SEO Pricing - Hours, Effort, and Value

I just read the following article, http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1528/, by Stoney deGeyter of Pole Position Marketing. 

Stoney does a very nice job of laying out the way that most SEO projects are scoped and priced.  The way he lays out rough estimates of the various components of an SEO project - keyword research, page optimization, usability conversion analysis, reporting, link building, and "miscellaneous management" - helps consumers of search engine optimization services understand that it isn't a "magic wand" approach.  Or an approach that lends itself easily to one-size-fits-all pricing packages.

Just like any other consulting service, it takes time, from talented people, to understand a business, research appropriate search language, and provide a long-term plan for search visibility success.  I would add a few other items to the list of typical tasks such as domain management, URL presentation, data feeds, consolidating acquired websites, and use of new SEO technologies, to name a few.

As someone who sells SEO services (in addition to providing them), I also want to help companies understand the value of an investment in an SEO project.  As Stoney mentions, "that's no small chunk of change" when a company is considering using marketing dollars for a project that can sometimes take time to bear fruit. 

If we are to take Stoney's example of an "average" SEO engagement of $3,000/month (and it can certainly be higher for a complex site facing stiff rankings competition), it makes common sense to ask "what will I get in return"?

I suppose success could be thought of in terms of the number of high keyword rankings, average daily search engine referrals, and search engine referrals as a percent of overall traffic.  But budget and business owners want to know about the return on the investment.  Every business has its own business model and economics, so it is important to think about things like a website's ability to convert visitors into sales and/or qaulity leads.  When the right tracking tools are in place (web reporting packages, referral-based call monitoring, offline tracking of leads-to-sale, etc.), it becomes possible to analyze the impact of the improved search engine visibility on the business.

For that "average $36,000 per year", will there be sufficient profit-after-expense to justify the investment?  For almost all large businesses, the answer is "yes, and then some".  For most business-to-business companies, including mid-size companies, the answer is the same.   So, if you will excuse this open plea, try not to think only about "how much am I paying these people per hour, or per month", but "how valuable is this to my bottom line?"

SEO/SEM and Tracking ROI

If you are interested in SEO and don't know about High Rankings, I would recommend subscribing to Jill Whalen's regular newsletter, which offers tips, Q&A and other helpful pieces of information on all sorts of SEO and SEM related topics. 

This piece was published in a recent newsletter and offers some discussion on how to realize the value quantitavely, in your SEO and SEM efforts.  The response comes from Michael Stebbins, VP of Marketing and Web Analyst at ClickTracks (a service we use for some of our clients as well).

Question:
I represent a golf accessory manufacturer considering doing some serious SEO/SEM. We are interested in determining the real efficacy of SEO/SEM as it translates into online unit sales growth or online revenue growth. I havesearched through many, many sites and haven't been able to come up with any good stats that demonstrate B2C improvements in eCommerce sales after applying SEO/SEM....I thought I'd contact you directly to see if you had any insight into concrete statistics that would convince a traditional manufacturer to consider these tools.

Stebbins Response:
This is a well stated question and an issue that is faced by most companies on the brink of investing in SEO/SEM. 

I like to think that good SEO/SEM efforts bring quality traffic to a site that meets visitor expectations.  Given this, here's a different spin on measurements that web analysts typically look at first:

Revenue is the result of your value proposition, sales, and overall marketing (which includes your web site), so it really shouldn't be a sole indicator of the benefits of your SEO/SEM efforts.  Also, delayed revenue and offline revenue events can skew the accuracy of marketing decisions based on ROI measurements. 

Conversions include events where the visitor indicates further interest in your product or service. This includes newsletter sign-ups, white-paper requests, carting an item, or on some sites, a complete purchase. Conversions happen in a shorter time span than most revenue events -- often in a single visit -- so the degree of accuracy can be higher than ROI measurements. While conversions are also affected by your proposition to the visitor, they can be a key indicator of whether or not the site meets visitor expectations.

Average time on site (ATOS) measures your site's ability to successfully retain each visitor's interest. It's also a good indicator of the synergy between the expectations visitors had before clicking to your site, and what they found once they arrived.  ATOS is not valuable when read by itself or when compared to visitor times on some other web site.    ATOS is more valuable when you compare it among various visitor groups within your site. For example, if this month's visitors from natural search stayed on site 30% longer than last month, then I could believe that my SEO efforts are successfully directing visitors who are interested in my content.  I can also compare ATOS between PPC visitors and visitors from natural search results to judge PPC campaign and landing page effectiveness.

Hits and visitor counts are less valuable by themselves and more valuable when segmented by visitor behavior and then combined with revenue, conversion, and time on site.  For example, a rising visitor count is a good thing unless the new visitors all stay on the site less than 5 seconds!

Don't forget to monitor changes in keyword ranking for important keywords and phrases.  Which ones are important? The important keywords are the ones that generate a combination of conversions and higher-than-average ATOS backed up with reasonable volume of visitors and revenue (sound familiar?).

Whenever I have made significant SEO/SEM investments, I check my work by using ClickTracks' Robot Simulation View where I can view my site as a robot sees it (text with header tags, meta and alt text revealed).  I often catch mistakes or missing data with this view.  Lastly, I use ClickTracks' Robot Report to see when and how often my important pages are getting spidered.  A skipped page won't get listed, so be sure to clean up any links that stop the robots from seeing your important pages.

There are many more ways to measure - including goal pages, return visits, lifetime customer value, email responses rates, comparison to PPC, and more. The keys are to (1) compare measurements for a specific type of visitor against the average and (2) recognize the limits of each measurement in the context of your marketing effort - in this case SEO/SEM.

Michael Stebbins, VP of Marketing and Web Analyst
ClickTracks Analytics

Room for SEO Improvements?

You would think multi-billion dollar companies would hire or use the best SEO resources, right? That doesn’t seem to be the case with Apple or Dell. Search the terms “computers”, “laptops”, “notebook computers” at Google, Yahoo! or MSN and the results of the top rankings are a bit surprising.

In the case of the Google results, both companies scored top ranking spots for “computers”, in the middle page in Yahoo! and not even the 1st page in MSN. “Laptops” and “notebook computers” provide even less-impressive results.

This tells me they didn’t SEO their website seriously for such common terms. They are getting the top ranking in Google, more so based on Google’s advance algorithm and page ranking system, then by a smart SEO strategy. In other words, plenty of websites link to those brands, but the content of the sites does not help with SEO.

So is “computers” really a search term worth targeting? Not particularly, since it’s well known such broad terms don’t convert to business as often as more-targeted terms. But why pass up the positive association you brand will earn with such a core term if you are a company as large as they are?

Think of the marketing potential a company like Apple could boast by leveraging this top position, “when you search for computers we are at the top” (with a clever ad agency spin and wording of course!).

Of course, people don’t set out to buy computers, instead when it’s time to shop in their minds (or search expressions) they are looking for a “desktop computer” or “laptop computer”, or even a specific brand or model to purchase. So a good target search term with positive conversion potential would be terms of that liking.

Check the search ranking for Apple and Dell for the more-targeted terms and their poor results (inconsistent from company to company and from search engine to search engine) clearly illustrates a fairly weak SEO strategy. So now their search marketing strategy is failing on two fronts. They are not capitalizing on the success of core brand terms, and completely passing up great sales conversion terms. This provides an excellent example of how even large well-established websites, should pay close attention to how search will define their business in the future.