Regurgitating Search Engine Optimisation

Fairly often, we at Monochrome come across ‘search engine optimisers’. These people are there to provide a service to companies that sits somewhere between the technical, the marketing, and the design.

Essentially the brief is simple. Take a website (either at concept stages, or already live) and tweak it so that when a user is looking for a relevant term on one of the major search engines, the site in question will appear near the top of the organic search results.

There’s a number of tried and tested ways of doing this, plus a wide variety of old wives tales that some people believe make a difference. However, search engine optimisation is fairly simple and straightforward, and not something that a lot of people need spend a lot of time on. Once you’ve got the basics in place you’re pretty much good to go, as long as you keep your standards up and keep doing what the search engines like you to be doing.

However, one thing that is becoming more and more apparent is the quality of these services that other people provide and the approach that is taken. From the various optimisation companies that I have come across, the vast majority follow a standard path. This will initially consist of the running of some sort of tool that spits out graphs and tables of how your site might be performing on some varying measures (which might or might not be relevant), and they then chuck all this into a standard document that get’s sent to the client.

You’ll always get the standard fare – Meta tags, page rank, canonical URLs, H1 tags etc etc etc.  You’ll also find that most of the data is already available to you via tools such as Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Now, this initial work could cost thousands depending on the agency and site in mind (bigger client, bigger bucks), but ultimately the work required isn’t drastically different. SEO is SEO.

What comes next is the monthly cost that the vast majority charge – for instance, charging to tend to the garden of keywords that you might be targeting, or ensuring your markup is up to par. Other than that, it’s pretty much rinse and repeat.

So, why do companies blindly pay this money out? Essentially you’re paying the vast majority of SEO’s to cut and paste into a word document, and provide you with a few snazzy graphs.  You’re then paying well over the odds for a couple of hours of maintenance.  If developers charged the same amount, we’d all be laughed out of the room.

The biggest problem is the charging model.  Every SEO company I’ve ever met charge via the standard mechanism.  However, their benefit to the site varies, so why do we not have these companies charge by results?

You engage with an SEO in order to raise the profile of your site and achieve some other objective – increase traffic, increase leads, increase conversions, raise brand awareness.  You have ideas on how much you want to achieve your objective by – page views up by 25%, conversions up by 10%.  Therefore, why do we pay SEO’s regardless?  Surely we should only pay these people if they achieve what we wanted and to a satisfactory level? After all, you wouldn’t pay a interior decorator if he only painted half a room, would you.

So – search engine optimisers – do yourself a favour.  Find out WHY the client wants to talk to you,  WHAT they want to achieve and WHAT sort of budget they might have to try and do this.  Only once you do this will you truly be able to add a worthwhile service to your client that they will be happy to pay for again and again.

Taken from :neil_middleton

Posted by Neil Middleton on 15 Dec 2010