Onsite SEO work and Linkbuilding costs

Johnny_Fontane

Just wondering if anyone here could give me a brief idea of costs.

We have a fairly decent website and we meeting with a guy today who has a company that 'specialise' in SEO.

I just wanted to know if there is a general rate applied to
1. onsite SEO work
2. Linkbuilding (generally on a monthly basis)

Any advice/insight into this, a great help.

Cheers.

JF

M.T.D

Hi
Very hard to give general price, too many variables.t

• target market -local/international,
• competition,
• value of your product or service,
• number of searches for your product/service,
• current site content,
• is it to tie in with ad campaign,
• what feedback the SEO company provides

We offer a full SEO service as well, give us a call for a 2nd opinion

Our starting point would be circa €200/month with a larger initial payment.
We provide full documented list of activity done each month, the results can be tracked by analytics.

SEO results are not instant but by the 3 month mark there should be marked rise in targeted traffic. Because of the lag time between activity and results many companies want a 12 month contract minimum. But I have seen this abused far to often with some companies doing little or no activity after first 2 months.
So don't sign up for longer than six months and specify you want a monthly list of activity done with analytics report and make the contract breakable if they do not provide it.

adrianshanahan

Honestly,

SEO and those who try sell their service are a con, it's one of the great online myth that these people can increase your profits.

As anyone with a true grasp of how things are going that SEO is dieing a death and Google etc are discounting all the traditional SEO methods as a waste of time.

People who promise 'we can make you rank first of 'x' words are selling something no one is buying.

SEO is a waste of time.

Adrian

M.T.D

Hi Adrian,
I agree, a lot of what is done/said in name of SEO is hogwash. But from experience, a properly set up site with good content, well laid out, and a bit of promotion will do a lot better than an non-optimised site. We would not put the effort into optimising and promoting some of our own sites if it was not cost effective.

tricky D

adrianshanahan wrote: »

Honestly,

SEO and those who try sell their service are a con, it's one of the great online myth that these people can increase your profits.

As anyone with a true grasp of how things are going that SEO is dieing a death and Google etc are discounting all the traditional SEO methods as a waste of time.

People who promise 'we can make you rank first of 'x' words are selling something no one is buying.

SEO is a waste of time.

Adrian

SEO is still very, very relevant. However there are oodles of clueless charlatans offering it just like in the web design world in general, with its almost non-existent barrier to entry. You're kinda right about the ones who promise a rank, they can never fulfill this, and anyone making such a promise should have 'clueless SEO charlatan' tattooed on their forehead and stuck off as an SEO provider.

unnameduser

SEO is very valuable but there are a lot of snake-oil salesmen in the business which gives it a bad name. Anyone can read a few online sites and sell a couple of meta-tags changes and think it'll change the world.

Check out primaryposition. Last time I talked to David there he mentioned that they aren't taking on any more clients - a clear sign that a lot of value from large organisations is placed on SEO.

Another group that comes to mind is Redfly.

From what I've read its all about the relevant, original content. SEO is changing on a month by month basis. A lot of it is trial and error. A and B testing etc. I did a lot of my own SEO a few years back and have read quite a bit but if I had the budget I'd outsource in a heart beat, what little I did know is now probably irrelevant. If you're going to contract someone it'll pay to do your homework - get references etc.

Best of luck with everything.

The Apprentice

Seo is a waste of time eh ??


Sorry i had to pick my self back up off of the floor from laughing there! Your worst than the Journo crowd saying all Public Sector workers do nowt, and all builders are systers ..

Quite frankly you haven't a clue and im worried now that your posting on the seo forums

The Apprentice

Oh and for all to actually understand why im laughing at him heartily is because :

Seo is actually marketing, specifically digital or online marketing for a particular website...
so that would lead me to think that it is indeed marketing which he is against

A new business without marketing, is like winking at a girl in the dark. You may know what your at but no body else does !
And if that buisness is online so be it - and im still in shock that he actually said it

:O

cormie

It's a strange one alright, I researched and did all my own SEO, I had nowhere near the budget required to outsource so had to apply myself, learn it and do it all.

