Will so called SEO experts be killed off by their silly prices

asj100

Free Member
Nov 3, 2010
79
18
i employed an SEO "specialist", he charged me £250 a month for the first 3 months, my website went onto the first page of Google within 3 weeks and stayed there for the most part for the whole 3 months, at the end of that set-up period, my SEO guy said your website is easy to keep "UP" as there is a limited challenge for position, so I can keep your listing on the front pages for £50 per month as there are few hours involved. I have now been "up" for 8 months, traffic has increased and sales climbed dramatically, my SEO costs dropped and I have recommended him to about 22 companies, all reporting good things... so SEO in the right hands works, and with the right business model seem an easy business to grow..

The hard part is finding the right guy, mine was recommended to me by a business friend who had also been using him for a number of months.. So qualifications as an SEO should really be more "how many companies already recommend you"...

Buying wise is always key, forums like this one are a great help and I recommend you use them as much as possible...
 
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i employed an SEO "specialist", he charged me £250 a month for the first 3 months, my website went onto the first page of Google within 3 weeks and stayed there for the most part for the whole 3 months, at the end of that set-up period, my SEO guy said your website is easy to keep "UP" as there is a limited challenge for position, so I can keep your listing on the front pages for £50 per month as there are few hours involved. I have now been "up" for 8 months, traffic has increased and sales climbed dramatically, my SEO costs dropped and I have recommended him to about 22 companies, all reporting good things... so SEO in the right hands works, and with the right business model seem an easy business to grow..

The hard part is finding the right guy, mine was recommended to me by a business friend who had also been using him for a number of months.. So qualifications as an SEO should really be more "how many companies already recommend you"...

Buying wise is always key, forums like this one are a great help and I recommend you use them as much as possible...

Just out of interest.... once you had reached page 1, why didn't you target new keywords with other pages, rather than reducing the SEO budget?
 
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asj100

Free Member
Nov 3, 2010
79
18
we are mostly a B2B company and as such the majority of our work comes from exisiting trade account customers and clients found at Trade shows and the like, prior to the SEO work about 8% of our business came from web enquiries, following SEO that has gone up to an average of 12%, still not enough to justify an increased web spend, also web enquiries do tend to have a longer lead time and require a lot more emails "supplying info" than those who we meet and show and tell at shows....
 
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I have now been "up" for 8 months, traffic has increased and sales climbed dramatically.

we are mostly a B2B company and as such the majority of our work comes from exisiting trade account customers and clients found at Trade shows and the like, prior to the SEO work about 8% of our business came from web enquiries, following SEO that has gone up to an average of 12%, still not enough to justify an increased web spend, also web enquiries do tend to have a longer lead time and require a lot more emails "supplying info"

Doesn't make sense, you went to Page1, from which page and to what position on Page1? and you only saw an increase of 4% and you don't think it's worth the extra expenditure even though your sales have 'increased dramatically' :|
 
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asj100

Free Member
Nov 3, 2010
79
18
That 4% increase was in real terms a 50% increase in web sales, the problem is always one of effort and time, a trade show enquiry is usually an email for pricing and delivery and that is followed by an order,

A web enquiry is at least one email of questions, "how does it work", "what's the install requirements". Then you get a few emails with generalised questions about operation of the system and that is then followed by pricing and quotes, so we have found that website sales take on average 5.4 hours to deal with and have a conversion to order rate of 1:4, while a trade show enquiry takes on average 2.6 hours and has a conversion rate of 1:1.16, so we can process twice as many enquiries off line than we can online and have a much better conversion rate. The only benefit from the website is that the order values tend to be lower and therefore the profit per sale is slightly better because there are less volume discounts.

We are sure that once our product is better known, this may change, also some clients are moving towards repeat online ordering. So as that happens things will likely change....
 
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That 4% increase was in real terms a 50% increase in web sales, the problem is always one of effort and time, a trade show enquiry is usually an email for pricing and delivery and that is followed by an order,

A web enquiry is at least one email of questions, "how does it work", "what's the install requirements". Then you get a few emails with generalised questions about operation of the system and that is then followed by pricing and quotes, so we have found that website sales take on average 5.4 hours to deal with and have a conversion to order rate of 1:4, while a trade show enquiry takes on average 2.6 hours and has a conversion rate of 1:1.16, so we can process twice as many enquiries off line than we can online and have a much better conversion rate. The only benefit from the website is that the order values tend to be lower and therefore the profit per sale is slightly better because there are less volume discounts.

We are sure that once our product is better known, this may change, also some clients are moving towards repeat online ordering. So as that happens things will likely change....

is that included factoring in the time and cost of setting up a trade show. In any case none of my business really, just interested in garnishing more on the SEO work.
Maybe useful to put up a FAQ page - if you haven't already
 
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Step 1 - rank for exact match
Step 2 - rank for synonyms...

I prefer this one:

Step 1 - Try and rank for exact match
Step 2 - Too many targeted anchor backlinks, penalised or filtered
Step 3 - Panic
Step 4 - Start building more varied links
Step 5 - Rank for the big money phrase
Step 6 - Note to self - promise not to get filtered again
Step 7 - repeat
 
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A web enquiry is at least one email of questions, "how does it work", "what's the install requirements". Then you get a few emails with generalised questions about operation of the system and that is then followed by pricing and quotes, so we have found that website sales take on average 5.4 hours to deal with and have a conversion to order rate of 1:4, while a trade show enquiry takes on average 2.6 hours and has a conversion rate of 1:1.16, so we can process twice as many enquiries off line than we can online and have a much better conversion rate. The only benefit from the website is that the order values tend to be lower and therefore the profit per sale is slightly better because there are less volume discounts.
And if a pro could reduce the cost of that 5.4 hours to less than the 2.6 hours, wouldn't that be worthwhile? ;)
 
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You should be looking at sites as a whole, not just a measly title tag on the homepage.

It all depends on competiton as to how effective or in-effective onsite is. The title tag isn't measly as having your titles correct is one of the few important apects of onsite.

As i said before there have been pages on page one of google for the term viagra that dont even have the term viagra on the page.

You think a site with 500 pages, has only one primary money making phrase?? :|
Neither here or there, that's not being discussed.
 
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terryuk

Free Member
Jan 26, 2007
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It all depends on competiton as to how effective or in-effective onsite is. The title tag isn't measly as having your titles correct is one of the few important apects of onsite.

As i said before there have been pages on page one of google for the term viagra that dont even have the term viagra on the page.

Yeh I agree on site is important, but you then explain the complete opposite and highly spammed market which is down to who's got the bigger willy (or spam machine).
 
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