Once my new site is optimized, what am I paying for on a monthly basis?
If you are just starting out in the internet marketing world, this question may have run through your mind as you carefully calculate where your marketing budget is being spent. We understand that you have a budget to stick to and you’d like to drop unproductive expenditures and use that money elsewhere. However, SEO is not the service to drop, and we’ll explain why in answering the questions below.
What does an SEO firm do?
We can’t tell you how many times we get this question. A good response would go something like this one, from Joshua Steimle at Forbes.com:
“Oh, you run an SEO firm? So…what exactly do you do?” This is one of the most frequently asked questions I receive. I often give the simple and short answer “We help companies get business from search engines,” but this always leads to the follow up question “How do you do that?” I then explain that SEO is primarily three activities; 1) creating content, 2) building high quality links, and 3) analyzing results and adjusting accordingly.”
Even in just casual conversation, if that person is in the market for SEO and just doesn’t know it yet, then this might spark further communication and a potential customer. However, what the potential client doesn’t understand is that we could easily launch into a two-hour discourse about all the aspects of SEO that would greatly benefit their business and the work involved to bring them online success.
Essentially, you just need to remember the following benefits of search engine optimization, and that they are incredibly important to your website and brand’s online success:
- Quality Content
- Local Listing Optimization
- Quality Internal and External Links
- Targeting
- Analysis
Why is my SEO company still charging me even though the site doesn’t look like it’s changing?
As you can probably tell from the list above, only about half the SEO work happens on the actual site itself, or at least in the visible portion of the site. SEO involves a lot of technical work and really nerdy jargon that mainly only those who have spent years analyzing the field will understand. Because of this technical work, you may not be noticing the changes that are happening regularly, both on and off your site, but rest assured that Google will.
I still don’t understand why it’s necessary to keep paying the same amount each month. What am I getting this month that I wouldn’t get next month if I stopped paying?
This question most often comes from people that don’t understand that ranking first place on a results page is not the finish line, it’s just your position in the pack of runners. The minute you cancel service and the work is no longer done for your site, you will begin to fall in the rankings and those second and third place runners will lap you.
If you don’t have the time to do SEO yourself, our work is extremely valuable to you. We’re building out your online presence with weekly updates to the site that will be picked up by search engine crawlers. These crawlers recognize that your site is current and relevant, from our edits, and will trust you more and more, increasing your organic search rank each time. This has to be done monthly, which is why you pay a monthly SEO fee.
It’s always up to you where you spend your marketing dollars. But Bob Dylan said it best: “You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone”. The times they are a’changin’, and people are using the internet for their product research, and utilizing online listing sites like Yelp and YP.com instead of hardcopy yellow pages. It’s a risk to not invest in SEO services for your website, but it’s up to you to decide whether it’s a risk you’re willing to take.
Please let us know if you have any questions, or give us a shout-out on Google+, Facebook, or Twitter if you liked this post!