I currently am with a big company in my area who has taken my original website work and done a good job improving my organic rankings, however we have been at this for under a year with little competition in my area and we appear to have stalled. (Oh and not on page one either)
My guy is selling me on their SEO team, for an extra $200 a month. I also use $200 for SEM as well. The total bill is $602/month. Should I ride my current growth pattern out or give up the cash? With constant algorithm changes on google it seems really hard to keep pace as a business owner.
If I go this route I will almost stop all other marketing until profits come off of current work.
seo is way easier than people make it out to be. as long as your code isn’t a mess on the back end and the site itself is optimized, you can totally do your seo yourself. all it takes is time.
i wouldn’t pay for seo personally. i guess if i was way too busy or hated to do it i might, but i think i can get better results than a hired professional.
$600 a month???
That seems excessive for a small company - BUT, if its producing the results you need then its worth it. Rankings mean nothing, page one means nothing - - paying work coming in should be your only measure of if its worth it,… if spending $600 generates $3k or more of new work each month then stick with it.
Personally though I’d wonder what exactly they’re doing for their $600 - - are they creating new content, bolstering organic ranking & optimising conversions,… or are they link spamming & doing things that could come back to bite you in the ass?
My thoughts exactly, however if you do not rank highly on google you won’t be found, therefore no results. You do have to spend and wait while your rankings improve so that someone can find you organically. This SEO is the big mysterious black hole that you can lose big on going in the wrong direction, so I am grateful for the help and the forum.
I have full access to the site and it doesn’t appear to have any “black hat” spamming going on, and their SEM work has never seen my company fall below 2nd in the rankings. SEM counts for 20% of my page views currently. As of now it does seem excessive and I have not committed to the $200 increase.
True - Google is far from instant to react,… but at $600 a month I’d be expecting these guys to be doing more than making changes & sitting back & waiting. Any portion of the SEM that gets spent on Adwords should give fairly rapid results so you’d know straight away.
What are they doing to give you long term organic rankings that keep performing after you stop paying? Are they doing any content creation work?
I really am particular about the content on my site. I designed it all myself and they ported it over to their platform. But yes they do update content when google changes algorithms, and they monitor and change geo tags and my basic long tail keywords. I get consulted first, before they change anything due to my specific requirements.
That is what the extra $200 will provide. A team that will focus entirely on SEO. Basically I pay $125 for my content updates, advice, and the small SEO work currently. We’ve moved from unranked to 3rd or 4th page on google in 6-8 months with this plan, but last month we showed no improvement, and this option was presented to me.
Obviously I don’t know how much competition you have or what keywords you’re targeting,… But that seems like fairly dismal results for your spend? I’d expect diy seo efforts to have more effect on the average website in that time frame…
I agree that is too long for 3rd and 4th page placement. So where is your other 80% page views from? I can’t imagine it’s from organic rankings. Diy efforts can be very good. I know i can have a site on page 2 with just working very part time on it in 6 months. My 2 main sites were ranking 1st in LA and Orlando within 1 year. A lot of competion too. My Orlando site has been #1 for years and the LA site I haven’t touched in a couple years and is still on page one.
I recently landed on page one, hovering between #3 and #5 on the list, depending on which city gets named in the search. I did all my own SEO and I’m still using Wix to host my site. It’s really not that hard, just takes regular work and many little tweaks over time. 600 a month is a tough pill to swallow if you aren’t seeing huge results in very short order.
