Getting paid for SEO optimization

Question

A friend of mine works for a small web development firm. They have a pre-packaged product that they basically brand with respect to each client that they take on. Recently, their clients have been interested in SEO, but few of the people at the firm know enough about web standards, search engines, etc. to do enough effective SEO on their own. Recently, they contacted me to see if I'd be interested in doing some freelance SEO work for them.

I'm interested in doing this; however, I could have a couple of concerns and am hoping that some of you have some experience with this and feedback to offer.

• As of now, I am unsure how well-organized the XHTML is for their pre-packaged product. I'm going to be looking more into it this weekend, but I've also mentioned to them that SEO depends on a number of factors - such as how well the HTML is structured - and, thus, some of the optimization will only be as great as the weakest link.
• I've expressed that a caveat of SEO is that it's very hard (impossible, even?) to promise that a customer's site will be the first, second, or third listing on, say, Google. It's even difficult to promise that they will be listed on the first page (because of factors such as the nature of the business, keywords, etc). All I can offer is that it will be more optimized when I'm done with it, than not.
• My biggest issue that I want to be honest in that I can do the work that will optimize the site beyond what's already there, but I can't promise a tangible result such as "your site will be on the front page in two months."

What suggestions and feedback do you have when faced with a situation such as this? I apologize ahead of time is this question is too far out from under the programming question umbrella.

Answer 1

There are two types of SEO businesses out there. Ones that do the things you suggest, like improving the meta tags and making sure the content is indexable, and the scum suckers who spam blog comments, forums, and who run link farms. Make sure you're not working for the second kind.

Answer 2

One good idea would be to try it out on one of your own sites first. Then you could demonstrate success to your clients. Of course, this could take months and wouldn't help you out with this job.

Answer 3

If you are upfront as to what you can promise (as you seem to be) and the terms are agreeable to you, go for it. Be sure that the contract specifies what you will do, not how high on google they will end up.

Answer 4

SEO goes far beyond making sure their website HTML is well optimized. Comment spamming is bad as has been stated, but there are a ton of other things to consider outside of the technical part which you seem to be focused on. A well rounded SEO strategy might include things like establishing a blog, making sure the site is listed in all of the major directories, establishing a program for updating content on the site, monitoring the results, looking at what works for the competition and using what you can to improve your position, etc. etc. etc. You've got the right idea by not making a guarantee about results, but recognize that your proposal (if we are seeing all of it) is focused on optimizing their site code which is only one component of a typical SEO program. SEO never ends, its a process that needs continual monitoring and tweaks to achieve results, make sure your client understands that.

Answer 5

While you cannot ensure a particular rank for a web site, you have a number of metrics you can use to show that your efforts are effective such as:

• traffic increases (you have 50 more people a month coming to your web site)
• rank increase on Google (you were at 5034/1,456,234 for a search for "product X" now you are 99/1,457,199).

If you agree on metrics in advance, not on specific numbers, everyone will understand what you're trying to achieve.

Answer 6

There are ways of showing improvement in page-rank, as a result of the work that you do. Google Analytics and Webmaster's tools go a long way to quantifying the effect of your work.

I think you're on the right track being open and honest about what their expectations should be. Are you providing SEO advice to the end-users, or to the pre-packaged software provider? Once you've properly populated all the meta tags, set the title up right, made sure the URLs are human readable and spider friendly, there still remains the question of how well the actual site is describing what it is. How good is the content? How many inbound/outbound links do they have to and from other "good" sites. All these things are specific to what the end-user site actually does.

Answer 7

I would definitely say be honest from the beginning. You're dead on target when you say that the only thing you can truly promise them is that their site will be better optimized than before. Promising any position on a results page is ludicrous, especially if you aren't willing to engage in black hat SEO methods.

A few things I would advise:

Your plan to look at the code their CMS outputs is a good place to start. If you work with them, see if you can also have input into their coding that will better optimize it from the start so you don't have to make the same changes over and over again.

You might find that you will be far more valuable to their clients if you also work on things like branding and customer satisfaction. SEO is only a small piece of the puzzle. You can have all the traffic in the world, but if it leaves right away and doesn't convert at decent rates, the SEO is worthless. You can work with customers through iterative and split testing to ensure that their conversion rates increase, thus affecting their bottom line and making you more valuable. If you can approach the job from that angle, it will put you head and shoulders above most of the SEO's out there.

I would also make it clear from the beginning what you will and won't do for the purposes of SEO and why. Clients will feel a lot better knowing their reputation isn't at stake if you have full disclosure.

Answer 8

It sounds like your biggest concern is around how to market or sell SEO. Probably your best bet is to gather as many statistics as you can, and show the customer what 'has' happened. This should preempt the questions that they have to keep the business relationship healthy.

People can be made to understand that they are not paying to be #1, they are paying to compete. In return they just need to know what the money 'was' used for and what it 'did' get them. It should be things like, "Your site's PR moved up 5 spots this week in Google". It may also help to be up front with them about how competitive the market they are entering is. Not all keywords are equal, and some take a lot of money to really be competitive.

Answer 9

Hey I just wrote this article about Natural Search and techniques one can use to increase traffic and rank for free. http://topcweb.com/content/stop-wasting-money-online-advertising A successful SEO effort relies most heavily on links.
-Do not worry so much about structure -Never make a promise of exact rank let customer know you can simply help improve rank -Get an analytic package in place (Google Analytics is free). From there you can prove the work you have done has been beneficial.

Answer 10

seo can be broadly divided into two major categories: on-page seo and off-page

its the off-page which you cant really make promises on (nb. i have heard of companies that do offer money-back guarantees though)

on-page is more predictable

one thing you can do as a demonstration of your knowledge is to put a potential clients website through a quick checklist and provide them with the score (basically saying 'your website has problems, we can fix these')

this is a very basic checklist i use:

Source: Bare Minimum On-Page SEO

--LM