Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a popular method for internet marketing, but before you begin, how can you determine the value of a campaign or whether SEO company A is better than SEO Company B?
I try and answer the question with some ideas and examples.
Keyword Research
A first thing to look at is is how many keywords you are getting for your bucks. Most companies offer a low number of keywords or search terms, and some offer around 10 on average. This is the first step in determining what SEO Company you will choose.
Get a quote or a proposal from each company you are looking at, and ask them for samples of search terms they would suggest for your site and why they suggest them.
Be wary of a company that recommends all ten keywords round a single ‘main one’. EG going after ‘animal shelter’ and then they recommend animal shelter Melbourne (not so bad), best animal shelter (oh oh), cheap animal shelter (oh oh!), cheapest animal shelter (oh my gosh, ring the warning bells).
While having several search terms related to a theme is a good thing, having long and longer search term phrases is not. Essentially you will be wasting a lot of dollars on this.
Projected Volumes
Related to the above are projected volumes or how much an individual search term is worth. For example, Animal Shelter has an estimated Local Search Volume of 60 500 searches based on Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
Now that does sound good. But estimating how long it will take to get even a page 1 position is difficult. A keyword like that has over 16 million results in Google Searches. That to me says it will take a while. But don’t lose sight of that one.
Animal Shelter Melbourne has 3600 Local Searches. A Much better option as your main search term phrase with under 500 thousand results.
This is the kind of thing to keep an eye on and to analyse when choosing your SEO Company.
The Value of SEO
So, you now have a handful of quotes and proposals from a dozen or so SEO Companies. How do you determine the most valuable option to you?
Look at these four things:
- Suggested Keywords
- Difficulty of those keywords
- Estimated Volumes of those Keywords
- Estimated Timing. I left this off on purpose. This is a difficult thing, but tends to relate to contracts as well. If a company wants to force you into a monthly contract over 12, 18 or 24 months, that is a warning sign. Guarantees are as well. I can estimate, with proper, dedicated work, one can get almost any search term on to page 1 of Google within twelve months. But I will never Guarantee that.
- Price, Contracts, Terms. Read these carefully. Under no way should you agree to a contract. No matter how ‘affordable’ the monthly repayments are. At the same time, don’t expect miracles. Any good SEO specialist knows that the work takes time and should educate their clients on this. As a client be prepared to 3, 6, or even 12 or more months of SEO.
With all this, you can almost estimate the Value of SEO.
If you pay $1000 a month and it takes 6 months for Animal Shelter Melbourne to reach the top 3 on Google, it has cost $6000 (Of course this is rather abstract as there are another ~9 search terms for that price as well) so let us divide that by 10, to get 600$.
If that search term returns 1200 visits a month for it (and anything related to it), then it has cost you only 50c per visit. Again, this is rather Abstract and doesn’t take into account conversions, bookings and the like.
At the end of the day, determining this value is up to you, but most often it can only be done in hindsight and can only be estimated prior to an SEO Campaign.