EP 10: Key Takeaways for Buying and Selling SEO Services

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill:

Today, I’d like to tell you a story. Bear with me on it because it will lead to SEO and a few important points. So a new patient requests a consultation with a chiropractor. Within the first few minutes of the meeting, the chiropractor can tell the patient has self-medicated himself and has visited some questionable healers in the past. It’s clear that the patient is in need of assistance and the chiropractor can help but it’s going to be an uphill battle.

Over the years, the patient has read some questionable articles on the internet and purchased a few products to provide him with some in-home healing and quick fixes. This has made the existing situation worse.

When these tactics didn’t work, the patient visited less than reputable healers who prescribed questionable help and discounted rates. Now, the patient finds himself in severe pain and the state of his health is hampering many aspects of his life.

The patient decides to visit a more reputable chiropractor. And when he does, the chiropractor can see the prior damage and truly feels for this gentleman. After the initial review, the chiropractor can see a lot of work needs to be done. Not only does he need to reverse the self and for the damage done by the patient, he also needs to fix the lack of reputable care delivered by the discount healers.

The chiropractor recommends that the patient visits his office three times a week for 20-minutes sessions. When this is stated, the patient declares he can’t afford that level of care. The patients state he only has money for five minutes per week.

The chiropractor has empathy for this patient. And against his better judgment, he agrees to these shorter visits. It’s justified in his mind with the premise that any care is better than no care at all.

So each week, the patient checks in with progress and visits the chiropractor but isn’t quite the results he expected. He is spending but he is not really feeling like he is seeing the type of change and shift in his health that he expected and he wanted.

So he starts to call and email the chiropractor and ask when progress will be made and when he should be receiving the true benefits for his appointments. The chiropractor is at a loss and honestly, just disappointed.

His intentions were honorable and he gave the patient a discounted rate and he even provided more time with the patient than he is charged. While he really wanted to provide assistance and healing to this patient, he is limited on the progress he can make because the patient has constraints with his budges and his allowable time for treatments.

To make matters worse, the patient’s expectations are just out of sync with his budget. The patient keeps asking for status updates and progress reports but they’ve only just began to reach the surface of the issues. Progress is being made but it’s slow going and it’s limited because of the time they can spend each week.

Both the patient and the chiropractor are frustrated. They like each other a lot but despite their best efforts, it’s impossible for this relationship to be healthy because there’s a mismatch.

This, my friends is a true story. But instead of it being a patient and a chiropractor, we’re really talking about an SEO consultant and his client who is a chiropractor and a solopreneur. This is the situation that I got myself into this year.

A website themed buyer reached out and required assistance with his website. The buyer was a chiropractor who owned his own practice. And as such, he has been doing his own website maintenance and updates. He has modified the design and code of the website. He added plugins that didn’t function right and he hired an SEO consultant that was less than stellar. Content was written but it was stuffed with keywords. So it didn’t read well and it certainly didn’t adhere to SEO best practices. This meant it didn’t rank well in search either.

The content presentation was so poor that it was difficult for visitors to read or digest. Basic SEO tools like Google Search Console and Analytics and XML sitemaps were not functioning as intended. They just weren’t set up right.

Meta titles and descriptions were either missing or stuffed with just oodles of keywords. I mean they said chiropractor everywhere which made things very difficult to read and just really not usable.

There was time and money spent on the website but it was haphazard and it lacked the professional knowledge of SEO and web design best practices.

And these issues are only some of the problems that existed from a DIY website development and the low-end SEO consultant that was hired.

So in this real world scenario, I was allowed a monthly retainer but it was for a fraction of the time that was required and that I really needed to spend. And then when I actually did the work, I made matters worse because I was spending way more time than I was actually billing for and I was charging at a discounted rate.

So not only was I not being paid my hourly rate, I was putting an extra unbilled hours which dropped my hourly rate even further. But that’s not really the issue. The issue is I knew the website needed a lot more attention and the client just couldn’t afford it. And I couldn’t put that much time in free. It just wasn’t going to work out.

