Help finding a good SEO company

[RevaxMedia]

Indicators is all there is (unless you are already there), and knowing the saturation doesn't provide you with the info needed to cost a keyword for POR.
What happens if you quote a price for x and realised that without spending more time/money you wont be able to rank it. What do you do? walk away leaving a sour taste in the clients mouth, or carry on wasting more time/money?
Then there's the situation where the client is spending more to rank a keyword than the money they're receiving from it. No matter how good the research is, it's all based on estimates, and that is the flaw which will trip people up.

That's a fair point - there is always going to be some risk, at the end of the day you need to beat the websites currently on that first page so you can decipher their strategy to see a rough time frame then we can times the dedicated hours by an hourly rate. In the majority of the work we have done we have over quoted for work and we passed the savings back onto our clients and touch wood we have not had any clients under quoted - as in this event we are contracted to continue the work until it's complete.

 

[RadiusBPO]

"Plumbers in Torquay" the 18th result is the 1st organic. It's worthless and only someone without experience would recommend SEO. Oh or someone offering POR as ROI doesnt matter only rankings do.

People think they need better rankings and traffic but what they want is more money. Rankings are traffic are the wrong things to be focused on, ROI is the correct target.
SEO = ROI from Googles Organics.

Contracts mean nothing. Anyone can close their LTD and leave a POR contract high and dry, and who is going to chase a few hundred quid?

You can keep the cautious (cheap) clients.


POR is horrible. Why do POR for someone when you can set up your own site for aff or lead gen and make £500-1000 pm forever?? Why waste your time?

 

[Chunkford]

People hire SEOs in order to gain traffic through rankings - there is physically no other way a "SEO" guy can generate traffic. An SEO would focus on SEO elements such as link baiting to improve SERP visibility and not to generate referral traffic - if it does it's a bonus.

An SEM professional would generate referral traffic from Search such as PPC incorporating the work for an SEO specialist. SEO is part of SEM but only a branch.

Which ever way you look at it, when people hire an SEO specialist or PPC specialist or email specialist or an affiliate specialist etc, the underlying solution to their problem is they want increased venue. Nothing more, nothing else.
Without it, the service that is provided will not last very long and will force who ever into having to find new clients just so they can replace the ones they lost.
You know what they say "It's far cheaper and easier to nurture your relationship with existing customers than it is to find new ones"

 

[mobyme]

Milestones on KPI's would be rankings for keywords. When you get to position A, pay x amount, when you get to position B, pay y amount, etc.

Times are a changing mobyme. SEO is no longer black art, it's a science. Pricing is shifting from predatory to a commodity, like buying rice.

I know of at least 2 companies, personally, who work off this approach for several clients (pay on results). One of them generates about 100mil GBP of online revenue for their clients annually and the other owns a ton of B2C keyword space (and hasn't told me their full portfolio revenue driving).

It's not the bargain basement people who work on a results basis - it's the consummate professionals. If you can't compete against this business model (shared-risk / win-win) then it's time to up your game.

I've always seen SEO as a science which is probably why we work for two of the biggest retailers in the UK and are in the throes of finishing over £280'000 worth of Olympics connected work placed with us in the last two years.

We do get involved in projects as full business partners but would never contemplate working with that model.

You know of two companies that work with that model whereas I know of in excess of sixty that don't. You will never convince me that is the way to go.

 

[RevaxMedia]

"Plumbers in Torquay" the 18th result is the 1st organic. It's worthless and only someone without experience would recommend SEO. Oh or someone offering POR as ROI doesnt matter only rankings do.

People think they need better rankings and traffic but what they want is more money. Rankings are traffic are the wrong things to be focused on, ROI is the correct target.
SEO = ROI from Googles Organics.

Contracts mean nothing. Anyone can close their LTD and leave a POR contract high and dry, and who is going to chase a few hundred quid?

You can keep the cautious (cheap) clients.


POR is horrible. Why do POR for someone when you can set up your own site for aff or lead gen and make £500-1000 pm forever?? Why waste your time?

POR is just making the judgement that the keywords are going to work for you the same way any TV commercial is designed to bring in more money yet the channel you advertise is only interested in getting your commercial live and in front of as many people as possible. POR concept works and works well, you develop a keyword which is viable and fruitful for the business and you get there with the peace of mind you won't get burnt.

 

[RadiusBPO]

POR is just making the judgement that the keywords are going to work for you the same way any TV commercial is designed to bring in more money yet the channel you advertise is only interested in getting your commercial live and in front of as many people as possible. POR concept works and works well, you develop a keyword which is viable and fruitful for the business and you get there with the peace of mind you won't get burnt.

we will agree to disagree.

 

[Fresco_Creative]

Would anyone like to recommend some very good cost effective SEO companies?

Ask to see some actual proper samples of work that have been done to date so you can see.. keywords, link building, the overall strategy..... This really does help and have a great bearing

 

[PeaceJN]

Thanks for all your good comments on this thread!

 

I've always seen SEO as a science which is probably why we work for two of the biggest retailers in the UK and are in the throes of finishing over £280'000 worth of Olympics connected work placed with us in the last two years.

We do get involved in projects as full business partners but would never contemplate working with that model.

You know of two companies that work with that model whereas I know of in excess of sixty that don't. You will never convince me that is the way to go.

Well as I have had 12 years of income from projects I completed 12 years ago.

I suspect I ain't gonna agree with you.

Earl