What You Need To Know About SEO

SEO - What is it and who needs it?

 

There are a ton of small businesses out there who are trying hard to get found in Google and other search engines for their keywords.  They don't know crap about SEO and desperately need the enlist the services of a search engine optimization expert.  Someone who understands how to make their website rank higher by 1) getting more links to the site (paid or not) and 2) Optimizing various HTML text on your website optimizing for the keywords you want to rank for. 

 

Whats the charge?

 

The current way many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts work is they charge you a monthly retainer.  Usually a minimum of 2 thousand a month and I have many SEO friends who are not interested in any clients for less then 50,000.00 per month.  The top top SEO dogs like Neil Patel who's clients were huge fortune 500 companies charge hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

 

In addition to this monthly retainer most work on performance.  Meaning they get paid a bonus each month as your keywords improve in ranking and get paid more the better they do.  For instance if you were a chiropractor in San Diego and hired a SEO to rank you for San Diego Chiropractic then in addition to paying a SEO 2k min per month you could also pay them:

 

• $100 per month once your site ranked in the top 10 for San Diego Chiropractic.  
• $250 per month once your site ranked in the top 5 for San Diego Chiropractic.
• $1000 per month once your site ranked #1 for San Diego Chiropractic.

Why such a big range in monthly retainer?

 

Well its mostly scaleability.  Obviously if your Neil Patel and you have clients like Target and HP who want to rank for 10,000 terms and have hundreds of thousands of web pages that's not something one person can do.  So he needs to pay a rather large staff.

 

So what do they do?

 

For this fee the they will use tools like ShoeMoney Tools (We have over 2500 SEO's from the guy with 3 clients to the largest SEO agencies in the world),  Raven SEO Tools,  SEOMOZ Tools, etc..    They will use these tools to do analysis on their clients website and generate reports for them.  These reports will be things like:

 

• Backlink Analyzer:  SEO's will analyze who is linking to you verses your competition and with what anchor text.  From this they can tell you exactly who you need to hit up for links and with what anchor text to do to BEAT your competitors

• On Page Analyzer: SEO's will analyze all the on-page HTML of your web pages vs that of the top rankings in search engines of your competition.  Then tell you what you need to change on your page(s) to beat your competitors.

They will take these things into account and also their experience (or lack there of) and give you a monthly list of things you need to do.  Go get links here... pay for directory listing here... change title tag here... change image alt tag here... etc.

 

 

WAIT! So I am paying THEM to give ME work to do?

 

Well kind of... yes...  but you are more paying for their expertise to tell you what to do.  Its kind of like hiring a personal trainer.  Everyone knows they need to do physical exercise  to lose weight but where do you start?  How do you know you are not just wasting your time and energy?  Your time has value..... and if you are like me wasting it pisses you off.