Can anyone help here? I have had a quote from a company to "try" get me to the top of google and manage an adword account for my ecommerce shop and the cost would be £1500 per month! For that they would re word my website, do SEO work, get back links and run addwords campagne. Is this a expensive? I spoke to another ecommerce shop they marketed and they said that after a few days they were at the top of google for the keyword "Radley" which sell bags so the £1500 per month bill was worth the money! How realistic is this?
I'm going to ramble a bit here so bear with me! Right for a start I used to do exactly the type of work you are paying for, I ran my own very successful business for a fair few years and my opinions are based on that. The good news is that by using the word "try" they are only selling what is possible. If they were promising you top rankings I'd be worried. The next thing worth noting is that the people who are the top performers in internet marketing/SEO work do not sell their services. Well not for less that about $4k an hour anyway Why would they? Once you have the skills there is more money/less hassle to rank your own sites than work with clients. So no matter what you pay there is an upper limit to the abilities of the type of people you can hire. In my opinion £1500 a month is towards the upper end of what a small business should think about paying for this type of service. The re-wording of your site is a one-off job, that leaves link building and managing your Adwords campaign as ongoing tasks. You may find it more cost effective to pay a lump to have the website content/design done over for SEO as 1 step. There are plenty of (foreign) companies to outsource link building to who will cost only a fraction of that £1500. Again in my experience they are as good as anybody you can hire, the only difference is cost. There are plenty of SEO companies in the UK and US who outsource this part of the job anyway As far as Adwords is concerned between £600-£800 a month would be the norm for most small/medium campaigns. I don't think £1500 a month is over the top but by seperating the parts of the job you might be able to get more for your money. And besides never ever go with a single quote for anything!
Im a full time SEO and online marketer in London working for a direct advertiser (ie. not an agency), and have four years experience now in both organic SEO and run an in-house adwords spend of around $8,000,000 per year. Prior to my working at my current employers I succesefully ran poker sites online, and worked for amongst others, 888 and have done consultancy for victor chandler etc. The money that you are talking about here is significant (presumably) to most small businesses, over the year it sums up to be a decent amount and the only way that you would recoup this would be by making several times that amount in additional turnover which to most small businesses would have other associated problems with the growth. My frank advice before embarking on such a marketing drive and perhaps investing £3k to £5k with little returns would be to spend £600 to £800 on PPC and making sure that the other aspects of your site are up to scratch, ie conversion ratio etc. That will give you a much clearer idea as to whether investing in specific keywords are worth the money that you are talking about. Out of interest, what is your website and what keywords are you thinking of targetting so that I can give you my appraisal?
Is your plan to keep paying this monthly fee forever? I would think eventually you would have to break away from this service. Here is the catch. Once you break away, can you do it on your own? To continue paying a monthly fee of that amount for a new site seems a bit steep. If you plan on doing it for a few months to get to the top, in time the results will vary unless you keep up with the latest SEO methods. What works today, may not work or be sanction by google and other search engines a year from now. If you have to invest, invest in yourself by learning SEO.
A business owner has enough to do without working on SEO though. There is a business to run! For those of us that work exclusively online it makes sense, but not if you have an offline enterprise to run.
It's a difficult one to decide. We have only just started the site, last month. the keyword is "Wedding Invitations" and the site is "bw-wedding-invitations.co.uk" we was page 1 yahoo and taking orders but now slipped to page 5. We are page 32 google UK. I do have limited time to do SEO and think I have done the best I can so far for what little I know. But when you hear another company doing really well and on page 1 for their keyword it makes you wonder if the investment pays off. In other words achieving page 1 in google. I think as in previous posts, get lot's of quotes.