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Hiring an SEO Company: We're Ready - Are You?
October 04, 2005
SEO clients, I don't envy you.
Everyone's out to get you, and I'm not kidding. Your competition is tough - almost as tough as your affiliates. Search engine optimization firms are full of worthless, shady criminals. Can you believe any of us when we talk about "SEO Ethics" when behind your back, you're the object of scorn and ridicule? And don't get me started on cost. We're either prohibitively expensive or suspiciously cheap.
Nervous laughter aside, once companies make it through the minefield of selecting a decent SEO firm, they often become their own worst enemies. Doug foreshadowed it a few weeks ago, but it was reinforced just last week as Chris Sherman summarized the iProspect Outsourced SEO Metrics & ROI Study (PDF):
Just over a third of respondents said that there were no obstacles to implementing search engine optimization. However, fully 64% of organizations outsourcing natural search engine optimization to an SEO firm encounter obstacles within their own organization that got in the way.
The two biggest obstacles were lack of human resources to implement changes (34%) and lack of outsourced IT budget (17%). However, this suggests that if a company lacks human resources to implement changes or a budget to outsource them, they are not being well-served by their current search marketing firm.
The emphasis in the last paragraph is mine. Notice the lack of judgment in Chris's use of passive voice. He's not saying that the SEO company is giving the shaft to the client - only that, empirically, when the client does not make the recommended changes (for any reason), it is not getting its money's worth.
The study itself ably points out why recommendations aren't made, and the fault lies with both SEO firms and potential clients. In addition to the two reasons quoted above, some of the key factors preventing the implementation of SEO firms' changes include:
- Upper management decision not to implement the recommendations
- Branding issues / restrictions
- Agency failed to educate my company on the required resources to implement recommendations
So who's guilty here? The potential client, for not doing its homework and asking the right questions, or the SEO firm, for poorly explaining the processes and resources required? Yes and yes.
So let's get this out in the open and put it behind us. In most cases, organic SEO is going to consume significant staff hours on the implementation side - your side. While we will work with design and marketing departments to reach as effective a compromise as possible, we're going to push for more content. And one of the most important things to realize is that in most cases, our recommendations, while itemized, are a package, and they rely on each other for overall effectiveness. If you make the title and content changes to 900 pages but refuse to allocate the staff-hours to the URL crawling and indexing issue, you've wasted our time - and your money. And you'll continue to call us worthless, shady criminals. And we'll continue to mock and scorn you. Let's not let that happen.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at October 4, 2005 09:49 PM
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