that probably took a few hours to write, surely it should be a one off charge? Secondly while it is good to have lots of new content on your site I do not think placing the links in the site-map is ideal, if anything it looks a little spammy, especially as the example I found included articles ripped off from places like Wikipedia. The client clearly has not been informed correctly about SEO, as far as I am aware there was no link building taking place and with the duplicate content the client could be landed with penalties at any time.

The other type of service is cheap SEO. I have noticed this become more and more common especially with companies that use outsourced services. I have no doubt that there are some brilliant SEOs based in India or Peru or wherever but I am sure the ones that are good probably can get away with charging similar prices to their western counterparts. Most of the time I find these cheap services rely on directory submissions and poor quality article syndication.

One example I found was a UK company advertising the fact they use non UK based SEOs and because of this they could offer their services at a much cheaper rate than a UK SEO. For a few hundred a month you could have an SEO working several days a month on the site.

Looking into some of their clients that appear to of been with their services for at least a few months I found:

  1. 0 onsite optimisation had been done
  2. Between a few hundred and a few thousand low quality directory links.

Considering a few months SEO must cost £500+ that does not seem like very cheap SEO. I could skip the middle man and get someone from Digital Point or any other SEO forum to submit a site to 1000s of directories for a anything between $50-200. That is quite a bloody impressive markup!

The other problem with these types of SEO services is that they all claim great success when in fact the results they achieve are poor at best. Getting a website for obscure long tail search terms like “Small business networking services hull” is not going to get any traffic, so the few hundred spent on these cheap SEOs has been completely worthless.

Unfortunately there is little point in educating SEOs about this problem as we already know about it. It is trying to educate the clients about it and unfortunately until they experience a bad SEO they have a tendency to go with the cheapest SEO available, which in turn makes them suspicious of SEOs in the future and gives the SEO industry and bad rep!

16May

SEOs that can’t code

Ok I am already doing a little rant post even before I have bothered to change the theme of my blog, install any plug-ins or just do anything in general.

This morning I had a phone call off an old acquaintance that I did the occasional bit of work for but because of work commitments I could never handle the work he wanted doing. Since then he has been to 2 other SEOs and both times he has come back asking for advice on problems.

The main problem is that the web-site is made in ASP.NET and according to him he cant find an SEO that does ASP.NET. Now, I realise ASP and .NET are not always the most search engine friendly of languages due to you not being able to use the ever so handy mod_rewrite. I also understand that you can’t expect an SEO to be a programming genius in multiple languages. Hell I am not even an expert in ANY language (even my native English!) but I am sorry if you are going to try and pass yourself off as an SEO you need to be able to have a grasp of programming.

Ok, now I realise there are some people lucky enough to specialise in a specific area because they are very good, and therefore it is probably acceptable to not know how to do things not in your niche. However for a generic SEO consultant I do think you need to be a bit of jack of all trades and if you can code in one language and have a basic grasp of programming in general you should be able to transfer them skills to other languages. I am not talking about coding a site from the ground up either. The examples from this acquaintance included:

  • The SEO creating flat HTM pages but then leaving server side code at the language declaration and imports at the top of the page!
  • The SEO not being able to turn a dynamically generated product name into a link to that product even though the was already there but for a “Read More” button
  • The SEO not being able to dynamically change the title of the page based on the product / category.

I am sorry but the above 3 issues should be easy to handle, ANYONE that deals with HTML etc should know the difference between HTML and server side code. With the 2 programming issues above the code is nearly always already there for you, you just need to alter it a little!

I am personally weaker at PHP. I know it is shocking. As we are all probably aware PHP is very popular and therefore I have to frequently change code in it, yes it probably takes me longer as I sometimes have to look up guides on the net or experiment with the code but it is not impossible and I think most/every SEO should be able to dabble with any code when necessary!