I believe the business owner needs to have some input into SEO as they know their business more than even a great SEO specialist would (I hope?), so would ultimately know what people would be searching for etc.

It's a very unpredictable area though. My ratings seem to have dropped for certain terms since I did all the research and changes and I'm not sure why, websites which definitely don't appear as optimised as my own are outranking me in some cases. New content wise I believe I'm doing pretty well, I've a blog and everything like that and keep quite active in terms of social media, as well as having great reviews on Google place page/google plus and an excellent name for myself on the likes of boards.ie and from any active tweeters who have used me.

It's a little disheartening to see rankings dropped when you're getting more popular in other areas but that's the nature of the beast, nobody knows for sure why certain things are.

At one stage a search for my most popular term had me high in the rankings but aswell as this, also had the google map results show on the result page where I was top of that list, with a nice 5 star rating beside the listing with about 17 reviews and a little map to show where I was too I think. This was of course brilliant but I think Google changed something in their system and now it seems to be returning results based on where the IP address is based and giving results closest to that, which is very unfortunate for a business that drives to the customer. I'm based in Dun Laoghaire so would be quite a distance from the main IP address of Dublin which seems to be around Mespil Road? Some properly established competitors are ahead of me which seems fair enough but then some randomly listed classifieds are too which is very puzzling!

One important question for anyone who knows their stuff:
I'm thinking of doing a site redesign, a complete overhaul with new CMS etc. I believe my page titles etc are well worded for SEO and everything else content wise is good too, would a complete new website, even if I used the same wording etc, have a very negative affect on SEO? Would it have any affect at all or maybe just a temporary affect while Google spiders the new content and it may take a few weeks to get back up? Which it hopefully would?... I'm almost afraid to revamp the site!

The Apprentice

Well without going into detail on the keyword there could be lots of factors -
Judging by what you have said

1. You have got hit by the penguin/panda updates, you didnt mention when.
2. Your competitors have seen the ROI on that particular keyword and are actually paying for Seo teams to target that which is probably the likeliest.
3. You can be optimised to death but they probably have stronger Support from other links and from varying sites which will kill you eventually (link diversity)


Nope your rankings should not dip at all, it reallly depends what you have and what you are upgrading to. Your new cms may be quicker - This will help with page load times etc, and google will love this. Ive seen some ****ty cms's and the longer the cms goes on the worse the links and errors get, some of them have been knocking around years.
Also have u duplicate content on the site ?? Have u enough content on each individual page, you could be trying to rank a 2 line description of a product cormie which will probably be either very very hard or likely never work.
I also have seen if your site was a main distributor of that product in EIRE UK - Your customers who are supplying that info are most likely duplicating it onto their sites, so optimizating is out the window again
Your competitors sites, Domain authority - Do they specifically target only your products or have they other niches that they sell ?

There are literally hundreds of variables that you may not think of that may be relevant, but even the Seo juniors can spot them, because it happens on every site every day !

Feel free to email it on if you want - I work in Seo, and im not pitching, under contract etc !

The Apprentice

I should have went into more detail on the specific question -
Im on the CIE here and typing is torture..


Reasons for rankings to drop after the redesign
1. Robots.txt
2. Navigation Changes
3. Dupe Content discussed above
4. Url Changes
5. Changed Content Discussed above (Need long descriptions giving user satisfaction) bounce times on any page is a factor in google alghoritm now.
6. No 301 Redirect.. lol :S

cormie

Thanks a lot for the input:

1) I don't even know what the penguin/panda update is so I'm sure this is a factor
2) I don't know, the top result is boards.ie (which thankfully I'm highly recommended in the specific post) and the next result is a website which appears to have very little in terms of SEO (all page titles the same etc) so I'm doubting their knowledge of keyword targeting.
3) This is the one thing I never really did. In terms of link building, I have a link to my site like I do in my siganture below, on a few different forums, but probably only about 5. I've heard of link building, link exchanges etc but have always been afraid of this as I've heard that some SEO "specialists" just sign you up to link building sites which Google has a very bad view of and will downgrade your ranking if you're site is linked to from such sites, so I've just been trying to build links "genuinely" through customer recommendations and mentions, my own postings on other forums, links to my youtube videos or facebook competitions etc.

