You know you’re in blog trouble when you start your posts with, “It’s been too long since my last post.” Hey, we’re busy as hell and we’re hiring: SEO Specialist, SEO Copywriter, Linking Specialist, Admin. More about all that on the TopRank site.
Now on to this malarkey about discount search engine optimization:
Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to give prospective search marketing clients “good deals” for a variety of reasons. Early on in your business, there are some compelling reasons to do so, but my advice? Don’t. Here’s some classics along with my feeble replies:
“We want to see what you can do with organic SEO for a month or two, and if we see results we’ll pay more.”
Great, sounds like you’re focused on results. For the short term, your best bet will be a paid search program. We can have a Google AdWords account setup with the approriate keywords, ad creative, landing pages and conversion tracking within 2-3 business days. We can monitor progress and scale the program up or down accordingly.
At the same time we can begin the process of optimizing your site for improved organic rankings which will take some time. Organic SEO should be thought of as a long term strategy. As we refine your site to be crawlable by search engines and enhance content as well as incoming links, your site will become more relevant for the search terms your prospects are using. If you’re going to optimize your site for organic rankings, it should be done correctly and long term or not at all.
“Our brand is very strong in the marketplace and working with us could be an entry point to bigger things. So give us a lower rate now and we’ll introduce you to bigger opportunities with our other companies in the future.”
I can see you’re very proud of your brand. We’re very proud of the results we’ve been able to deliver for our clients. The value we provide our clients is not something we discount. We would be happy to try a smaller project with you and scale accordingly based on the merits of that program.
“We want you to optimize our site on a pay for performance basis.”
Unless we have near full control over your site’s content and design, a pay for performance program is not practical. An effective search engine optimization program almost always involves improvements to the content, organization, linking and usability of your website.
There are many others and it’s tempting to just say, “thanks but no thanks”. I can say every time we’ve ever given a discount for any of the reasons above, it almost always turns out for the worse. That’s why we don’t any longer. What’s needed is better education on what SEO is, what it can do and when it is appropriate.
Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.
