If We Were To Pay £350 a Month To An SEO Company Then How Much Should We Consider ...

[Page]

Spending on ad words to get that balance right

If there was a monthly management fee of around £350

We can see if we spent £1 on adwords - that makes no sense
And £1M yes we will have that please

So there must be a sort of industry standard that starts kicking in as a sensible point and so anyone would need to match to the right sort of set up to their business and spending budget

 

[altonroot]

Our model is to charge one time set up fee which depends on account scope obviously and then our monthly charge will be based on spending. Percentage will be on higher side with less spending but that is obvious.

This is I think fair enough for small businesses and as growth increases spending will also increase and will take care of our profit as well.

 

[Page]

Interesting One

 

[extulsftjz]

Google recently gave a time-scale to help the expectations of people paying for SEO.

They said 4-12 months to see results.

 

[Mr D]

That 4 to 12 months would be the same for a good SEO company and one that did little work?

 

[extulsftjz]

They didn't elaborate

Yes, it would depends on the amount of time and effort they put in. Perhaps that is why they chose 4 to 12 months - 12 months being the smaller company.

There is also the fact that a small agency or an individual could do a quicker/better job than an established agency.

 

[Ian J]

They didn't elaborate

Yes, it would depends on the amount of time and effort they put in. Perhaps that is why they chose 4 to 12 months - 12 months being the smaller company.

There is also the fact that a small agency or an individual could do a quicker/better job than an established agency.

"could" being the operative word as there are as many clueless individuals as there are large agencies

 

[extulsftjz]

"could" being the operative word as there are as many clueless individuals as there are large agencies

Very true.

 

[Clinton]

So there must be a sort of industry standard that starts kicking in as a sensible point...

No, there isn't.

You spend on Adwords to the point where the RoI drops below what your business finds acceptable.

And spending on Adwords to "get the balance right"? What's that about? Who ever told you there was a relationship between the SEO spend and PPC spend?

 

[Page]

I know it all depends - but often in businesses there are typical norms that prevail

Those that fall outside these norms do not take to make things work

But I think this comment of yours about sums it up
You spend on Adwords to the point where the RoI drops below what your business finds acceptable.

Once we have bitten that fee that is all that matters

 

[MarktBiz]

It all depends of objectives. Just get SEO that puts a lot of emphasis on link building tied to social signals. That will give you some advantage to seeing quick results hence getting the right balance with Adwords. Also expand to Social PPC (Facebook,Twitter) to spread your PPC costs. These rightly done should get you the right balance and good ROI.

The difference between page one and page two is no one has the patience

 

[Alan]

It has been nearly 6 years since offering Adwords as a service, at that time the industry 'norm' was management fee was 15% of spend so a spend of £2,333 would incur a management fee of £350

At the low end ( £350 a month management fee is low end ) there has been substantial competition driving rates down ( as the barrier to entry is very low, any one can set themselves up as an adwords expert in no time ) so I have often heard of 10% of spend.

The % of spend model doesn't sit well with small businesses as they don't really understand why if they spend more the agency should get more, and they would often leave quickly having had their campaign optimised to manage it themselves, which is painful for the agency as the initial setup is disproportionate, so now at the low end there are a lot more 'set up fee' packages.

I would say, when we did it, the minimum relationship fee really was £400/month, below that it is difficult to add personalised value to a client.

Big powerhouse adwords agencies start with a minimum of £5k/month management fee.

I can't speak for the SEO side.

 

[JakeM]

What kind of business do you have? Are you service or product based?

I personally felt that Adwords Express with no management fee was the way to go (for me). I'm service based and offer one service. Adwords Express is Googles way of simplifying how everything works and cutting out the middle man.

Ultimately, you need to ensure that whichever company is working on your PPC campaign, is optimising everything to the point where you're saving more than their cost per month (£350).

 

[The Byre]

Repeat after me "SEO and a PPC strategy is not something you can bolt onto a website and a business, after the event."