I'm not selling any product, just supplying a service, but perhaps in the future I'll venture into different areas so they are some good points you raised regarding product/customers/duplication etc.

I've nothing really duplicated on the site at all. Good to hear a site rehaul may actually improve ratings. Just as long as the designed knows what he's doing and about all the things you mentioned!

cormee

adrianshanahan wrote: »

Honestly,

SEO and those who try sell their service are a con, it's one of the great online myth that these people can increase your profits.

As anyone with a true grasp of how things are going that SEO is dieing a death and Google etc are discounting all the traditional SEO methods as a waste of time.

People who promise 'we can make you rank first of 'x' words are selling something no one is buying.

SEO is a waste of time.

Adrian

What an incredibly incorrect posting.

RedCardinal

adrianshanahan wrote: »

SEO and those who try sell their service are a con, it's one of the great online myth that these people can increase your profits.

I'm not as involved in providing SEO as I once was, but I still keep very close to what's going on. Over the years I have been working in SEO I'm confident I've generated €MM's in additional sales for my clients. I've worked in some very valuable niches where moving up or down a position in the rankings can translate to really serious revenue changes.

adrianshanahan wrote: »

As anyone with a true grasp of how things are going that SEO is dieing a death and Google etc are discounting all the traditional SEO methods as a waste of time.

Not quite. The spammy techniques certainly no longer work, and now can actually have adverse effects on your site.

adrianshanahan wrote: »

SEO is a waste of time.

I doubt the many companies vying for top rankings on terms like [credit cards], [car insurance], [hotels], [flights] would agree with your sentiments.

The real problem with SEO is that it became a race to the bottom. Remember if you pay peanuts you get monkeys...

Matrix Internet Web Design

RedCardinal wrote: »

I'm not as involved in providing SEO as I once was, but I still keep very close to what's going on. Over the years I have been working in SEO I'm confident I've generated €MM's in additional sales for my clients. I've worked in some very valuable niches where moving up or down a position in the rankings can translate to really serious revenue changes.



Not quite. The spammy techniques certainly no longer work, and now can actually have adverse effects on your site.



I doubt the many companies vying for top rankings on terms like [credit cards], [car insurance], [hotels], [flights] would agree with your sentiments.

The real problem with SEO is that it became a race to the bottom. Remember if you pay peanuts you get monkeys...

With a new Penguin update on the way in the coming days, it's going to weed out even more of the spammy tactics - and will hopefully discourage / weed out a lot of those using these kind of tactics too.

bceltic

Johnny_Fontane wrote: »

Just wondering if anyone here could give me a brief idea of costs.

We have a fairly decent website and we meeting with a guy today who has a company that 'specialise' in SEO.

I just wanted to know if there is a general rate applied to
1. onsite SEO work
2. Linkbuilding (generally on a monthly basis)

Any advice/insight into this, a great help.

Cheers.

JF

Hi Johnny,

Unfortunately there's no easy answer as it depends on a few variables.

Onsite costs depend on the size of your site, the age of your site, the competition level and the state of your site's content. Is your site already well optimised and needs fine tuning such as improving the site speed and updating sitemaps or does it require major heavy lifting, restructuring the architecture of the site, URLs, meta tags from scratch etc. and content for each page to be rewritten.

Offsite link building work is another kettle of fish. The simplest way I can explain it as a rule of thumb is that the harder the link is to acquire, the more value Google assigns to that link as a signal of authority for your site. For example I could get 1000 directory links for a fiver but a link from the IrishTimes is almost impossible to get. Ask the SEO company what type of links are they going to acquire, are they transparant with showing you these links, what sort of process do they have in place to acquire them etc. I've seen links go from the extreme of 1000 directories a fiver up to the other extreme - 500 GBP for a link per month (i.e. 6k per year for a single link).

