It’s not hard to see success with SEO. Sometimes expectations are higher than what is reasonable at a particular budget, but it’s very rare that companies don’t see some degree of success through search engine optimization. There are a few things that are important to understand when beginning SEO.
How To Achieve SEO Success:
1. Pick a good company. All of the companies we refer you to are solid companies that will do a great job. We don’t encourage you to pick one company over another out of the referrals we give.
2. Don’t choose the cheapest company just because they’re the cheapest. There are companies online that claim they will do SEO on your site for $50/mo. Please take our word for it: these companies will not provide ANY benefit to your site and may even hurt your rankings. The term “SEO” can be used very loosely. One company may say they can do SEO for $500/mo but they will only do a small amount of work. Another company might quote you $5000/mo but the scope of what they do is huge and overall they’re a much better value for the money.
3. Don’t buy in to false promises. Any SEO company that guarantees top positions or guarantees an increase in profits is a scam. If it sounds too good to be true, it is.
4. Plan on sticking with it. The first good results from SEO generally show up 4-6 months after you start. Many companies quit after they get to the 6 month mark because they think that things aren’t going to get better. The rank changes are less aggressive after the 4 to 6 month mark, but the results are much stonger with each rank increase. There is a 500% traffic difference between position #1 and position #3 in the search engines. Don’t give up before you’ve really tasted success.
5. Dedicate a reasonable budget. SEO is a very powerful marketing method, but the product itself is not as tangible as many other forms of marketing (i.e. you don’t get a TV commercial, billboard ad, print ad, etc…, you just get an optimized website), so it’s harder for companies to feel good about dedicating a reasonable budget. The general tendency is to feel fine about something you can see or touch, but to be very hesitant about something that is not as tangible. It generally costs more to achieve your SEO goals than you think it will, but those who dedicate an appropriate budget will be exponentially more successful with SEO.
Great ways to make your SEO a complete failure
1.Have your SEO done by a company in India, Argentina, Romania, etc…. We’ve never seen anyone achieve true SEO success through outsourcing to economically challeneged countries. Yes, the price is really low (sometimes as low as $8 or $10/hr), but from our experience it would be better to recruit a high school student from McDonalds and buy him a book on SEO (another bad idea, but better than outsourcing).There are communication barriers that cause an abundance of grammatical mistakes and there are often several “common sense” errors that are made. If you’re in the U.S., you should have a U.S. company doing your optimization. You pay a premium price for U.S. service, but it will provide you with a much greater return on investment
2. Quit after 2 or 3 months. If you don’t give your SEO company the time they need to show you success, you will be disappointed. Their job is similar to farming: they prepare the ground, plant seed, water and fertilize. If you stop at the 3 month mark and they stop watering and fertilizing the ground, you may still have a small crop, but it will be very small and unless you start back up at some point your initial investment into SEO will have essentially been a waste of money. Plan on evaluating your SEO success at the 6 to 8 month mark.
3. Prevent Your SEO Company Making The Necessary Changes. This sounds stupid, and it is, but it happens often, especially in cases where the SEO company doesn’t have access to your site and just has to make recommendations to your webmaster. For example, your SEO company may tell you it would be a good idea to remove some of the links to other pages on your site from your home page. If they tell you this, there is a good reason. If there is a really good reason for the link to stay, tell them, but if you find yourself fighting your SEO company on several issues, it’s extremely likely that you’re being too sentimental about things you have done on the site. Things can always be changed back, so let the SEO do what they need to do unless there is a really good reason not to. If your SEO company tells your webmaster what changes need to be made, make sure that the webmaster knows that action items the SEO sends are high priority.
4. Don’t answer your SEO company’s emails or phone calls. Again, this sounds ridiculous, but it is common. Your SEO company will often have questions that they need answers on. Get back to them quickly.
5. Send emails to your SEO several times a day and call them frequently. The quotes that you get for SEO are usually based on the amount of monthly hours the company thinks that they’ll need in order to get you the results you desire. Communication time is going to be billed the same as the time they spend working on your site. You have to be in communication with them, but if you keep it to the basics only they will have more time to spend on optimization and they will get results faster. There are some companies that feel that they need to be in daily communication with their SEO company. If you’re one of those, that’s fine, but either put extra money in the monthly budget to cover communication time or make sure that you understand realistically how much time you’re asking your SEO company to spend on communication with you and adjust your expectations accordingly.
