How Long does it take for SEO Pro to rank your site in top 10?

I recently hired a SEO company for one of my sites and paying them on a monthly basis. They suggest that it takes about 3-4 months to start ranking in top 10 using all white-hat methods. Is this average?

Me being a primary ppc IM for last 5 years this seems too time consuming and not sure about cost/return at this point.

 

3-4 months is a reasonable amount of time. SEO does take much more 'work' than PPC but in the long-term your cost per sale or aquisition will be much lower than PPC - many times SEO and PPC can work in harmony but if you want the best overall ROI then SEO is where you should be leaning.

 

I will not suggest you to go through any seo company ... learn seo by your self and apply them check out http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34444 and learn some basics of google ....

 

Problem might be with the payment..monthly might make them take longer..it's in their interest. I would pay per performance. If they get you X rank they get X amount...then maybe pay them again in the future to up the rank further if you are satisfied. 3-4 months sounds like an eternity but in reality it takes time for sites to get indexed properly and have the amount of links necessary to rank well.

 

Pay for rank opens up a whole other "can of worms", if someone is only getting paid for getting you ranking then chances are they are going to use lots of blackhat and spam, meaning :

1. You get your rankings
2. You pay them for that performance
3. You get banned from the index
4. You lose the money you paid for SEO and you lose your business.

As I have mentioned before, there is a reason Rand can charge $1,000 an hour and there is a reason an overseas 'SEO' firm will accept a $22 payment after they rank you for some useless term.

 

3-4 months to consistently get more free traffic is too time consuming? I think you have your priorities wrong. Then again, you can keep on paying google for traffic.

 

Agree with all other posters - good, lasting SEO takes time.

When SEO is done using white hat techniques, it does take time. But the impact would not be temporary - you would sustain your good ranking, and would keep getting traffic from the search engines.

Consider it an investment that would give perpetual returns

 

valid argument. Make up the contract so you pay per performance but the ranking has to hold for at least 3 months or so (not sure what would be fair). Escrow the money and then release once you see the rankings are holding. If you pay me hourly to wash your car I'll take 5 months to do it..but if you pay me per performance your car will be spitshined and ready to go in 30 minutes. Pay per performance is the only legit metric in SEO imo. People that understand SEO like people in this thread and myself know we can accomplish a lot in a month but if it's for someone elses website I don't see the need to push myself each month if the check is guaranteed (I wouldn't slack off personally but be realistic).

 

Don't use SEO companies, unless you see their logo on well-established sites

 

3-6 months is what I tell my clients but sometimes its less or more.. One of my clients got a good result within 1 month. it all depends.

 

So 3-4 months to get a ranking and another 3 or 4 months to get paid....seriously, you are not going to be able to find any decent SEO to work without getting paid for 6-8 months.

Also comparing a car wash to SEO is apples and oranges.

I would say that 99% of folks claiming to do performance based SEO are scamming you one-way or another, take a look at my site under the category SEO Scams and you will see some example. Actually some of them are pulled right from this forum.

 

jg123 good point on the timeline but to mitigate this you can pay them a little to start or a % monthly, but not escrow the entire amount until the rank holds for at least a month. I think waiting 1-2 months for a 900 dollar package is fair (no idea what people are charging now).

You didn't read my analogy correctly. It was not apples and oranges. If you pay me per month I will take more months to complete the project; if you pay me per performance I will complete it as fast as possible. This is true for any labor intensive task. This is true for human nature. (I'm not available for SEO but I would assume anyone doing the work feels the same way).

Nothing to do with people scamming you. How would someone scam you if they only got paid for results? I would say the exact opposite is true. If I pay you to SEO per month, couldn't you theoretically slack off and still get paid? Yes. If I paid you per performance you would have to show results which is the fairest metric available - results pay, months under your belt don't.

Either way you obviously know your stuff so it's a moot point. People really getting hammered by this are people that don't take any initiative to learn the basics to understand the timeline/price structure.

 

Here is an example I wrote a blog post on:

Another popular scam is to rank for rarely searched long-tails with some popular words in the phrase so it looks like there is lots of competition, example: Popular Rock Music Bands (51,000,000 without quotes).

So there is two pay for performance scams and I am sure there are many, many others.

 

yes that time is reasonable when it comes to ranking a website using SEO, but based on my experienced ranking a website have many factors to consider it depends on the keyword, design, niche, content and age of domain. And you can also achieve a google serp #1 ranking in just a few days as I have told you it depends.

 

Thanks for all your replies. So now a further question.. this company is charging me $300/mo and says that in 3-4 months they can rank it in top 10. Again there is no performance guarantees or anything, but is $300/mo a fair price for their work. What would other SEO pro's charge me.

 

It depends what your keywords are you're targeting.

Sometimes you can rank in the top 10 in a week if there's not too much competition. Or if there's a lot of competition, you may never rank in the top 10.

 

Depnds on competitivity ... from few months 2-4 to 1 year or even more ...

 

i think its better to learn on your own about SEO.
if someone dose it for you, you won't know how they did it.

also, you will feel better if you learn it yourself.

 

It does depend on the keywords, but $300 does sound like a very low price.

 

I agree.

I also think it's best to learn how to do it yourself, if you have the time. Reason being, this is not a short term thing, it's an ongoing process, when you have the ranking you desire you have to keep working at it to maintain it.

What happens if you get the ranking you want and then all seo stops, it's highly likely that at some point down the line you will lose that ranking, what then? are you going to keep paying the company each time that happens?

Just something to think about

Dee