Best of luck

A1terEgo

^ A link from boards.ie would be weighted well based on the above?

I am learning more every minute here - good rankings are based on many things but:

• Good original page content is critical and it should be of reasonable length and I assume have your genuine key words listed within the page content but not overly so?

• A good domain name would not be a negative but does not guarantee success?

• Links from other sites are of benefit but the more prestigious the site the better these links are? How does this translate to a signature on a popular board? People recommending your site on a board etc?

Thanks

A1terEgo

BTW - Does a link from say the irish times count if your website was listed or reviewed in an article?

The Apprentice

Oh yes alter Ego .. its link gravy !! Very good for anyones website to be featured or mentioned on that website or any larger ones !

A1terEgo

Thanks TA!

What about sigs as I see many have them on sites such as boards.ie.

B1gft

I would love to have a budget for SEO, but alas!
If I had a budget, I would type in SEO or Search Engine Optimization into Google and what ever companies results come at the top, (not the ads) I would phone them first, reason being, they have proving they know what they are doing, they have put themselves on top for a very hard competitive keywords.

I think anyone who offers you a price, check where they are for seo keywords. After all if they can not do it for their own business, how can they claim they will do it for your business.
If they say we are top for (Long tail keywords) that means they were not good enough or to lazy to go after the main keyword.

Just my thoughts.

gomez_gomes

People who are giving negative thoughts....it means they have been ripped off.. you think SEO is a waste. Omg no wonder some people still thinks that if SEO was"word of mouth" ever... Ya looking for a proper SEO Co. should choose & go for that Co. who will be a Google Certified Co.. Imagine those business still getting business from Google+.. local business promotion tool... SEO will take over one day...it will rule.. & it will be magic.. all the best my friends.. good luck!

brianbaru

adrianshanahan wrote: »

Honestly,

SEO and those who try sell their service are a con, it's one of the great online myth that these people can increase your profits.

As anyone with a true grasp of how things are going that SEO is dieing a death and Google etc are discounting all the traditional SEO methods as a waste of time.

People who promise 'we can make you rank first of 'x' words are selling something no one is buying.

SEO is a waste of time.

Adrian

I'm an SEO consultant. Why don't you try to convince my clients of that. One of them in particular was getting a couple of hits a day selling a competitive product. After a few months of SEO they are getting 4,000 a week and raking it in. My services were not cheap but they have been more than paid for.

SEO not only works it's absolutely vital.

Rollo Tamasi

B1gft wrote: »

I would love to have a budget for SEO, but alas!
If I had a budget, I would type in SEO or Search Engine Optimization into Google and what ever companies results come at the top, (not the ads) I would phone them first, reason being, they have proving they know what they are doing, they have put themselves on top for a very hard competitive keywords.

I think anyone who offers you a price, check where they are for seo keywords. After all if they can not do it for their own business, how can they claim they will do it for your business.
If they say we are top for (Long tail keywords) that means they were not good enough or to lazy to go after the main keyword.

Just my thoughts.

Be very very careful with assumptions like that. Just because their own sites rank for the top SEO keywords, doesn't mean they are any better or worse than someone that doesn't rank too well.

Another way of looking at it is.... the very best SEOs are too busy with their workload optimising their client sites to care / focus on their own sites. And the guys on the top have too much time because they don't have the clients, so they focus on ranking themselves for #1 keywords.

Best thing is to ask any potential SEO Consultant / Agency what sites they have ranked and conduct an SEO-audit on said site(s) (to the best of your abilities) and determine for yourself wether the tactics they used are legitimate or poor practice.

Be prepared to spend between €6,000 than €10,000+ for a 3 to 6 month SEO retainer if you want quality and to work with an SEO that can not only optimise your site for search but optimise your entire website for better revenue performance.

The Apprentice

Rollo Tamasi wrote: »

Be prepared to spend between €6,000 than €10,000+ for a 3 to 6 month SEO retainer if you want quality and to work with an SEO that can only optimise your site for search but optimise your entire website for better revenue performance.

