I get a lot of clients that use our services who have tried so many other services and not gotten results. I can tell by the questions they ask me that our SEO company is way different than what many of them are used to.
Here are the top 10 questions they ask and my answers;
1. What type of monthly reporting will we recieve?
Seriously, we do have tools we use to track progress. We can give you progress reports on your link popularity, search engine saturation, search engine positioning for your keywords and phrases, and can do usage reports to track which pages, links, buttons, etc. were clicked on your website.
The bottom line is since hiring us, are you making more sales? If so, then leave the reporting to people that spend all of their time creating really pretty reports.
Reporting takes time. Time better spent on actually marketing your website and working on your website. For a fee I can provide as many reports on whatever you want as often as you want them.
What do you really want to pay me to do? Work on marketing your site or on studying trends and statistics and reporting them to you. We study these trends and stats ourselves and use that information to market for you. To take time out to send those as a report takes up valuable time that we feel is better spent working for you.
2. What type of statistical analysis will it include?
Any kind you want as stated above, but for an additional fee so i can pay someone to make you reports while I do the really important stuff like working on your website and marketing.
3. Will it contain graphics and charts we can use in presentations and to study?
If you insist, yes. You can pay us to optimize and promote your website and also to make you really pretty graphics that you can show off in the boardroom. Again, that isn’t included in our pricing.
A lot of companies charge you a lot of money to do SEO work for you and they include lots of great looking reports, stats, and analysis. Many companies keep these SEO companies on board because it looks like they are doing a great job because “just look at all these really cool graphics and charts!”
The only reason you should keep us or any other SEO company on board is if they are making you more money than they cost. Yes this takes time, so you can’t judge how well they did for your bottom line in just 30, 60, or 90 days. Try 6 months to a year to show real profitability.
If you were starting an offline business you wouldn’t expect to make a profit for at least 2 years. Why would you think online it’s any different.
If the SEO company you are talking to spend more time talking about charts, graphs, reports, link popularity, search engine rankings, etc. than they do about how they are going to help you make more sales, you should continue looking for a good SEO company in my opinion.
4. How long is the contract we will be asked to sign?
None. The day you believe we are not doing a good job for you, get someone else. You should. Performance is all that counts. Good intentions are not enough. Many of our clients have been with us for years because we get results. But even my oldest dearest client should leave me if I stop getting those results.
5. Here is a general explanation of what we need. We want you to rewrite all of the content on xyz.com and optimize it and do some website promotion for it afterwards. Can you give us an exact proice for that?
The answer is no. Absolutely not. I need to know exactly how many pages you want optimized and edited. How many pages we need to add so we can optimize them for some of your key phrases that you aren’t getting ranked for currently.
I also do not know what problems I might run into once I start working on the site. I can give you a minumum and a range of what it could cost. But you have to put up the minimum as a deposit toward the work we do.
Anyone that just gives you a round number like we will optimize your website for $5000 is just making sure they get enough money to hopefully cover their costs then they will spend a certain amount on optimizing your website to be sure that the $5000 is profitable to them. They will not do more even when it would benefit you because they need to make a profit on what they bid.
Once we start on your website, we do everything possible to make sure your website is optimized properly. Many of the pages we do for you will likely come in at more than the minimum price/deposit you placed with us. We let you know as we approach the end of that deposit and the amount of work we think still needs to be done and let you know how much it will cost to finish.
If you tell you you only have x amount of dollars in the budget, we will tell you exactly what we can do for that amount of money. But if you want everything done that we can possibly do for your website, then we have to do that page by page.
Every page in your website needs to be optimized and needs to have a way to close the sale, whether that close is bying something or signing up for a newsletter or membership, or just getting people to contact you and building leads.
Each time a user clicks a link in your website, they are asking a buying question. Think of your website as a sales pitch. If someone clicks the about us page, it’s like them saying, “I’m thinking of buying from you, but tell me a little more about your company.” If they click a link to your FAQ, they are saying “I’m interested in your products, but I have a few more questions before I say yes.”
