59 replies to this topic

[Nadir]

No one can pretend to do cheap SEO. SEO is not cheap, it it was cheap, that would mean it doesn't require much time to implement. That's not true.

So why do all these SEO companies pretend to do SEO campaigns and provide 500 bucks per month contract? Or even something like a one time fee of $1000? I'm not talking about companies in France who call themselves SEO and ask 2.5 euros a month (4 dollars) to submit your site to 15,000 search engines. Yeah, right.

Maybe there are companies out there who are very generous and who do provide low-cost SEO, but there are very few.

So, all of these charlatans are just about making money quick. They don't do SEO because they like it, they do it because they know there's a huge demand, but companies still think that it's a secret science and they hire the first guy who knocked at the door who has SEO written in his business card.

If you do SEO campaigns for $500, the company obviously doesn't wanna spend more than 2 work days on it, at most. So, you think that you can define the right SEO strategy in less than 18 hours of work? No, you just can't.

SEO is a full time job. You have to watch your rankings everyday, monitor your traffic, implement new strategies, see if there's new keyword you can try to optimize for, see what keywords aren't working, add new content, follow the trends in your industry, write a blog, write articles, submit Press releases, clear your code, maybe improve the look of your site, organize your landing pages, study your logs, the visit lengths... What else? A lot more!

So, can you do all of that for less than 1000 bucks a month? Even $500?

You don't even do any keyword research, you just ask your clients what his keywords are. Then he tells you "arizona home loans". Fine. You add 2, 3 title tags, submit to 100 free directories and send a bill to your client. Nothing happens on the site, the client calls you, you blame it on the sandbox and use jargon to sound clever and hope that he just going to believe you because you used technical words.

Don't you care about the client? How can you charge small local companies 2000 bucks a month if they don't see any result? They heard that SEO can improve their ROI dramatically, so they did some research and they found you on the search engines because you used spammy techniques and lots of reciprocal links.

Sometimes, I just wich there were an organization that regulates the SEO industry. But there's BBB already, I wish more companies used them.

[Wit]

Good call. However: if all you want to do is share some of your SEO knowledge, you can do so for very little money (say: $19 for instance). Quick tip, bit of info, a link to a nice tool, an SEO myth helped out of its misery - anything really.

But yeah: a full-blown SEO service can't be cheap nowadays... Maybe cheapISH if the link building is done by low-wage people (in low-cost countries???)




edit=confusing typo

Edited by Wit_, 09 February 2006 - 03:41 PM.

[Nadir]

Yeah, but give the 19 bucks document to someone who does not know anything about web development at all, no html, nothing. For him a title tag doesn't mean anything, he doesn't know where it is, or what it is. The document might help but he would have to spend months to learn how to implement stuff on his site.

So companies who do not have time to read these kind of stuff, they have no other choice than hiring someone. That's the problem.

Edited by Nadir, 09 February 2006 - 03:54 PM.

[Wit]

True.

The problem is that the person hiring a SEO must realise that SEO is going to make him/her money in the end. That means he/she must at least know something about SEO - if only what it means.

[Nadir]

Yeah, they should, the other problem that I didn't mention is that these SEOs do not educate their clients. All the clients that I deal with know exactly what I'm doing and why. Now, they are doing changes on their own, and it's just as good as if I were doing it.

Edited by Nadir, 09 February 2006 - 04:00 PM.

[kensplace]

Dont know what services these companies provide for a 500 bucks per month contract, but look at it this way

500 bucks a month could be looked at as

500 bucks divided by 28 working days per month = 17.85 bucks a day


Lets say you get some cheap labour, or even free labour (government training schemes etc) and get them to do most of the donkey work involved, you could get them to spend say 15 minutes every other day on a site.

Lots of the work could be mostly automated, such as link checking, keyword research, most of link submission, traffic generation sometimes, what cant be automated can mostly be done by low cost labour.

Specialist stuff can be done by the people who know what they are doing, but should not take that long to do for most sites in general if the experts in charge actually know their field.

17.85 bucks for say 15 mins work is more than enough to cover the cost of cheap labour (or even in some cases free labour, or even better staff that you get paid to have!)

A lot can be done to a site, if you spend 15 mins SEO'ing it every other day, on a regular basis.

They may not provide the worlds best service, but maybe they do, I dont know, never used any of these services.......

Edited by kensplace, 09 February 2006 - 05:40 PM.

[Nadir]

I've seen it happened in my own company, it wasn't a project that I managed myself, the boss had full control of it. He didn't do sh*t, really. The guy sent him an email asking for his money back and filled a claim with the BBB.

Edited by Nadir, 15 February 2006 - 10:58 PM.

[kensplace]

I've seen it happened in my own company, it wasn't a project that I managed myself, the boss had full control of it. He didn't do sh*t, really. The guy sent him an email asking for his money back and filled a claim with the BBB. 

I'm about to leave from that company anyway, if anyone has a company in South california, let me know.

Sadly, that sort of thing is VERY common in the computing field, worked in tiny companies that have been guilty of similar things, even worked in a multi national, billion dollar firm that was one of the worst offenders for producing crap in more ways than one.

Unlike say the field of electronics, where you cant make a TV or a monitor unless you really are a expert, anyone can stick up a webpage and say they can do anything, and sadly the people who are often the best at lying, are the ones that set up companies and rip people off. Then, unlike a TV or Monitor, where you can SEE instantly if it has been made correctly (ie a good picture, and no smoke) SEO services are not instant, they take time to come to fruition, and unlike a TV or monitor they dont come with a warrantee of any kind.

Most industries are established, software and its related industries is still very much in its infancy and "dell boy" stage (dell boy is a reference to a character from a classic BBC TV show only fools and horses).

