Search Engine Optimization Billing
January 7, 2012
I saw a graphic which purports to answer the question, “How Much Does SEO Cost?” The guts of the write up is more along the lines of how a client pays for the allegedly high-value, must-have ministrations of SEO experts. Here’s an example:
cost-per-project is the most common pricing model and is offered by 70% of the agencies and consultancies surveyed. A monthly retainer was the second most common cost model offered (60%), followed by hourly rates at 55%.
The big summary of data explains what services the alleged experts offer the clients who pay. The bulk of the work appears to be involved in making recommendations and suggesting key words. Okay, librarians, are you on alert. SEO experts are recommending key words. I wonder if home economics majors, those skilled in political science, and various unemployed high school teachers are trained in indexing? MBAs? Hey, MBAs are born able to manage anything. Key words are a piece of cake. Just look at the indexing of Lehman Brothers’ and BearStearns’ content.
But the big factoid in the write up is the Monthly retainer section. One learns that the fees are in what is “buy a Toyota Camry” range; that is, hundreds a month to $2,501 to $5,000 a month range. The use of blue bars without “real” numbers makes this observation suspect, but I concluded that with advisory services and some key word fiddling, a good salesperson could snag six or seven clients a month. Even at $2,000 per month, the enterprising SEO expert can move up to a baby Lexus.
Project pricing is, it appears, mostly in the $1,500 to $7,000 range. My hunch is that projects drag out over several time chunks. The hourly rate section pegs the experts in the $75 to $150 per hour range. Compared to blue chip consulting work or expert witness work, SEO experts are billing at a rate which probably keeps the lights on and maybe makes it possible to enjoy a holiday each year.
The infographic suggests that making a living as an SEO expert is possible, probably not particularly easy. Worth checking out the chart if you are in the SEO game. No information about the productization of the alleged SEO services. That would be interesting to me.
By the way, the “real cost” of SEO is the friction added to the spending of Bing and Google to deal with the craziness, spoofing, and coding horrors the SEO clan visits on the hapless residents of rural Kentucky. Google’s Matt Cutts has a job because of SEO. SEO costs a great deal of money, and when I consider how relevance has become a thing of the past, SEO has consumed more dough than it has generated for those looking for on point information.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Quote to Note: Perfect Search Engine
December 28, 2011
I find the search engine optimization blogs entertaining and humorous. The writers go through amazing gyrations, often suggesting that “real” SEO pros should tie clicks to money. Yep, great idea. But the theme that causes me to chortle is the message, “Content is king.” Yep, great idea.
Navigate to “Search & Mobile Marketing Trends: SEO Apocalypse 2012”. You will get a shovel full of SEO goodness. But the point of the write up is secondary to this quote to note. The speaker is top Googler Larry Page. He allegedly said:
“The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want,” according to Google CEO Larry Page. Generalized search tactics become even murkier as results become so individualized to time, place, preference, and personal social trends.
Yep, perfection. But what does “perfect” mean? Ad revenue? When SEO fails, there is the life saver of Adwords I believe.
Stephen E Arnold, December 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Good Content Should be Paired with SEO
December 24, 2011
Today, almost everything is accessible through the Web. Therefore, many companies utilize Web advertising in the form of SEO to increase Web traffic to their sites. Read Write Enterprise recently posted a video that addresses the importance of pairing good content with SEO strategies in the post “Google’s Matt Cutts: Good Content Trumps SEO.”
In the video, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam, answers a question about SEO practices and whether “poor” sites with bad SEO are penalized by Google. Cutts states:
Just because somebody dots every i and crosses every “t” and gets all their HTML structure right, doesn’t mean that it’s good content. Even if you do brain-dead stupid things and shoot yourself in the foot, but have good content, we still want to return it. In fact, Google tries to make it so that sites don’t have to do SEO. First and foremost is content, and there’s no bonus for having good SEO.
