A flat monthly fee for SEO

[TimeAssistant]

I need help with SEO.

I am looking to get SEO carried out on the website, and I have seen a company that looks fairly good. They are advertising a flat rate monthly fee. However what I am unsure about is how they can offer this when they don't know:

What my website is, and the amount of keywords.
The competitiveness of my keywords
Or the amount of keywords.

To me this seems a bit strange. Is this normal practice, surely company's should provide you with an individual quote based on your website / needs.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Alan

 

[RadiusBPO]

The advertised monthly rates are normally the minimum monthly rates. If you get in touch with them I am sure they will be able to give a more detailed proposal and price.

 

[TimeAssistant]

I did contact them, and was advised the price is based on 3 keywords per page.

I still think this is strange, if I had a 1000 page website the price would stay the same as a 3 page site.

Or am I wrong?

 

[RadiusBPO]

To be honest, most low price fixed fee monthly packages just involve analytics being set up and then maybe 20 directory submissions per month. They are just desperate for your money so will say anything to get it.

You are right though, you'd expect a campaign targeting 1000 keywords to be worth more than one targeting 3.

 

[RedEvo]

Trust your own judgement. You've already answered your own question.

d

 

[odihost]

They probably do monthly work but does not care about the result. Do they guarantee any result or any target?

 

[Esk247]

Seems dodgy as hell to me. How they get customers i have no idea..where they recommended by someone? or just found on Google?

 

[TimeAssistant]

No recommendation...... I was just doing a random google search and found there website.

So what would you recommend, in terms of pricing?

If I see standard prices on websites these are unreliable company's? Is the best way always to provide an individual quotation, based on my website and keywords?

 

[FreelanceSoftwareDeveloper]

If I see standard prices on websites these are unreliable company's? Is the best way always to provide an individual quotation, based on my website and keywords?

Not at all, many reputable companies offer fixed price packages, I plan to do the same.

What is important is to be clear about what you are getting for the money. Go back to them and ask them the questions regarding what they supply in each package.

 

[gemd89]

Whats the company called? Maybe we can take a look.

Its always better to contact some companies, give them details of what you have done so far, what you aim to achieve from SEO, which services you need and what keywords you want to target, then im sure they will give you a specific quote.

I wanted to rank for the competitive word p*arty s*upplies and used a company that gave me a tailor made quote and im ecstatic with the results they have achieved in a small time. I think with SEO it has to be tailored to your business, i wouldnt think there is one solution for all.

Gemma

 

[dubOnline]

The best person to optimise your website is you.

Yes seo firms can go and make sure your onsite SEO is good but when the dust settles it all comes down to back links.

The best way of getting good back links is writing quality content that is well optimised and links back to your site.

The best trick is to concentrate the page rank flow - so two links to one article that links to you is better then 2 links direct to you (depending on their PR of course)

All you need to do is make sure your onsite is good - then you need to build a quality 'network' of sites using social media and web 2 ready to place content on. The better the content the more links - the more links the more PR is passed to your main website and the more traffic and higher you go in the SERPS.

Over time if you focus on generating good content placed in the right places you will create an actual asset to your company. If you simply pay other people to just build links for you, you are throwing money down the drain and risking your entire business.

You wont beat google - google simply want to display the most relevant result at the top of the serps - become the most relevant.

Look in to aggressive white hat techniques - thats what I help my clients with.

 

[thetime22]

I'm not a fan of this type of SEO.. Give them clear goals.. eg how much for 100 pr5+ backlinks? How much for 100 article submissions etc. Try to learn what it is exactly that they will be doing, and ask for reports to prove what they have done.

 

[RedEvo]

I'm not a fan of this type of SEO.. Give them clear goals.. eg how much for 100 pr5+ backlinks? How much for 100 article submissions etc. Try to learn what it is exactly that they will be doing, and ask for reports to prove what they have done.

A good plan but only if you are hiring SEO monkey see monkey doos.

d

 

[SamRidd]

It depends if they garuantee a result within a certain period of time.

If not they will continually keep building on your site regardless of the competition you are trying to rank for until they secure the top spot. Obviously depending on the keyword this could take 48hours, 1 week, 1month or over a year.

Find a company that looks legitimate, ask their support a few questions and if you like the answers (if they are reasonably quick to reply aswell) then consider using their service.

 

[quikshop]

A good plan but only if you are hiring SEO monkey see monkey doos.

Nothing like well reasoned debate Red

Only those with a vested interest would suggest that a fixed-price SEO service is a con or inferior.

I used to offer a fixed price monthly SEO service with no tie-in period. It guaranteed nn number of hours a month with a clear plan and visibility following an initial assessment on the actions required and taken for a particular website.

It proved very popular and produced some excellent results for those who persisted with the service long enough to benefit from a longer period of service.

