How can it be, that SEO companies are presenting a project to archive significant search engine improvements as 9 month project involving several full time specialists?
I haven’t had any problems to get my articles indexed and top listed within a days.
Being in Brighton I rewrote one small company 26 page website to be more search engine friendly and it was in no 1 position after a week with very competitive keywords.
As I charged £8 ph. from him, he complained that I’m too expensive as others are offering this service for $99.
When the project needs traffic/link building, analytics and monitoring it could be several months part time work to have enough targeted traffic but if your eCommerce project won’t be successful within two months, it’s either non viable or you have implemented something wrong in your strategy and you should reconsider your business model.
But presenting it either 9 month project or $99 service are both scams.
I also don’t understand how IT projects can take 9-18 months to accomplish involving team of programmers, team of testers, project managers, business analysts, etc.
So the programmers job is to produce bugs, testers job is to find those bugs and project managers will argue is that a bug or new feature not yet asked by customer.
This can only be justified by employing incompetent programmers or choosing wrong tools and technology platforms for the project.
After being awarded finalist in the “World Championship of Programming” in 1995 where our challenge was to produce working software product within 48h, I later developed my programming skills to be able to modify my applications for any prospective customer specifications in airports and hotels before presenting it to the customer.
To my surprise, customers in UK and US didn’t accept my approach and expected the project to take 6-9 months team of programmers’ effort to complete.
Asian market (Dubai, Singapore, Malaysia) was somehow different and more open minded. With partners there we usually discussed how to fit my products to local market requirements and what the price we could ask.
To prove, that my programming skills are still available, I started to write a “mobile blogging and publishing system”XML, XSLT, CSS and Perl. I did it after receiving Invest NI grant for £400 to establish myself as “Web Designer” in Northern Ireland within two weeks and hoped to get new customers this way.
To my surprise, I have been again asked stupid questions “How many programmers and how long have worked for the project?”
Living in Brighton (2004-2006) I heard the term “British way to do business”. For me the business has always been developing something most effective way and finding global niche for the creation.
Is “British way to do business” robbing as much as possible to justify their existence?
I`m take it for translate in a russian for my blog. This link, you can be sure.
That is a great article. I know there are a lot of shady web firms out there. It ruins it for the rest of us.
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That’s ridiculous, over 6 months to optimize a site!?
I don’t understand it either. I’ve been doing SEO for about 1-2 years now, and I’ve even done fun whimsical #1 Google rankings for friends in less than 72hrs. I’m talking 1-page sites with barely any content whatsoever. I have many sites that rank in the top 3 on Google & Yahoo that have pulled in lots of revenue. My friends/family/clients wonder why I don’t charge thousands of dollars for these kinds of services “because that’s what everyone else charges.” And honestly, I don’t think I would be able to sleep at night if I was ripping people off like that. I guess it depends also what keywords you want to rank for, but even then, I know of methods to rank easily in the top 10 with in 2 months, even for saturated keywords.
I agree with you, a lot of these SEO firms are either scams or huge rip-offs. They mostly are taking advantage of their clients. It’s a shame.
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I think there is clearly a misconception and a lack of understanding from some people on this matter who like to think they know everything there is to know.
It’s one thing getting your site indexed and acheiving some ‘good rankings’ for low rent search terms and terms they would like to think of as competitive but when you have got sites ranking in the top 5 for terms such as ‘cheap flights’ only then you will know how much work is involved.
If it is that easy and can be done in a few weeks, prove it to me I set you the challenge break into the top 10 of Google for the term cheap flights.
If you had the ability to do this you would as it doesn’t take half a brain to work out if you set up an affiliate site for flights and ranked in the top 10 you would earn £10,000’s per month.
You mention about ridiculous costs involved in SEO, clearly you have a distinct lack of business sense. If you can offer a service which would make the company £1m, the work you carry out doesn’t constitute you pawning yourself out for £8 an hour, you are still offering value to the company by offering services for £75 per hour.
You mention “Is “British way to do business” robbing as much as possible to justify their existance?”
I say is Estonian way to do business devalueing yourself and your business.
It is not very entrepreneurial to charge someone £8 per hour to make them £1000 per hour.
Yes I don’t deny that there are some scams out there mainly seo software and submission companies but there are a lot of companies which know what they are doing and offer great value for businesses.
Not only is it getting a site to rank well it is knowing how to market a site increase conversion rates and get the best possible ROI for the company which can be achieved.
People need to see the bigger picture and educate themselves before making judgements.
Some of them can be ok and save you a lot of time working on SEO.