While Cutts emphasizes that Google wants to reward companies for providing good content, he also makes it clear that to receive the best results, you should work to make that compelling content accessible through SEO. If Google didn’t recognize the importance of SEO, why would they have AdWords?
Jasmine Ashton, December 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Is Kantar Clueless: Online Ad Spending Going Down?
December 21, 2011
Data about ad spending is tricky for me. Those collecting the data can make decisions which may have a significant impact on how the numbers flow. I am suspicious of information from the “real” research firms and well as from outfits which are less familiar to me. Hey, we do data analysis too, and some data are slippery fish.
Against this disclaimer, check out “Kantar Media Reports Paid Search Spend Tumbled in 2011.” I found this passage interesting:
Kantar first observed the drop in spending from financial, legal and medical marketers around the end of the first quarter – and the drop continued right through Q3. Swallen said, “I don’t know if it reflects a variance in ad impressions vs. variance in keyword pricing. I can’t comment which of those two factors is more responsible for the declines, but the decline is primarily coming off those financial services.” Overall, Internet ad spending rose narrowly by 2.8 percent for the first nine months of 2011. Total advertising spending in the U.S. grew modestly from January to September, then slowed to a crawl in the third quarter. Third quarter ad spending was up just .4 percent compared to last year, capping a nine-month period that saw growth of just 1.5 percent. The total amount of ad sending for the first three quarters of 2011 was $104.7 billion.
So no big deal, right?
Wrong. If Google sucks in the easy money, the competition has to up its game. If Google plays hard ball and cuts its prices, there will be some new burger flippers practicing their wrist motion at Burger King.
Assume the numbers are off base. Google gets bigger, and it is quite plausible that it will spend its way to an even stronger market position. Worth watching. Ad spending up or down? We will know more in 2012.
Stephen E Arnold, December 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Why Intuitive Design is Amazing
December 5, 2011
SEO is a buzzword that everyone knows but no one really understands. We all know that good SEO can bring Web traffic to our web sites but its difficult to explain exactly how it all works. I would like to share with you a recent article that attempts to outline not only what SEO is, but why it is necessary for your business.
SitePoint reported this week on the importance of not only incorporating, but prioritizing, search engine optimization (SEO) in the article “Why SEO Comes First”
Throughout the article, writer Alex Mason pontificates on the failures of Web designers and the success of SEO practitioners when it comes to marketing a business successfully.
Mason states:
Web designers are hurting the search marketing industry at the very source. When clients whose understanding is only as good as the person who is telling them think that SEO is what web designers do, we’re at the bottom of a big uphill battle. It’s generally up to the SEO to then clean up the mess and rectify the oversights the developers and clients between themselves have left.” In all the time that Mason spends dissing web designers and ephasizing the importance of keyword research and traffic acquisition, he forgets to mention the most important factor –producing good content. Solely focusing on getting traffic and hoping that information value will just come along for the ride is silly and short sighted. This article is an indication of the sad state of intellectual effort today.
Our view is that “intuitive design” can veer from useful to lipstick on a pig. The notion of content is equally slippery. Gossip may be more valuable to some Web users than more substantive types of information. The loss of precision and recall as ways to measure search signals more than a nuisance for search vendors. The loss makes clear that substance is of less value than Revlon hot pink.
Jasmine Ashton, December 5, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Shop City Alleges Google Discriminates
November 20, 2011
Search Engine Watch has reported on yet another discrimination complaint against Google in the Nov 16, article “ShopCity Files Antitrust Complaint Against Google.” Shop City has filed a complaint with the FTC, claiming that Google pushed its Web sites down to the fifth page of results for searches, despite Shop City’s having created content within the bounds of Google’s guidelines. In addition to this, Google placed its own results, keyed to a map, at the top of the results, regardless of whether those results were legitimately more useful. Shop City CEO Colin Pape said of the investigation:
Our FTC submission has nothing to do with a lawsuit or damages of any kind. We feel that the entire marketplace would benefit from increased transparency from the world’s most powerful company, and this complaint, requesting a formal investigation, is the way to bring that about.