Now thats a load of crap .. and i can quite quantitative and qualitative evidence to suggest otherwise !!

There are some small smes that could spend in the region of 500 per month and achieve 5-10 keywords on page 1 after 3-4 months..

Rollo Tamasi

The Apprentice wrote: »

Now thats a load of crap .. and i can quite quantitative and qualitative evidence to suggest otherwise !!

There are some small smes that could spend in the region of 500 per month and achieve 5-10 keywords on page 1 after 3-4 months..

Load of crap? No it's not. That's how much I charged clients when I was freelance.

It depends on your niche. I only took on e-Commerce clients with budget. It's all relative. For you say it's total crap, is simply naive.

The Apprentice

You can charge €200 per hours work or you can charge 50 ..

Basing knowledge or skill level on the price you pay per package is not the method i would advise anyone to take. You can charge what you want but dependent on what sort of hours you put into the client site is more relevant than the size of your checkbook.

Just because your paying top dollar doesn't mean that your getting top dollar work !!
And just because your getting 10k throwing figures up on the forums is just fanciful and will probably scare off most of the readers. I would hope you could be a little more conservative and helpfull, I mean seriously to spends 100k + a year.. are we talking vodaphone or 02 or some of the other big fish regarding e-commerce ??

We have a client that grossed 5m+ in sales is well under that budget per year -

Trojan

There is no "good but inexpensive SEO" any more. Google are trying to devalue anything that remotely appears to be gaming the system, although if you talk to blackhats you'll find out just how badly they're doing. Any SEO worth their salt is currently providing a hybrid greyhat link building and content marketing service, maybe even corporate identity and branding services at the high end.. That takes serious time and cash investment to provide, but is worth it if you're in it for the long term. Otherwise the blackhat option of build them quick and cheap, and abandon them to the Google wasteland when an algorithm update hits is an option, if you're happy to work within that type of world.

I had a couple of recent blog posts on SEO and pricing issues: How Much is SEO which has recent data from SEOmoz, and SEO: A Market for Lemons based on Aaron Wall's infographic. The "market for lemons" issue is very interesting, and I see good SEOs moving away from client work on a regular basis because of this
(as well as Google's destruction of SEO).

cormie

What's all this talk of Google doing away with SEO? As a site owner and somebody who'd be interested in getting SEO work done, are you telling me it's eventually going to be done away with?

Trojan

The issue is that Google are giving less and less of their SERPs real estate to organic results, particularly on high value keywords (the long tail and informational keywords are still fairly ok). They are driving search traffic to their advertisers, their own products and partners.

Example from SEObook with only 3 organic listings on page 1:


You can see the same in many travel and local business listings.

IMO the natural conclusion to this is Google losing market share to new competitors in the long term, but that could be a long time away.

cormie

Ah I get what you mean, with a search for "man with a van" on google.ie, you get a lot of map listings too, which I'm not even listed on the front page for, which is annoying as I'm probably the most SEO'd "man with a van" out there and have the most reviews on my place page too

What's SERP? Search Engine Results Page?

Trojan

Yep, apologies for the jargon, but you got it - SERPs are Search Engine Results Pages. IBL is in-bound link, OBL outbound.

brianbaru

Trojan wrote: »

The issue is that Google are giving less and less of their SERPs real estate to organic results, particularly on high value keywords (the long tail and informational keywords are still fairly ok). They are driving search traffic to their advertisers, their own products and partners.

Example from SEObook with only 3 organic listings on page 1:


You can see the same in many travel and local business listings.

IMO the natural conclusion to this is Google losing market share to new competitors in the long term, but that could be a long time away.

I don't really understand the post. Unless I'm missing something. If you remove the custom location and just do a natural search, the results are the same as any other. two or three sponsored results, a couple of organic, 7 google places followed by 7 organic.

brianbaru

People should remember, if people thought that the results in Google's serps were biased for a moment, Google would go bust over night. There are sponsored results but they are plainly marked as such. Personally, I can't ever see the day when all you will ever see are sponsored results. I agree, sometimes it might look like Google are promoting "the big boys" but when a companies are spending millions of dollars on internet marketing and mr.jones creates a few blog links in his spare time, it's hardly surprising he's not up there on the first page with those companies.