 

[Alan]

Ultimately, you need to ensure that whichever company is working on your PPC campaign, is optimising everything to the point where you're saving more than their cost per month (£350).

Assuming you value your own time, then the time saved, not just the improved campaign, is also part of the calculation.

 

[Page]

Thanks for your varied and useful comments

We are going to give it a go through xmas and then review in the new year - we sell products and some are xmas present type lines

I think it will be worth the spend for the learning and seeing what is perhaps possible

One of the reasons for using them is for the time leverage - you cannot do it all - and so have a cost somewhere whether it is on house or out of house

And why do in house when you then train someone to get specific skills rather than out of house learn those skills and share across many customers

 

[MarktBiz]

Repeat after me "SEO and a PPC strategy is not something you can bolt onto a website and a business, after the event."

True and relevant quote to the thread.

 

[Page]

Actually that is not true you can and many - maybe even most - have

What I think you mean is that ideally do not do this and plan right from the start

What you have is that high view above the woods looking down and that comes from knowledge and experience

I would say we were part way there at the start

I also know that always - there is always more to learn and more that can be done - but you always have to start somewhere - and within budget and time scales - and often you are just better to start and get on with it

It is a case of trying to hit that sweet spot

I hope we have done so for where we are

 

[fisicx]

Bolting SEO or PPC onto an already developed site often means redoing a lot of the work. For example you may need to create new pages, rejig the internal navigation, change the content clear up the code. It just makes more sense to get started earlier and not waste your money. Consider also that SEO and PPC need different pages and structiures, you can't usually use the same pages for both.

 

[Page]

I am agreeing with you

But what I am saying is that there is always more and more to learn and to do before you get going

But it is also possible to never get going - and for that exact reason

And sometimes you are better to just get on with something

Ideally you hit that sweet spot of enough knowledge v time spent gaining more as opposed to doing

But even then with time you will have to go back and change stuff as you learn more or things change

 

[Page]

And that is a reason to call in and pay for the "experts"

But even then they do not know it all and things still change

So you may still have to go back and change stuff

 

[fisicx]

If you get the core right then you don't need to change much. Google likes old stable content. What it doesn't like is when you keep changing things.

So for example, if you have a page about a particular product or service you can leave it alone and it will still rank well many years later. There may be the odd tweak but the core content is stable and Google will reward you for this.

But if your site has been indexed and ranked for some time and you then go and change things your ranking can suffer. This is why it's better to begin your SEO (and PPC) work as early as possible.

 

[webmto]

Spending money for ads . google, facebook, bing, etc. is void without collecting and analysing data. The budget will continue to increase until a convenient balance will appear. But this is not profitable for website owner but it is for google, facebook, bing, etc.

Adwords support or agency will tell you that you need lot of month to get profit, have your website in top of SERP etc. But this is a normal process and is random. Some of your pages, in time, may be in the first page of SERP, that's random.

A valid campaign should analyzing data every single day, to be able to perform. Other wise will be best effort and for website owner will continue to fill the pocket book.

 

[webgeek]

There is absolutely no relationship between spend and effort made to spend that amount. I could spend thousands in minutes, or hundreds in hours. Anyone charging a flat % based on spend is padding their wallet at your expense.

Once a good campaign is set up, it needs a bit of tweaking, some ad a/b testing, but nothing like the effort required for setup.

Someone needs to create a decent landing page template, groups of keywords, and then spin that into many uniquely targeted landing pages. 2 days effort will do that for most people running modest SMe's. Figure that's somewhere around £500 to £1000 for the 2 days setup.

The tuning and tweaking can be done in a few hours per month. Figure 1/2 day. That's £125 to £250 per month. You could do more, but if you're going for max marketing ROI, then do it right once and rinse lather repeat. First couple of months will be a loss leader for the person/agency, then the next 10 will be a good return.

If you can't find someone to do this for you at these prices, just ask me and I'll give up a few hours in the evening to get you sorted.