I think we can all agree that transparency is a good thing when multinational corporations are involved. Whether Google’s alleged discrimination was intentional or unintentional remains to be seen. One wonders if these accursers are looking for a scape goat in today’s tough economy. On the other hand, is Google taking steps to ensure that its revenues remain robust as the financial winds buffet other organizations?
Jasmine Ashton, November 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Good Content Wins Fans
November 19, 2011
Suddenly Webmasters are chattering about content. After years of tricks, indexing silliness, and down right misleading search engine optimization games—content is popular again.
With the increased popularity of e-books, and the easily accessible tools of creation, distribution and promotion of web content, there has been speculation regarding how this will affect the quality of content being released.
In the TechDirt article “Good Content Doesn’t Get Buried By Bad Content” we learned:
We have no doubt that much new content being produced is, in fact, pretty bad. I’ve never quite understood the argument, though, that bad content harms good content. You just have to ignore the bad content and follow the good content. What that means is that the world just needs good filters, and we keep seeing more and more of those showing up every day.
The write up asserts that, with sites like Amazon, fans are able to show their support for the good books that they love by writing reviews. This helps separate the good content from the bad.
There will always be skeptics out there challenging technological innovations. I would argue that while it may be easier to make your content available for public consumption than in years past, bad content won’t win over the fan base needed to make an impact.
Jasmine Ashton, November 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Funnelback 11 Released With New and Improved Features
November 12, 2011
Funnelback , a website and enterprise search provider, launched version 11 of its product on October 1st of this year. Funnelback 11 is available on Windows and Linux and also as a cloud service and has an automated tuning engine and search-driven SEO assistant capabilities.
Funnelback 11 also has new features like updatable indexes, efficient crawling, 64-bit indexing and a new high performance search interface.
According to the Funnelback news release “Funnelback 11 Launched with Automated Tuning and SEO Assistant”; Managing Director Brett Matson said of the product:
“Funnelback 11 has the ability to continually and automatically optimise its ranking using a correct answer set determined by the customer. This enables customers to intuitively adjust the search engine ranking algorithm to ensure it continuously adapts and is optimised to the ever-changing characteristics of their own information environment. A related benefit is that it exposes how effectively the search engine is ranking,”
Regardless of the high praise that Funnelback is giving itself, our take on Funnelback 11, and this release in particular, is that its an annoying display content and that maybe they are trying a bit too hard to impress.
Jasmine Ashton, November 12, 2011
Keyword Research – An Interesting Approach
October 15, 2011
Search Engine Watch offers a non-traditional examination of search engine ranking in, “Keyword Research: Dealing With Uncertainty.” The author lays out a plan for researching which keywords will return the highest ROI for search engine ranking.
The method is explained:
When selecting the keywords you would like to rank for, you must take several factors into account. Preferably you’re able to calculate its potential ROI by finding out what effort is required for a return in profit. There are, however, various uncertainties that you can choose to minimize.
Quite frankly the article is quite lengthy and the illustrations are somewhat incomprehensible. Perhaps we are not smart enough to understand the point here. But for those who live and die by SEO, the innovative approach might be worth a second look.
Emily Rae Aldridge, October 15, 2011
Beating the Panda Once More
October 14, 2011
I wrote a blog post in 2009 that offered up some of my own suggested guidelines for Google in handling reconsideration requests. I’m still convinced this could work:The penalized Webmaster fully and truthfully completes a reconsideration request Wizard, which walks you through the Google webmaster guidelines & identifies compliance issues.
- Google immediately acknowledges receipt of the request and has 10 business days to respond.
- The response, at minimum, informs the webmaster what areas of his site do not conform to the guidelines and what penalty has been assessed.
- Google informs the webmaster that his penalty will be removed within X days/weeks/months after coming into compliance.
Is that really too much to ask? I don’t think so.
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