In each of those instances, just like with any sales pitch, you answer their question, then try to close the sale. They click another link/ask another buying question, you answer their question and try to close the sale again.
That’s how sales are made in person. It’s no different with your website. You need someone who understands more about how to sell than how to get what they believe is the optimal percentage of keywords into your webpages.
6. Can you show me some examples of websites you wrote?
This means I am shopping and not really committed to having you write our website content. Showing you a website that sells bicycle parts that we wrote doesn’t tell you anything about writing the text for what you sell. Every website is unique and treated as such by us.
Give us a couple of pages to optimize for you and see what we do with your topic and those pages and that will be a much better example than showing you other websites on topics that have nothing to do with your topic.
Plus we have nondisclosure agreements with many clients and we ghostwrite for many clients. We would break that confidentiality by showing you some of our work. There are even SEO companies that use our services for the actual work while they focus mainly on selling to new clients. So there are a lot of websites we write that we cannot show you even if we wanted to.
7. Can you give me a list of all of your services and prices?
Again, you are shopping. It’s ok to do that, but I won’t give you that full list to show to some other SEO company just so they can underbid what you show them to get your business.
Besides there are many services that cannot be priced until we see the website and get an idea of what you are trying to achieve.
8. Do you guarantee that I will be in the top 10 in Google for my keywords?
Nope. Anyone who does is likely to take you for a ride. No one can guarantee google will do anything except the owners of google. I can show you results we have gotten for ourselves and some clients who have agreed to let us do this and show you that we are going to use the same techniques to work for you as we did for them, but I absolutely cannot guarnatee you a top 10 google listing for your keywords.
Neither can anyone else. We have to study your competition and a lot of other things before we even create the plan that has the best chance of getting a good search engine listing for each keyword or phrase you need.
9. Do you have a money-back guaranteee that if I don’t like what you did for me I can get my money back?
Nope. The people who work for us put in a lot of time and effort to get you making more sales. They get paid for their work. If we work for you, then there is a cost for that. No way to get around that.
10. How long will it take for me to be on the front page of google for my key phrases?
It depends on so many factors it’s like measuring a black hole. Here are just a few.
1. Your competition. What changes are they making at the same time we are making to your website? Are they having someone re-optimize their site right now as well?
2. The level of competition. How many pages are there in the google results for your key phrase? Are there some major players spending a lot of money to maintain their top 10 listing in google? Are there government or educational websites ranking in the top 10? Is wikipedia taking one of the top 10 listings leaving us with 9 to play with?
3. How long have you been in business or owned the domain name with a website on it? Age is a factor. How long have your competitors who rank in the top 10 been around?
4. What is the search volume for that key phrase VS the search competition?
There is a lot more than just those 4 factors to consider, so we can’t give you an answer off the top of our heads. We can give reasonable estimates, or call them educated guesses based on our experience with key phrases we have top 10 listings for VS a similar level of competition and number of results for that keyphrase. But we can’t say we will get you a top 10 listing in x number of months or weeks. It’s not possible.
The reason we get these questions is that there are SEO companies out there saying they can do some of the things listed in those questions above. So people believe that SEO companies can make guarantees about those things. Anyone can say anything to make a sale. Actual performance is all that counts.
Important Note: Notice none of the ten most asked questions have anything to do with sales. Again the clients learn from the SEO companies they deal with and the SEO companies don’t talk much about making sales.
They talk about number 1 google listings. They talk about link popularity. They talk about a lot of technical stuff. They talk about monthly reporting. They talk about and show you lots of pretty graphs and charts. They talk about contracts. When you receive a bid from them you would think a fortune 500 company had the bid written for you.
But look at any of the SEO bids you have gotten in the past and show me where it talks about how they will increase your sales. Most of the time you will not be able to do that. A few SEO companies do. Stick with them whether they have pretty reports or not.