 

[webgeek]

Adwords support or agency will tell you that you need lot of month to get profit, have your website in top of SERP etc. But this is a normal process and is random. Some of your pages, in time, may be in the first page of SERP, that's random.

SERP's have nothing to do with ad spend. You set up a dedicated landing page for each term (or tiny handful of closely related terms), one ad group and one ad. This has nothing to do with SERP's.

 

[Alan]

There is absolutely no relationship between spend and effort made to spend that amount. I could spend thousands in minutes, or hundreds in hours. Anyone charging a flat % based on spend is padding their wallet at your expense.

% of spend is just a common pricing model, I'm not saying it is right or wrong. The OP was asking if there any rules of thumb ( at least that is the way I read it ).
However if you are an agency, you also really don't want to advertise an 'hourly rate', especially to small businesses as quoting say £120 per hour ( whilst it is less than many other services ) often gets a negative response. So the choice of pricing models is limited.

When we were doing it (Adwords), with a few clients we worked on revenue share but only where we had complete control over the the landing pages, understood the products, and able to verify the sales conversion ( e.g. digital sales ).

 

[webgeek]

Rev share - for the win-win, is a great, but very rare model.

I hadn't intended to bash on you personally, but the general, and all-too-common model of % of spend which we call T-Rex... it's a prehistoric predatory model, just like in the Smithsonian.

The problem is, agencies don't want to work for minimum # of hours - they're too busy working out how to get the maximum # of billable hours.

Small business owners need to find consultants, or agencies (rare), who are willing to work for a reasonable monthly maintenance fee - which accurately reflects the effort required.

Frankly, after the initial setup and fine tuning, there's little need for much ongoing effort on a good PPC program. Sure, you can do seasonal promotions. You can add new products/services and terminate old ones. You can tweak bids to get them down the page further, so you get lower volume, but higher return per Pound spent.... But if you set it up well in the beginning, tested it for a couple of months of tweaks - many sites can run a good long time on autopilot.

That's not what consultants and agencies want to admit - but it's the truth and is in the best interest of the business owner.

 

[Peter Bowen]

but if you set it up well in the beginning, tested it for a couple of months of tweaks - many sites can run a good long time on autopilot.

This is only partially correct. While it is true that once a campaign is running well it doesn't need as much attention as it does when it's a toddler, it still requires work or it starts costing more and delivering less.

For instance, we check the actual search terms that triggered ads every month for every campaign. If you don't do this you end up with your ads showing in response to the wrong searches and adverts that are not relevant to search terms which weren't popular when the campaign was built.

 

[webgeek]

This is only partially correct. While it is true that once a campaign is running well it doesn't need as much attention as it does when it's a toddler, it still requires work or it starts costing more and delivering less.

For instance, we check the actual search terms that triggered ads every month for every campaign. If you don't do this you end up with your ads showing in response to the wrong searches and adverts that are not relevant to search terms which weren't popular when the campaign was built.

It is 100% correct. It doesn't deteriorate over time. Sorry, campaigns don't fall to pieces without some agency bleeding the company owner dry - it doesn't work like that. If you have a decent ROI campaign, it will continue to do so, provided you spend a few minutes here and there tweaking the ads, to avoid ad blindness, checking positions to make sure you're capturing enough of the available traffic (and converting it) and adding phrases to the negative keyword list (that you missed originally). A great setup will avoid all these issues - for months. The worse the setup, the more tweaking it takes to get it profitable.

If adding phrases, that you missed originally, to the negative keyword lists takes more than a few minutes each week, or an hour or so each month max, then you need someone a bit faster at reading the conversion data and typing phrases into the negative list. This ain't rocket science - your interns could do this with a half-day training.

None of these activities justify a % fee based on spend. The check you write Google has nothing to do with how many terms go on the negative list, how many variations of ads you A/B test, etc, etc. It's an antiquated approach that business owners need to stand up to and say, "enough is enough".

