A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about SEOing a site on a limited budget and one of the points I made was that the moment a price is mentioned prospective clients seem to get scared away.
Landon found this post thanks to our recent review on ProBlogger and made the suggestion:
It would be interesting to explore what businesses expect SEO is vs. the work that actually goes into it
So… What do clients expect?
I read a post by Samuel from Wake Up Later and he sums this up beautifully with his statement:
you know, the lady who has been thinking about selling dog sweaters online and has a $100 budget for an e-commerce site, 1000 brochures, and a guaranteed #1 Google search result for the words “dog”, “sweater”, and “love”
Some clients have unrealistic expectations simply because they don’t understand two simple things:
- There are over 11.5 billion web pages currently indexed on the net… and the more generic the search term you’d like to rank for, the more competition you’ll have.
- There are over 200 factors that help to determine how a website ranks in each of the various search engines.
Once the points above have been explained, some clients are happy to listen and learn about what needs to be done to achieve their desired results. The ones that get scared away have the following reactions:
- The client begins to understand that making a million dollars online isn’t something that just magically happens without investing a considerable amount of time, effort and money.
- The client goes into denial believing that our views about online marketing are completely incorrect and they go looking for a company that will tell them exactly what they want to hear.
Patrick Burt added a very relevant comment on the original post saying:
Pete, if what the clients are doing is running for the hills at the mention of the price, you need to really sell them the concept before money’s ever discussed.
Whilst I fully agree with Patrick, I think that mentioning price (and potentially scaring some people off) isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It helps weed-out the clients who have unrealistic expectations and allows us to spend more time developing relationships with the clients that do appreciate the amount of work required.
So… What work is actually required?
An overview of some of the most common techniques are listed in the post SEO On A Limited Budget. So you’re probably thinking – Why would I pay someone when I can do a lot of that myself?
If you were to develop an illness – you could look online and find a hundred different articles listing your symptoms suggesting what the illness could possibly be. All this information could be correct under the right circumstances, but without years of study and experience you’d have no way of being able to accurately diagnose the problem. So you’d go to a doctor.
Exactly the same applies to search optimisation and online marketing – every website and every industry is completely different, meaning that different techniques will be more/less effective.
If you’re serious about promoting your website online and achieving your goals, it really does require a professional’s experience and expertise to gain the best and quickest results.
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The other problem is there are so many people in the industry who have very little understanding of SEO and charge their clients for useless services such as submitting a site to 5,000 search engines, or mass submitting to link directories using automated software. It makes it much harder for someone who knows what they are doing to justify their price.
Great blog by the way, I found you guys via ProBlogger and was interested to find more SEO’s near Brisbane.
Thanks Sean… you’re totally right about there being a lot of snake-oil peddlers in the SEO industry.
Half the time it annoys me because of how difficult they make it for legitimate businesses like ours to justify how and what we do… but then I realise we’re probably going to get all their clients in the long-run anyway since they can’t deliver consistent ongoing results.
So it will all work-out well in the end.
Not to mention that so many of them are really incompetent.. I did some research on this a few years back and wrote it up.
I don’t like leaving links in comments where the webmaster doesn’t know me and doesn’t know that I’m not a jerk just trying to spam the comments, so just do a Google Search for “Is There Value in SEO Firms?”
my page with that title will be the first or second result..
Webmaster: if you decide that isn’t spam (it isn’t) and want to put a link here, it might add to the conversation.
Thanks Tony – here’s a link to your post: http://aplawrence.com/foo-web/seo-firms.html
Good reading for anyone interested.
Cheers
Interesting perspective. I’m sure I’ll be tempted to share this with prospective clients.
We found this post @ SEL recap today and look forward to exploring the blog and future posts. Cheers.
Tony, I am not so sure that wasting seo’s time with SPAN is really a good idea. It’s really seems to me that you secretly wish you were an seo with too many clients to even consider a lead such as yours. Personally I think your time might be better spent building something positive for yourself.
If you like genuine seo (which it sounds you do) than proudly state that – spread a positive message that seo need not be tricks and salesmen in word docs, but a genuine professional practice. If you call out all the snake oil, you will only associate yourself with that in peoples minds.
Also content is and always will be Queen to Links
Sorry for my off topic comment. I love the picture you used for this post. I wonder where you found it. It’s a Kinder Surprise toy. I’m an avid Kinder collector and I have these ghosts. Here’s a link to see what I’m talking about: http://www.chokoegg.com/?p=86
Adrian – No probs – I found the pic on Flickr (which is where I get most of the pics I use on the blog).
Hi Pete, thanks for a wonderful discussion on the seo pricing topic. Actually there are various methods for optimizing any particular site. You wrote above “Why would I pay someone when I can do a lot of that myself?” is true to some extent but not for fully optimization, as lot of research work is required which is not easy for the site owners.
Hi Pete.
This posting is very interesting to me too. Our company doesn’t really target large companies because of the time their decision making process takes. And the satisfaction is much higher for us with small to medium businesses.
It is always one of those edge of the cliff moments when you mention prices. It is when you find out if they are serious or not. Our pricing is not high and we consistently have good results and have great references, but the mention of price is always in SEO the defining moment of the sales process and the best trial close.
One way we are trying to swerve this is with performance based pricing. Our clients now have the option to pay a small initial fee followed by payments when their keyphrases come into the top ten. You can see an example on our website.
I would be interested to know what people, and you Pete thought about this model.
Well done to everyone out there who sells SEO. We all know that it can be suuch a value adding service but getting to the decision maker and convincing them is not easy. I have seen many people fail in a few different SEO companies now, so a pat on the back to everyone who makes it work.