Trojan

brianbaru wrote: »

I don't really understand the post. Unless I'm missing something. If you remove the custom location and just do a natural search, the results are the same as any other. two or three sponsored results, a couple of organic, 7 google places followed by 7 organic.

There's only 3 organic results there.

brianbaru wrote: »

People should remember, if people thought that the results in Google's serps were biased for a moment, Google would go bust over night. There are sponsored results but they are plainly marked as such. Personally, I can't ever see the day when all you will ever see are sponsored results. I agree, sometimes it might look like Google are promoting "the big boys" but when a companies are spending millions of dollars on internet marketing and mr.jones creates a few blog links in his spare time, it's hardly surprising he's not up there on the first page with those companies.

Google are continuously expanding the keywords where Google products dominate the SERPs. The number of organic results on page 1, particularly above the fold, is dropping dramatically - to only 2 or 3 in many instances.

Yes, this trend should have a negative effect on Google's business model, but I certainly don't see them going bust overnight.

brianbaru

If you look closely at the page, it's a customised search. If you did a normal search it would bring up an entirely different looking page as described in my previous post with 9-10 organic results. I appreciate the results above the fold are not as organic as those below the fold but Google are there to make a profit. So naturally they will put their customers above the fold.

The results in Google's places would be classed as organic too so I'm not sure the results are less organic. Just different ways of showing the same results depending on your search. Thats my impression anyways.

cormie

Do a search for "man with a van" on Google.ie, the place pages do of course seem organic, but in no way influenced by SEO unfortunately. I think they used to be perhaps? I remember a search for "man with a van" had VanTasks top of the place listing with 5 nice big shiny yellow stars beside the listing too. They seemed to have replaced the place listings now with some other algorithm and have replaced the stars with numbers too a red 29 or 30 is the best score you can get, but to some people, a red 29 or 30 could come across as 29/100 RED for warning.

brianbaru

cormie wrote: »

Do a search for "man with a van" on Google.ie, the place pages do of course seem organic, but in no way influenced by SEO unfortunately. I think they used to be perhaps? I remember a search for "man with a van" had VanTasks top of the place listing with 5 nice big shiny yellow stars beside the listing too. They seemed to have replaced the place listings now with some other algorithm and have replaced the stars with numbers too a red 29 or 30 is the best score you can get, but to some people, a red 29 or 30 could come across as 29/100 RED for warning.

When you see a site like boards.ie or any other site like it ranking #1 for that keyword, it's based purely on it's a overall authority and based on that alone you know the other sites must be a real mess. On further investigation, they are. The only page that has any real right to be on the first page in SEO terms is #2 (onemanandhisvan.com)as he has a PR of 2, 6 years old, 500+ backlinks, 6 indexed pages and his domain to backlink ratio is one of the highest.The backlinks though would not be of the highest quality. Directories,blogs and forums.

You could get to #1 in a heartbeat with a little SEO and an aged domain.

cormie

I thought my own site was somewhat decent SEO wise, at least in terms of page titles, keyword usage etc. I know there's a lot left to do also, I thought I had done everything but "The apprentice" sent me a PM with some advice outlining all that could be improved upon. A LOT! How does my own compare to onemanandhisvan?

brianbaru

Which site is yours?

cormie

vantasks

brianbaru

Short and sweet. It's your backlinks profile. Only one that I can see has man with a van as an anchor. Most of them are from boards.ie. Think diversification in anchor texts, ip's, platforms etc.

You are in a good position to write a few tips based articles on moving and how to pack etc and publish them around the web. Look at zajava,squidoo,article base,ezine,goarticles,hubpages etc.. and promote them as well. Do a press release once a week on a different topic. There are literally hundreds of different topics to write them on without repeating yourself and they are extremely powerful. I've done many that get a PR of 3-5 without ANY promotion. Make a few youtube videos linking back to you on how to pack and move home and promote them. Use all and every platform you can think might be useful to your business and use them regularly. get into a routine and write it down so you don't forget. To do SEO well, you need to be very methodical and organised.

