SEO? Oh yes, our web design company handles that

{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Matthew 05/09/2008 at 1:14 pm

I think I saw the same type of thing but with a web hosting company. It was basically a service that submitted your URL to various places for you. It looked automated.

2 Nick Wilsdon 05/09/2008 at 1:52 pm

This is exactly why as an industry we should be 100% behind conversion based performance tracking. Ranking is pointless, as many sub-par companies will get companies positioned for 3-4 term uncompetitive phrases. Nothing better points to the performance of your SEO contractor than the increase/decrease in sales or other KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

That would also deal a death blow to the kind of “SEO operators” that Matthew references, who pointlessly submit sites to search engines. The problem is that few clients know how to measure SEO success so contractors get away with this kind of nonsense.

3 Craig 05/09/2008 at 5:06 pm

This is a good point Patrick, and I’m sure this applies to the ‘big’ companies you speak to and work with. For smaller companies (like the one’s I work with), I can handle all of their design, SEO and link building requirements on my own.

Ranking local businesses at the top of Google for location based terms is not difficult, and on page factors can sometimes be enough to get the client on the first page, with just a handful of incoming links.

4 SpotOn SEO 05/09/2008 at 9:18 pm

You hit the nail on the head Patrick! In my town Houston, Texas most design firm sites are in Flash. Yuck! It would be nice to be able to educate folks about the differences between a design firm and SEO firm. Perhaps some sort of certification?

5 g1smd 06/09/2008 at 3:37 pm

I thought this was going to be a post about how a lot of design companies say they have got all the on-site design stuff covered, but in actuality have not done so at all. I’d say it was the vast majority.

*** The problem is that most people believe SEO is about on-page factors and keywords, very few people realise that having the most optimised site in the world is useless without links ***

Actually, both are important, but an optimised site with “X” number of links will perform far better than a non-optimised site with the same number of links, obviously. Optimisation of the site lasts as long as the content isn’t altered, or for as long as the CMS running it stays the same.

6 Saint Louis SEO 06/09/2008 at 6:40 pm

I started my company eleven years ago doing web design. Then five years I added hosting. Then I discovered SEOa few years back. I spend nearly all my time researching, learning and doing SEO now.

But my company still does web design. Still does hosting. Neither of those are my main focus, but they are still services I offer, as do a lot of self-employed SEO’s, I’ll bet.

7 LEON Bailey Green 07/09/2008 at 3:39 pm

I agree up to a point. What matters is that the company has a strategy for attracting links to their website through good content and online PR.

I am sure you offer quality and relevant links, but many SEO agencies with “link building departments” have strategies that will become outdated and useless in the eyes of search engines.

8 Richard Spencer Davies 07/09/2008 at 9:31 pm

I agree with SpotOn SEO in that some form of certification would be a great thing. I’m a designer, and clients often ask for ‘SEO’, like its a bolt-on product like a flash anim or a contact form. SEO sometimes has a bit of a bad rep as an industry as well, thanks to a handful of firms employing black hat tactics. Saying that if someone told me their SEO company had a ‘link building department’ i’d tell them to run a mile!

9 Dave 08/09/2008 at 9:42 am

I think there’s another side to this coin. I deal with really small businesses who just don’t have the budget to hire a good SEO. You can’t expect a one-man business who can barely afford a £500 website to spend thousands on SEO. They just can’t do it, and they don’t understand what they’re paying for.

If there are SEO’s out there who can do good work for a low monthly fee and who can explain (up-front) exactly what they’re going to do and the results the client can expect, I’d gladly hire them.

10 Nick Wilsdon 08/09/2008 at 1:23 pm

@Dave

The bottom line is that no decent SEO is going to work in those price ranges. By scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of prices they end up getting taken advantage of. There are enough dodgy operators who hang around at that level, promise the earth and deliver nothing.

If a small business only has limited funds they need to work out how to do their own marketing. The best way is usually starting a blog and getting a member of staff to update it every week. If they learn the basics of SEO Blogging they can have an impact. Take those few hundred quid per month and put them onto that person’s salary If they then learn some basic structural SEO (get on forums like Cre8asite) and improve the site further, give them a bonus. The business will get a much better ROI than hiring a cheap SEO outfit.

You can’t push down the price of decent SEO work though. You don’t go to get a house built for $100k and then look for someone who will do the same for $1k. It just doesn’t work. If companies can’t afford the prices they have to do it internally. If someone is offering the same service for 100th of the usual cost, be suspicious.

11 Dave 08/09/2008 at 1:32 pm

@Nick

Good points Nick. Nothing more I can add to that. You can see why people get lured into the ‘#1 on Google for just £100′ trap though.

12 Nick Wilsdon 08/09/2008 at 1:50 pm

@Dave

Absolutely. It’s an easy trap. I’ve seen some great results though from sticking an internal staff member on the job (for simple sites anyway). Your job as the developer is to set them up with the tools they need, namely:

1. Copy of WordPress (with some SEO plugins + auto-update)
2. Ability to Change META Titles, Descriptions across their site

Then give them a copy of Aaron Wall’s Guide to Blogging (http://www.seobook.com/bloggers). It’s going to give them a better ROI - seriously

13 Chris 09/09/2008 at 6:52 am

Patrick,can you give some advice about my web http://www.dress-gown-wholesale.com ,is there any ways to improve my page ranking?thanks

14 Alastair Campbell 09/09/2008 at 12:17 pm

Good post. There is a clear shift in business owners thinking abround their website. Five years ago it was all left to ‘experts’ who would say what to do. Now more and more people are seeing that the more they get involved in their own online marketing the better it is for their results.

15 Neuromarketing 09/09/2008 at 3:48 pm

When my company was offering SEO services to clients, we found the objection cited in the headline to cause a major lengthening of the sales cycle. Things always went something like this:

Us: You need to look at your positions in search results for your key terms - it doesn’t look like you are getting much free traffic.
Client: Our web design firm did that SEO stuff already.
Us: Really? Here are some rankings we checked…
Client: Those %$@#s… we’re going to make them fix this for free! Thanks for showing us those reports.

Us: How’s it going with your site traffic?
Client: We had to get our attorney involved, but the guys who designed the website finally agreed to fix the SEO they were supposed to do in the first place. Now we’re waiting for the traffic.

Us: How’s it going with your site traffic?
Client: We’re not seeing any more than we were before. We’re trying to find out if our web designers really fixed anything like they said they would.

Us: How’s it going with your site traffic?
Client: We need to talk…

Despite our efforts to explain what was involved in a real SEO project, we found many clients didn’t get it or were simply duped by firms that had only a minimal grasp of SEO.

Your post really resonated here, Patrick.

Roger

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