Comments on: The Cost of SEO: How Much Should You Pay?

By: Web Design Brisbane

Web Design Brisbane — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 02:11:50 +0000

I completely agree with your article. One of the hardest things with the industry is educating clients on the work that’s involved in creating good long term results in SEO. I will be directing my digital marketing clients to this article.

By: Dennis Miedema

Dennis Miedema — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:08:25 +0000

Hey Bruce, great post! I’d like to give my two cents here in terms of how companies should shop for SEO.

Important to know: be careful with what the payment method you’re looking for easily leads to. Examples:

– Pay for results (per top ranking, per keyword, etc.): this easily invites companies to do black hat SEO so you’re #1 for a couple weeks at best, you pay in the mean time, and then your rankings evaporate or worse: you’re banned.

– Pay per hour: invites inefficiency, after all, why do it fast when you get paid more for doing it the slow way?

In my experience it’s thus best to go with paying for a project with predetermined goals (example: SEO review, make a custom 404 page, etc.)

By: Mark Asciak

Mark Asciak — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 23:53:43 +0000

Great article Bruce, I wish this information was common knowledge for those out there engaging in SEO. These days I strictly work with larger organizations but always found it hard to help smaller guys understand what it is they’re buying, how it works, dodgy guarantees etc. etc.

By: David Daly

David Daly — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 21:15:02 +0000

Exactly! If SEO companies don’t even rank highly for their own chosen keywords that should ring alarm bells. Also teams of people from India might not necessarily be the best option. One immediate difficulty they face is bit just language but culture. What might be acceptable to some (an idea, phrasing, etc) may not be acceptable to others. Very good post in outlining the difficulties in SEO in showing its bit a simple service.

By: barry Sanchez

barry Sanchez — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:03:23 +0000

Great post, we have a couple of options available for our clients, we look at local SEO, which basically has fixed costs per keyword + Area (we liken this to the cost of advertising monthly is a local magazine but we are able to quantify ROI as monitoring ROI in a “local” magazine is difficult for most unless you have a unique code/phone number etc) then we undertake individual SEO projects, with the core aim of generating ROI, for example if we optimised the word “golf clubs” we would theorize on how many additional sales we believe we could achieve and this features as one of the many factors in our SEO prices.

By: Paul Madden

Paul Madden — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 08:35:32 +0000

I promise top rankings, it helps me get the business and if I dont, then I’ll blame Googles algo :) – Just being honest here!

By: Joe Bailey

Joe Bailey — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 06:19:48 +0000

Insightful. I also agree that the localization of companies on the Internet will mean that local place searches will become stronger and stronger and that competition will become more niche whilst still adding value to the consumer.

By: Suthnautr

Suthnautr — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 04:55:36 +0000

I mostly agree except for the low margin make it up in volume angle at the end. There’s just too much work on any client’s site that needs to be done right taking up so much time that simply adding more will force a reduction in SEO quality, and building a reputation without meticulous attention to quality first won’t fool people for long.