Video Transcript – Buy a small slice of good SEO not tons of “cheap SEO”

Buy a small slice of good SEO not tons of “cheap SEO” – original post here

Hey, welcome back, rankers. I was talking this week to a former client. She was a client back, I think as far back as about 2007. That’s a long time ago. And SEO was a very different world then, in some ways a lot easier, in some ways not as sticky, a lot harder as well. But we had this client at number ones and twos and threes for all her highly competitive keywords. And we put up our prices I think in about 2010 when she left us. She said, “Sorry, I can’t afford you any more. You’re too expensive.” And I did that video a couple of weeks ago on how to select a good SEO, how to check for an SEO and I said beware of cheap SEOs.

I just wanted to expand on that a little bit because in my discussion with this former client she said to me, “Jim, can you give me an overview of the SEO that’s been done on my site over the last 12 months?” I asked, “How much have you been spending?” to which she replied, “I’ve been spending about 1200 bucks a month, something like that,” which is not a typical price point for SEO. But my contention with her has always been how much can you get done in that month for that amount of money, so I said, “Look, our prices start at more than double that amount now for a client. And it’s all based on how many hours you would do in that month. It’s essentially time and material, except we don’t have a lot of material.”

But it’s essentially how much time someone is spending on your site, how many people are managing your site. It’s a bit like, I’ve often compared it to law firms, except when you smile at a client you’re not being charged for the smile as opposed to a lawyer. And in that blog post the other week I said cheap SEO is like a cheap lawyer. They’ll both take your money, but you probably won’t like the outcome. And in the case of this client it’s kind of true. She spent over $12,000 in the last 12 months and it really, really irks me – I’m not going to swear. It really, really annoys me because it’s this sort of SEO, and look, I’m not going to tell you whom the client is and I’m not going to tell you who the SEO company is, but do your research. Seriously, do your research. This client is in a very, very small niche. It’s a one-woman business. She has part-timers come in. It’s a high value niche that she just manages on her own.

So a deluge of traffic has never been her goal. It’s been phone calls, leads, people who need her service. And this is from 2009, this graph I’m showing you here now. Another indication that I left out is being wary of SEOs who do things. One of the things that you should be wary of is if they want to change the whole analytics account, okay, because you’ll lose all historical data. You’ve got no seasonality. Now, for every client that we look at over time, unless they’re being hit by a Google penalty, your traffic will tend to go up from Google over time because Google sees that you’ve been there a long time, you’re stable. If you’re not doing anything too dodgy you’re going to be okay. This client back in the same time period which I’ll show you, current time period, for that 30 days did about 300, so you can say 10 visits a day from Google which I know by most people’s standards is, “So what?” But for her that was okay. She was getting leads, she continued to be a client for a further two years, something like that, and that was coming off pretty much no traffic.

The current SEO has provided her with 181 sessions from Google Organic in the last 30 days. Now, you might say as she said, “Well, it’s very competitive now. There are more people doing what I’m doing.” “Sure there are and all their sites are newer than yours, you’ve been around longer, you’ve got some really nice backlinks from different publications and all the rest of it. You should be the authority.” She probably isn’t publishing as much as what she should be now, that would be the only thing, but I haven’t done a full competitive analysis. But I said, “I don’t have a product for you,” and then I thought, “What am I going to do? I feel bad for this person.”

And I revisited my phrase about cheap SEOs like a cheap lawyer. Well, you can still hire a good lawyer; just don’t hire them for as long as someone else might. So you still get their expertise, but as I said to her, “Look, I could do more in four hours with your site than you’ve seen in 12 months.” Because I’ve gone to the site and I’ve looked at the page titles and this is the stuff that annoys me. I’ve looked at the page titles and the one phrase, and I know her phrases back-to-front because it was me doing the SEO on her site back then, I’m looking at the phrases that she wants to rank for. They’re not in the page titles, they’re not anywhere in any URLs, they’re not in any H1s, and on the one page that maybe looks like a target page it doesn’t appear anywhere on the page. I mean talk about fundamental SEO, get your words on the page. Get them in the page titles.

She doesn’t have a lot of problems with the site. The site seems clean. It’s functional. It’s only 60 pages. It’s a WordPress site. You’re not going to have a lot of problems with that. But you will have problems if you don’t put your keywords in the right places. So anyway, so what happened yesterday after that conversation, we thought, “You know what?” I said to her, “Look, I tell you what I’ll do. I’m not going to cannibalize my hourly rate here, but how about you just take a small amount of hours for the next 90 days. We’ll give you some goals, set some goals for you about what we hope to achieve in that 90 days. If you’re okay with that come on board and we’ll see what we can do.” So she’s back as a client as of yesterday and I thought, “I should be doing that for a bunch of other clients.”

So if you’ve had bad SEO or if you’ve been spending about a $1000 a month, something around that over the last 12 months and you’re not real happy with what you’re getting, give it to us. I’ll do it for a similar price. It won’t happen as quickly as some of our enterprise clients because we’re focusing on a lot more key phrases, we’re focusing on much more traffic, bigger sites, and those sorts of things. But if you have been spending that give us a shot at it and I assure you, I’m not going to turn this into an ad, this video, but there’s cheap SEO and there’s expensive SEO. It is how much of that do you need to make a difference to your business is the question. I’ll leave a link at the end of this video, in the video, just click on the video and it will take you to the other video they’re about to record straight after this to tell you more about the product.

And here’s another metric you can look at too, right. So this is the current SEO what they have done for her, or haven’t done I should say. You can see here that only 71% of her sessions are new out of the 181 sessions for the last 30 days. Now, what that means is that about 30% of the visitors are returning visitors. They already know who you are, but they’re coming in from Google, so they probably Googled your brand. So you could probably assume that about 30% of these visits are brand-related, so not really the work of the SEO. Back in 2009, there were only 20% of her sessions that were probably brand-related. Okay? So what I’m trying to say here is that over time her brand-related search has only grown by 10%, well that’s horrible for the numbers that we’re looking at. Brand search hasn’t grown that much at all, so you could argue she needs to be doing more with the brand certainly. But the percentage of organic traffic coming in naturally from keywords has shrunk as a percentage as well of the entire traffic. So it’s got so bad for spending $1200 and I hate that.

So there are some of the metrics that you can look at and of course do all the other things. Oh, another thing I noticed too. The bounce rate back in 2009, 52%. Probably a bit high. These days on her current site it is .55%. Now, you might say, “Jim, that is stellar. Half a percent bounce rate.” No, that’s a mistake. That’s an error. That does not happen. What I would say, and we aren’t even looking at the code. I’d say the Google Analytics code is stuffed up somewhere. I’d say she probably got two or three versions of it or something, something like that within those pages because that’s typically what happens. We did that from Melbourne Storm. When I went and had a look at their Google Analytics their bounce rate were all at 1 or 2%. I found four instances of Google Analytics code within every page, which basically meant that Google thought no one was ever leaving the pages. So when you see a bounce rate like that, no. I’ll accept 10 to 20% as a bottom end bounce rate, but .5% means there’s a problem with the code.

So even these numbers here, these numbers might even be greatly inflated even more. I don’t know. I haven’t got down to that level. But obviously, like most things, it’s not how much you’re spending. It’s the quality. So if you’re getting good quality at a thousand bucks go for it. If you’re not, click here. And hopefully that’s helpful. Hopefully that’s given you a few things to look and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.