 

[webmto]

SERP's have nothing to do with ad spend. You set up a dedicated landing page for each term (or tiny handful of closely related terms), one ad group and one ad. This has nothing to do with SERP's.

On the contrary, there are a lot to do. Which is the landing page on the e-commerce website? When doing ads you have just one goal, conversions ?

 

[webgeek]

The landing page is a single page template spun out to X variations, using unique keyword/content, so that it is laser targeted to a single term/phrase (or to an extremely tightly clustered group of phrases with common stems/roots). The page would be noindexed, so as to not compete with your site 'brochure' or 'product' content, making it a PPC only landing page.

SMe's need ROI in order to make a self-funding proposition. Brand building, engagement, inspiration - are all great, but don't pay the bills. PPC has to pay for itself, and generate Y amount above and beyond its cost, in order to make it a worthwhile endeavour. The various other purposes for PPC, typically found in the Enterprises, are not going to deliver net positive ROI for SMe's and hence shouldn't be a primary consideration - 99% of the time.

 

[webmto]

@webgeek, you have not answer to my humble question.
Where is the landing page on the e-commenrce website?

--

You said that "This ain't rocket science - your interns could do this with a half-day training."

On the very much contrary, it very much is.
If not, this is the part when google laughs happily. Ads is not just about setting up some words, !words, landing page, etc. A valid ads campaign requires lots of data to be analysed (from page code, content to users behaviours).

Of course, if your budget is £10,000 may be easier for the campaign manager, because there is a place to hide errors or misunderstanding.
But if you have customers with limited £500 - 2000 budget, or even less, every pound counts.

Nevertheless, setting Ads is a business. They need to make money. The ads managers are paid as long the campaign is running. If customers increase the budget, they are earn more.

I judge things through the language of mathematics rather than marketing. And math is always right.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

One thing not mentioned so far is that it is easy and simple to dabble in AdWords' or Bing at very low rates and slowly learn what works and what does not, many books to get you started but most if not all will make you a instant expert as that takes time and energy

All web site owners should now a bit of the basics of PPC as outside of their own office there are thousands of sharks willing to con you for large sums of money, and you need to be able to follow the daily results to see how your ROI is doing

I would suggest you start yourself with a very low click cost and daily amount and learn a bit about the subject and then, if needed contact some companies with some basic knowledge behind you to be able to asses what they are telling you as their sales pitch

 

[MarktBiz]

It comes down to ROI. It is what you get from your adwords' investment that determines a lot.

 

[webmto]

ROI is the effect, the campaign should be the cause. Along with ROI, there are a lot to earn and (re)use. ROI is the instant effects (campaign differentiation), what about the long term effects?

The same issues when decided to have a website. Lot of promises followed by a lot of explanation.

Agree with @Chris Ashdown , website onwers need to undertand a bit of website functionality, adwords, etc. at least minimum required to ask pertinent questions and understand the answers.

 

[webgeek]

@webgeek, you have not answer to my humble question.
Where is the landing page on the e-commenrce website?

--

You said that "This ain't rocket science - your interns could do this with a half-day training."

On the very much contrary, it very much is.
If not, this is the part when google laughs happily. Ads is not just about setting up some words, !words, landing page, etc. A valid ads campaign requires lots of data to be analysed (from page code, content to users behaviours).

Of course, if your budget is £10,000 may be easier for the campaign manager, because there is a place to hide errors or misunderstanding.
But if you have customers with limited £500 - 2000 budget, or even less, every pound counts.

Nevertheless, setting Ads is a business. They need to make money. The ads managers are paid as long the campaign is running. If customers increase the budget, they are earn more.

I judge things through the language of mathematics rather than marketing. And math is always right.

The landing page can be any URL on the site with a meta robots noindex flag set in the header. It could be on the main domain (preferred), or even a subdomain. It's URL architecture is not relevant to the performance - just memorability of the human visitor.

