SEO - The Truth
Any SEO geek worth his salt should be able to optimise a full website, no matter what the size of the site itself in no more than 1 working day !!
Larger Internet Marketing Agencies justify their existence by producing reams of reports, strategic analysis documents and long-term budget forecasts.
Six out of the top tem rated 'search marketing companies' don't perform any in-house SEO at all - it is all outsourced.
Blue Chip Internet Marketing Companies employ a sales team, account managers and 'specialist teams' - further adding to your costs.
If you cut out all the reporting (surely all you need to know is that rankings will increase, therefore sales will increase) and the middle men then you can save yourself a fortune.
INTERNET MARKETING AGENCY - A DAY IN THE LIFE
As six out the UK's top ten rated internet marketing companies outsource all their SEO (as they haven't got the talent or the wherewithall to perform the task in hand themselves), we thought it would be good to highlight what goes on in those trendy offices with all the fancy cars outside.
Large companies have a marketing budget and it is the Agency's Sales Director's job to relieve his counterpart of as much of that budget as possible. Of course, a huge chunk will go on 'set up costs'. 200 page competitor analysis reports, 50 page website analysis reports, lunch expenses and a new car for the MD - that's what your set-up costs are !!
Once the account is secured then the work itself is usually dished out to an SEO specialist - normally a geek working from home. "Take your time, the client has been told it will take three months to get his site up to scratch and we are charging your time out at £10000".
In fact, we know of one particular agency in the North of England that only employs sales people - they even outsource their reporting.
Yes, Creative Box are on their outsourcing list but we are so utterly perturbed by one particular client website scenario that we won't do any more work for this agency at all !!
We discovered that this Internet Marketing Agency is charging the client some £200,000 a year for the service that we provided for a one-off charge of just £500.
The reporting now consists of a monthly schedule of bastardizing the reports that Google Analytics generate for free, copying and pasting into a standard report document and emailing it to the client - 1 hours' work.
In essence, if you are responsible for the marketing budget in any company - large or small - you should take an hour or so and get onto Google and perform a search for SEO + your local area (or any related term like 'internet marketing' etc.) and speak to whoever is top. You'll get a better service, better results, save heaps of cash and form a long-term relationship with someone who can do the job.
If you where to take your car for a service, would you expect the Head Mechanic to greet you with a report on what spanners he was going to use and in which order?
Nope, you'd trust him to do the job - at a decent price - and expect your car to be running better than before you took it in. What's the difference?
The wool is being pulled over your eyes.
Here's a challenge. Give us a ring, tell us your website address and, within two minutes, we'll give you some ammunition to go back to your SEO providers and say: "Hold on a god damn minute - you aren't doing the job that we pay you to do!"