SEO work warning...
Those of you that read any of my blogs know that I tend to write them after I see a trend. Just this week, I have been asked to give three quotes to new potential clients and to every one of them I have said the same thing.
The work in question was to improve search results, drive more people to their websites and improve their enquiry levels. Nothing unusual here except none of the companies had Google Analytics installed on their websites. Tis meant that we had no baseline to measure where the starting point of the work was going to be. I couldn’t tell what their website was doing, which keywords it was ranking for, how many visitors they had and where they were coming from, who they were competing against – and that’s just a starting point!
Two of them got it straight away; one didn’t, getting quite cross with me because I couldn’t pull a figure out of thin air for a job that was unquantifiable. I was informed that others had managed it – well of course they had, they were pushing a package at them, one with no level of targeting or personalisation and sadly, I can practically guarantee they won’t do a very good job for the client. This is why SEO professionals get such a poor reputation – because some companies think that there is only a process to go through and they will do the same thing for everyone – this is frankly bad practice.
We often get clients coming to us who have had a very bad experience with ‘SEO experts’ who charge a fixed monthly fee to ‘do SEO work’ for them. The clients often complain that it made no difference AND when we delve into the website, very often, we can see it hasn’t been optimised properly – if at all. They had literally been conned because its hard to see what is done on a website if you don’t know what you are looking for. And honestly, we see this alarmingly often. Its infuriating for the business and shockly damaging for all involved in SEO work.
If anyone in the world of marketing ever offers to give you a flat rate for SEO work, run a mile! Marketing professionals will always require data and baselines; how else can we know what we are doing is working? How can we measure change and demonstrate that to our clients?
At White Knight Marketing we don’t offer ‘packages’ – they couldn’t possibly fit a client’s needs precisely. We offer a bespoke service which is genuinely tailored to market a company effectively.
The two potential clients who got that straight away could see the sense of it. They both went off and have now got Google analytics installed on their websites.
We will now give it a few weeks and then look at what we find, we will interrogate Google Search Console and make a structured plan which will successfully build their online presence. We will complete a thorough audit of the site and correct any shortfalls and we will be able to measure the rate of improvement, not only their visibility but in making the website convert more people for them.
I know it’s frustrating when you just want to get something done and want to know how much it will cost – but if you want it to work, you can’t afford to miss out benchmarking and research; jumping straight into action without any evidence base is crazy and unprofessional – please don’t fall into this trap – you will spend more money in the long run and you still won’t know if it has really been worthwhile. If this has happened to you, you are far from alone but please know, we are not all the same.
Rant over!