To the OP; just make sure what it is you would be buying into and agree on deliverables from the outset, and ignore the nay-sayers, they are all playing their own angle

 

[backlinkshub]

Be careful because most of the SEO companies are providing the black Hat SEO services so first of all enquire all about that company & after that Place an Order .

 

[RedEvo]

Nothing like well reasoned debate Red

Not sure I follow you. The point I was making was if you hire an SEO company and tell them what to do......

Give them clear goals.. eg how much for 100 pr5+ backlinks? How much for 100 article submissions etc

then you only need to hire monkeys. If we were approached by someone looking for x links for y pounds or x articles for y pounds we would point them in the direction of India or a company in the UK who outsource to India.

IMHO good SEO firms work with companies who want to do more business on-line, not companies who want to buy a set number of links/articles.

It's just a point of view

d

 

[SEO Lady]

I need help with SEO.

I am looking to get SEO carried out on the website, and I have seen a company that looks fairly good. They are advertising a flat rate monthly fee. However what I am unsure about is how they can offer this when they don't know:

What my website is, and the amount of keywords.
The competitiveness of my keywords
Or the amount of keywords.

To me this seems a bit strange. Is this normal practice, surely company's should provide you with an individual quote based on your website / needs.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Alan

Is this a flat fee for 'Google page 1 for your selected keywords guaranteed' in which case this is Adwords

 

[marketingquotes]

Hi Alan,

We also have seen this; whereby companies will offer a flat fee for SEO.

What normally happens, is that 'most' companies tent to be in markets that are semi competitive - and therefore little work is involved to get them up on search engines. However some companies are in very competitive industries and a lot of time and work is needed.

A good option would be to compare quotes from a few different agencies (which would be based on your industry, keywords, number of target keywords etc. - then you can choose which one you like the best (based on their experience, presentation price etc.).

Have you tried getting quotes?

Regards,

Marketing Quotes Support.

 

[I, Brian]

The best person to optimise your website is you.

Not really - a specialist in any field will usually do far better than one who is not.

A key lesson in developing a business is learning to delegate work to specialists in each required field.

The difficulty is always finding the specialists you can rely and trust your business with. It takes time, you can get burned (in any business sector), but once you find your partners, your business can and will run a lot smoother.

 

[Matthewb2]

If you run and own your own website good seo is just a matter of research and common sense. Try joining Google webmasters forums and get the lowdown

 

[RedEvo]

If you run and own your own website good seo is just a matter of research and common sense. Try joining Google webmasters forums and get the lowdown

Yup, coz let's face it if you run a business you've got nothing else to do with your time

d

 

[RadiusBPO]

Yup, coz let's face it if you run a business you've got nothing else to do with your time

d

I heard even Cameron does his own SEO for all the .gov sites.

 

[Matthewb2]

What surprising replies from 2 SEO "experts"?

 

[unet]

What surprising replies from 2 SEO "experts"?

I think they are having at joke at your comment.

"its simple and just a bit of common sense"

think its slightly more than that

 

[RedEvo]

I think they are having at joke at your comment.

"its simple and just a bit of common sense"

think its slightly more than that

Actually I was poking fun at the concept of business owners doing anything outside their skill set themselves. It's takes me all my time to do what I'm good at and I much prefer to pay experts to take care of things outside the abilities of me or my staff. Things such as hosting, accounting, servicing my car etc. It's just my humble opinion on these things.

I'm not suggesting people can't learn to do SEO, of course they can.

d

 

[Matthewb2]

RedEvo my 2 websites are my business. The first I built my self 10 years ago and recieve enquiries from everyday, it is my fulltime job. It is a niche industry website that scores first page results on Google for a range of pertinent generic search terms and has done for many years. Simple HTML text placement, page titles (about 900 pages of content and 10s of thousands of images).
The second site which has a much broader and competitive market I commissioned to a so called professional web design company in London (5 permanent staff, central London offices and unfortunately recommended for the wrong reasons). To cut a long story short after many months of frustration and wasted money with them I locked them out of the server and started using various companies to sort out areas that that needed attention I went through quite a lot of companies with varying results before finding a brilliant designer / programmer who completes work in hours instead of days.
One of the areas that was extremely problematic was that the content pages of the site were not being crawled by search engines due to design cock-ups, this was resolved by a little research and creating a dynamicly updating sitemap generated from the MySQL database,that and a bit of careful keyword placement in page titles and content now get the site on first and second page results on a wide range of search phrases to our targeted audience.
My point here is that in the field of web design and SEO it is still the wild west out there, anyone with a small amount of knowledge can set themselves up as either and there are vast gaps of competence between the good and the bad but they all try and charge much the same

 

[RedEvo]

RedEvo my 2 websites are my business. The first I built my self 10 years ago and recieve enquiries from everyday, it is my fulltime job...........

Good stuff. The businesses I deal with don't have the time to do this.

d