I get the impression you don't have any kind of marketing strategy. By depending on the web alone, you are leaving all your eggs in one basket. The way Google is right now, very few sites are safe when it comes to rankings. Make sure you hound storage places to pass on your number and leave cards in all of them. See if you can get links on their home pages and any other sites that are relevant.

Best of luck!

cormie

Thanks a lot for that. Good advice on writing the articles etc. I do plan on improving on SEO soon and will probably start a thread here looking for recommendations

M.T.D

Hi Cormie
Out of curiosity, what do you think are the keywords, that your main landing pages are currently targeted for.

Referring to your #9 post on this thread.
These are observations from my own experience.

• Most small business owners do not know what their customers actually search for as they never ask.
• Most small business owners could not write 300 coherent words about their own business, from plumbers right through to solicitors. not a criticism just not their area of expertise.
• Most small business owners do not know what makes a good website, not a criticism just not their area of expertise.
• Many web designers can not write good content
• Many web designers, and they could be good at design, are mediocre when it comes to SEO.

Most painters are probably crap at plumbing
Most plumbers are probably crap at painting
They know they are crap because it takes them twice as long as it should and the quality is poor. They know this by the drips paint/water when they do the others job.
A painter is better off getting an extra painting job and paying a plumber to do the plumbing job and a plumber is better ...........

You may say that is obvious ...

It also applies to websites
A plumber is better off getting another heating job and paying an online marketing strategist, web designer, content writer, SEO specialist, adwords specialist etc.
You do several years training to become good at anything.
So to leave what is potentially the main source of leads for a business in the hands of an amateur makes no sense at all.
Phone around, not web designers/seo , but their clients, find out if they get genuine business from their site, and when you find one ask who did it and employ them to do yours. It will save you a lot of money and wasted time.

cormie

Thanks for that M.T.D. See the issue was, at the start I had absolutely no budget for anything so I got the website built cheap enough and filled the content in myself and then worked on the SEO myself. Spent absolutely hours at it, trying to come up with the most keyword rich titles etc and checking to see how popular google search terms are. I do ask most customers where they found me and what they searched for and "man with a van" seems to be amongst the most popular.

I believe I'd be a lot more knowledgeable with website/seo stuff than your average man with a van or average plumber etc and I believe it shows considering the amount of business I get via the internet (I've never put money into any type of advertising offline as far as I know, well business cards and sign writing the vans is about all!). It's pretty much all my own work too, I got the backbone of the website made for about €400 6 years ago and haven't paid anyone to do anything with it since. I've been plugging away with what I know and it's worked enough to get the business established and it's bringing in enough work and I believe I've built an excellent reputation and have many loyal customers and great feedback on the likes of my google place page, facebook and indeed boards.

In saying all that, I now realise how much more can be improved upon and I believe I need a nicer, easier to use website as well as an SEO campaign that should, as a few SEO folks have said, shoot me to number 1 no problem! I also don't believe I can do it myself so plan on finding somebody who can

M.T.D

Hi Cormie,
Sorry for my last post it was not meant to be a dig at you personally, more a general observation about how little most business owners appreciate the differences between a "good" website that generates leads and clients and is a real asset to their business, and a web site that might actually have more visual appeal but is an expense as it does not produce customers.

Separate question do you know what key phrase each page on your current site targets?

cormie

I'd definitely agree with your general observation. I remember talking to a painter who was saying he got a website made but didn't get any jobs from it so gave up on the idea. I'm sure that's the case with countless sme's.

When you say about the key phrase each page on my current site, well that's the thing, as far as I know, it just depends on keywords throughout the page and the page title and description. For example, my piano transport page is result #1 for "piano transport" on google.ie, but I'm sure there's a plethora of other factors which influence it too, of which I'm not sure.

cormie

Just as a side note, my blog seems to rank pretty well. I'm on the first page for a search of "Winter Tyres" and it also comes up in a few other searches too. Why would that be I wonder?