This means that there is still room for new people to make a difference, to change the world so to speak (and that is still possible online) - but it also means there is plenty of room for cowboys. Also, as the industry matures, which it slowly is, the bigger boys get to play, and that makes it harder for everyone, as the bigger boys often bully the little ones, and use dirty tricks to stay on top.


There are genuine people out there, many of them, its just in general, the public remembers bad experiences over good ones. You dont hear people saying, hey I had a good experience with XYX firm online the other day. Nope, in general you are more likely to hear about their horror stories about firm ABC.

I know people that have been paid over 400 pounds an hour for consultancy, well over that, were they worth that money? Nope not in my opinion. But people do pay silly money for things, its the same with SEO, most of it is available for free, but is it worth the time spent to figure it out for yourself? Or is it cheaper to get someone else to do it? Then if you get someone else, how much are you willing to pay?

The amount a person charges is no guarentee of how they will work, I have seen someone who earned more in a day, than I did in say a month, who didnt even understand binary, and he was a programmer..........

I have worked in places that had their own R&D department, where NO R&D really went on, and god help anyone who had ideas, or who worked hard, and I know that they charge a fortune for support etc - but its rubbish support.

We are in the gold rush stage, every one is staking a claim, some will make it, most will be wasting their time. Many people with a business sense, see that this is the time to sell the shovels and picks needed to get that gold...... Its just a shame the tools are of varying quality...

[Nadir]

ken, I know of course that there are plenty of people who do a good job and ask thousands of bucks for a day. These guys are very creative, some call them genius.

But the amount of charlatans has to be big, if my company is one, I don't really see why they should be the only one.

[kensplace]

ken, I know of course that there are plenty of people who do a good job and ask thousands of bucks for a day. These guys are very creative, some call them genius.

But the amount of charlatans has to be big, if my company is one, I don't really see why they should be the only one.

Yup, thats what I was trying to say

[Nadir]

Yeah, I just reformulated for people who like it short. Just kidding, I just wanted to make sure I understood what you said.

[kensplace]

Yeah, I just reformulated for people who like it short. Just kidding, I just wanted to make sure I understood what you said.

lol, my g/f keeps telling me I do posts that are too long, but I keep telling her my posts are short compared to most on this forum!

One thing I have noticed about this industry, is its one of the few in the world where many of the 'experts' give away their knowledge/skills/time for free. Open source, forums like this, behind the scenes stuff, it happens a lot with software and the like.

Course, microsoft and the like is trying to stop it all with patents....

[Nadir]

No problem Ken. Yeah, that's true about the knowledge shared for free, that's how I learned SEO anyway, I didn't learn SEO thanks to these charlatans.

[kensplace]

No problem Ken. Yeah, that's true about the knowledge shared for free, that's how I learned SEO anyway, I didn't learn SEO thanks to these charlatans.

But on the bright side, you did learn an important lesson from the charlatans, next time a future client asks why should I pay you XYZ instead of a cheaper firm (insert name of charlaten here) you can honestly reply with lots of good reasons why....

[randfish]

Those who are charging $500 per month are riding ignorance about the industry, but it's certainly not the first time. Folks in the finance, marketing, advertising, health, small business and plenty of other fields have been using practices like this for eons.

While it will never really go away, there's a lot we can all do to provide information and direct folks to the right places to get an honest deal in SEO. No reason to lay down - we can fight back with our forums, blogs, articles and presence in the public sphere.

More articles in the mainstream press will certainly be key to helping this industry take off and get more respect.

[Nadir]

I'm afraid Rand, it's just going to he easier said than done. We can, of course, try to spread the word and warn everyone about these guys. But companies do not hang out on forums, nor on blogs etc. They just use Google (polluted by unqualified adsense addicts) or Sempo and pick the first web site that has the nicest colors on his site and a few rankings on the clients page.

Edited by Nadir, 09 February 2006 - 07:13 PM.

[travis]

Nadir,

We offer SEO free to our clients.

(i) Its not exactly rocket science. It does not take a university degree to be good at it.

(ii) If you design the site properly and gain appropriate back-links, you are half way there.

We try and put the knowledge in our clients head, so they can manage their own campaigns. They love it, and free advice means they never leave.

We invoice our clients for one thing and one thing only, work. If they are are good paying clients, then a little extra advice wont hurt the relationship.

In fact, when looking at our competition who have set up little spin off companies to deal with SEO, it gives us a distinct advantage.

Australia is not that competitive when in comes to SEO in reality, and the average view of an SEO industry representative would be a Snake Oil Salesman.

Our policy is that we dont guarantee search engine results, because we cant control Google.

You have to understand the main issue for many of our service industry clients is servicing their existing clients better through improved processes, rather than attracting new clients through search engines.

The product sales websites are where SEO is more critical.

Edited by travis, 09 February 2006 - 07:18 PM.

[Nadir]

I think I might write an article about my experience with these kind of crooked people, should be a good link bait, right? It might serve as a guide on how to choose the right SEO company. I can write stuff that each company has to check when hiring a company and also during the process.

[kensplace]

I think I might write an article about my experience with these kind of crooked people, should be a good link bait, right? It might serve as a guide on how to choose the right SEO company. I can write stuff that each company has to check when hiring a company and also during the process.

Good link bait yes.

Potential Future suicide regarding future employment? Possibly.

If someone reads what you write, it may make them think, I dont want to hire this guy, he could write like this about me.....

I dont care what I write anymore (I care, but not about future employment), but anyone who is concerned about it, needs to bear that in mind.

[Nadir]

Hmm, might be right indeed. It just gonna stay between me and folks here ;-) I see what you mean, Ken.