Are Monthly SEO Services Right for Your Business?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps people find your business online. Done right, SEO delivers droves of targeted prospects… month after month… for FREE.
How do you begin with SEO?
Step 1: Realize that you need SEO for your business.
Step 2: Look at SEO as a long-term investment.
Step 3: Get smacked silly.
In step 3 you get flooded with a deluge of confusing apples-and-oranges proposals from SEO agencies and SEO professionals until you’re left pining for the carefree days of newspaper ads.
Should you pay $500/month for SEO services? Should you pay $5,000/month?
Do monthly SEO services even make sense?
Ah, that’s a great question.
And I can boil it down to a very simple answer.
The truth is that SEO work comes in two distinct flavors:
- Initial SEO services – Completed up front and rarely revisited
- Monthly SEO services – Sustained effort required
A shady SEO company will bet that you won’t know the difference. They’ll bundle everything into an ongoing monthly SEO services package. That makes the list of SEO services seem more impressive, which lets them charge higher fees.
The truth is that most items on their list will require little to no ongoing effort. Yet you’re still paying for them.
Become an informed SEO services buyer
A) Here is the list of important initial SEO services for your business:
- Performing research to determine your high-value organic keywords
- Optimizing your primary website pages for the target keywords
- Optimizing your overall website structure, interlinking and meta tags
- Optimizing your site for local search (if applicable)
- Configuring your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts
- Reducing your website page load times
- Configuring your blog RSS feed and submitting it to aggregators
- Building a foundational set of valuable backlinks from respected directories, relevant authority sites, and social media sites
Yes, these items should be revisited on occasion to make sure the playing field hasn’t shifted. But monthly? Only if you like putting in 99% effort for 1% return!
B) Here is the list of important monthly SEO services for your business:
- Publishing and promoting fresh, valuable content — blogs, articles, white papers, e-books, press releases, videos, podcasts…
That’s right — just one item.
The SEO game has changed
For 2013 and beyond, building long-term SEO value for your website comes down to just one thing: creating, publishing and promoting fantastic content.
Your 1st priority should be publishing great content on your website. This attracts valuable links from other websites and gives Google more ways to display your site in search results.
Your 2nd priority should be publishing great content on other websites. This creates valuable links back to your website and brings new visitors directly.
This is what people want.
This is what Google rewards.
Doing anything else is wasting time and money.
There are other activities you might still hear about from some SEO companies: forum postings, blog comment postings, spun article submissions, link pyramids, etc.
The most these activities will do for you is provide a temporary rankings boost for a few weeks or months. Then Google figures out your game and slams you to the mat. So… good luck with that.
To be clear there are many non-SEO marketing activities that you should engage in monthly for your business:
- Refining your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
- Refining your target customer segments
- Crafting a more customer-focused home page
- Running paid ad campaigns
- Running social media campaigns
- Performing conversion optimization
- Gathering competitive data
- Building relationships with strategic partners
- Testing, testing, testing…
But these activities have little to do with SEO.
So, are monthly SEO services right for your business?
Yes… if those services focus on content marketing: creating, publishing and promoting fantastic content for your customers.
Certainly you should also invest in some or all of the initial SEO activities listed above.
But the next time an SEO company sends you a proposal that lists the 27 things they’ll do each month to improve your website’s SEO, ask them one question:
When they go mute, thank them for their time. Then get back to work that actually matters for growing your business.
Thanks for your honesty! Learned alot.
I think it benefits everyone to be open and transparent. It obviously benefits business owners who are buying SEO services. But it also benefits SEO professionals by forcing them to “up their game”.
Well put Andrew. This is exactly what everyone should be focusing on…engaging content.
Regularly publishing engaging content for your customers is hard work, which is why many companies don’t do it. But, like everything else, rewards come to those who go the extra mile for their customers.
Andrew,
Absolutely correct. I have been trying to tell clients that they need to invest in some initial SEO services rather than go for a monthly model. But, most of them see what’s being offered by SEO operators and think that making upfront payments is totally unwise.
I suppose I can understand that sentiment if all they consider is the money: paying a large up-front fee vs. paying a smaller amount monthly. But that’s rather short-sighted. Over the long term they’ll end up paying far more through bloated monthly fees.
To be clear, monthly SEO services *are* important. But they should be squarely focused on creating, publishing and promoting fantastic content for customers. Nearly all other SEO-related services should be completed up-front and revisited only when needed.
It’s very difficult to find a good SEO company which focuses on quality, not on spamming. On the other hand companies are usually shortsighted and want to get good results quickly.
Andrew, just a short note to let you know i’ve learnt a lot from you and your site. You have a great way of explaining things very simply!
Thanks, Deeksha. I appreciate it.
As the seo paradigm is changed its better to ask for deliverable first and how the company individual update knowledge data base with respect to google changes,Now a days seo is not just gaining links its about relevancy and quality,Loved to read your post
What should be the SEO Activites that we have to do other than content?
Hi Rajesh – It’s all about content, links and social shares. You produce great content so that search engines can show your pages more often and higher in search results, and to attract links and shares. If you can leverage or build relationships that will earn you high-authority backlinks or high-volume social shares (valid, not bought), then definitely do so. Otherwise, it all comes down to content.
I know its been a few year since you wrote this post and things have changed but I’d like to hear your thoughts on link building as part of a monthly SEO service.
Link building isn’t a one time thing. It takes time to build relationships and search out quality website to get links from.
Hi Jeremy – I appreciate your question. I’ve hired several link-building “experts” over the years to try to build out high value backlinks over time, and without fail I was very disappointed in the results (which were essentially nil). If you have found a reliable, predictable and measurable approach to this, I’d be interested to hear about it.