I can teach one of the VA's I've worked with previously how to identify negative keywords and add them to the negative keyword list on Adwords in a half day. If you can't do that with your interns, you're hiring the wrong ones.

There is no need to analyse page code - just conversion rates by phrase/page. If it converts, you do more of it. If it doesn't you do less. You're trying to baffle with BS and it isn't going to work - hopefully not for anyone reading. This is simple stuff, really.

Ads managers that get paid more when campaign budgets increased are nothing more than ripoff merchants with a licence to steal. There's 2 seconds work involved in bumping a budget. Getting an extra few thousand Pound paycheck for doing 2 seconds of work is robbery, plain and simple.

ROI is a simple calculation. You speculate to accumulate. If you're profiting, you up the bids to profit more until that ROI reaches your pain point and your overall total return on ad spend declines to that point where it makes no sense to earn Y by spending X.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

 

[webmto]

The landing page can be any URL on the site with a meta robots noindex flag set in the header. It could be on the main domain (preferred), or even a subdomain. It's URL architecture is not relevant to the performance - just memorability of the human visitor.

Really? The landing page on e-commenrce website is not the products page?

I can teach one of the VA's I've worked with previously how to identify negative keywords and add them to the negative keyword list on Adwords in a half day. If you can't do that with your interns, you're hiring the wrong ones.

Forget about negative words, until there is a long way to go.

There is no need to analyse page code - just conversion rates by phrase/page. If it converts, you do more of it. If it doesn't you do less. You're trying to baffle with BS and it isn't going to work - hopefully not for anyone reading. This is simple stuff, really.

Yes, is needed. Because the code structures define the way the search engine pass the content to servers core that define the way the page is shown in SERP.

Ads managers that get paid more when campaign budgets increased are nothing more than ripoff merchants with a licence to steal. There's 2 seconds work involved in bumping a budget. Getting an extra few thousand Pound paycheck for doing 2 seconds of work is robbery, plain and simple.

2 seconds work involved four times more costs for the same goal.

ROI is a simple calculation. You speculate to accumulate. If you're profiting, you up the bids to profit more until that ROI reaches your pain point and your overall total return on ad spend declines to that point where it makes no sense to earn Y by spending X.

If so, your campaign will always be in customers disadvantages, and ads manager will always will have a better excuses for failure.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

 

[webgeek]

99% of the products on an ecommerce site don't sell or aren't profitable. It's the 1% that drives the business (5% or 10% in some, depending on the volume).

You don't need 10,000 ads running because you've got 10,000 products. C'mon, the idea is to bring in profitability!

Pointless to continue this - your mind is made up that everyone needs an overpriced ads manager who gets X% to manage the same ads for the same products each month, pffft.

 

[webmto]

We notice that we are talking about different things, and we are already discussing the acquisition strategies, which is far from the topic of discussion.

I only tell you that art in this occupation is to sell what is not selling well. If you advertise on products that sell relatively well, then it means that there is a big, big problem somewhere.

If we come back with the discussion of profitability, well, that means doing 1000 pounds, which almost everyone is doing with 2000 pounds. Perhaps 1000 pounds do not seem much to you, but if we double the amounts, or we increase them 5 times?

And that can be done by using math in the entire campaign setting process. How many percent of those who set campaigns check the campaign rolling and optimization parameters daily? How many of them have been able to modify campaigns to cut costs by half and triple the visibility and implicitly ROI?

That's what we're talking about, not about putting words in a form from google ads.

 

[AnotherSEOGuy]

SEO at a decent level, done by somebody who isn't complete and utter rubbish will cost you somewhere in the region of £500 p/m to £PickANumber, most decent agencies charge £1,000+ but you may get lucky with a smaller growing agency (who have legit experience in SEO).

What you should be expecting at £350 is pretty much sod all for a long time, maybe at 12 months you'll see some results. SEO is an investment, do it right and it'll pay dividends and then some, put it in the hands of a Muppet and your business will reflect that persons work unfortunately.