So similar to the story I told, I thought any help would be good. And I tried to jump in and I tried to make a difference but I was really constraint. In retrospect, this is my fault and I take full responsibility for this situation. I let my emotions and my motherly instincts take over and this clouded my business judgment. I knew I would make limited progress with a few hours I was allowed each month but I saw such a hot mess that I thought any help would be beneficial.

Today, I’m sharing this story because I really want you to take away a few valuable points that can help both SEO buyers and SEO consultants. I want to share them with you and I also want to reinforce in my own head what happened so I don’t make the same mistake again. So let’s look at some of these takeaways for both SEO buyers and those who provide SEO services.

I’m going to start with those for SEO buyers. So the first takeaway is low quality SEO consultants can hurt you and they really can do long-term damage. If you hire an SEO consultant, make sure the money and time you spend is comparable to others in the industry. Just like anything else in life, you will get paid for. Really cheap SEO consultants will provide minimal results. And more important is the fact that they can hurt you long-term. If their tactics are not in adherence with best practices, they can degrade your rank and your search traffic for years to come.

The next point is know exactly what your SEO consultant is going to do and how they are going to do it. Do not let consultants work in secret. You should receive a solid plan of what needs to be done, how long it’s going to take and who is responsible for each task. If the SEO consultant doesn’t provide this in the proposal, run away and run fast.

The next point is self-help can hurt you. So if you try and apply DIY SEO to your own website, you need to make sure that you know what you’re doing. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do your own SEO work, not at all. I believe in website owners understanding SEO and if they have the education, they should do it on their own because in a lot of cases, they are the most empowered to do it because they know their business better than anybody.

What I’m saying is I want you to be educated with high quality SEO training. You have to have a good understanding of SEO on a solid process for you to make a measurable impact in your website and to keep what you’re doing safe for you long term. If you don’t know where to find good SEO training, I have an 8-hour class that is online and it will take you through my SEO process from start to finish and really teach you what needs to be done before, during, and after you write content. I’ll include that link in the show notes if you need it.

So the next point is your budget needs to match your needs. High quality SEO is not cheap. Know this going in.

I personally charge $200 per hour so it’s really difficult for me to accept any retainers less than $1,000. And every time I get really frustrated because I want to do more work than I’m allowed to do each month. I just can’t make enough progress for you if I’m only working 2 or 3 hours a month. It’s really difficult even on small sites.

If you’ve done a lot of DIY work or you hired a really bad SEO consultant, know that your budget is going to be elevated because that I’ll have to get fixed. And make no mistake, it will need to be fixed before you can make any progress with SEO.

So the point for SEO buyers is SEO takes time. You have to give yourself and your SEO consultant time to make progress. You would not make quick progress with just a few hours spent per month on SEO. It really takes more time to make headway and it’s going to take more time per month and more months than what you probably expect.

A really good SEO is a journey and not a race. It’s going to take about 6 to 12 months to see some really good results so you need to plan for this with your budget and your expectations.

OK. Now, some takeaways for those who provide SEO services. The first one is you can’t help every person or company you encounter. I know that we want to as service providers. But as much as you want to be a solution to all their ailments, you have to make sure that you only accept clients that are fit for you, your process, and your pricing.

And like I fell into that trap and learned from my mistake. And as much as I did want to help, I really couldn’t because it just we weren’t aligned well.

The next point is don’t compromise on deliverables due to budget. If a project calls for 10 hours a month to be successful, then this is what needs to go on your proposal and this is the only circumstance you accept the work. If you waiver on this, you’re going to run into the same issue I did. And the project would not be a success. The client would not be happy and you will really be frustrated and disappointed with yourself.

OK. So the next point is know exactly what work was done by the prior consultant or website owner before you accept new clients. Your standard timeline for work can quickly fell apart if the prior SEO consultant or website owner didn’t have good policies and procedures in place. If they did black hat SEO or they did just really crappy link building and just didn’t adhere to best practices, you can quickly find yourself running down a rabbit hole. It will take a lot more time per month to work on the project and it’s going to take a lot longer to make progress.

And the last point for service providers is to set time and expectations with your client before you engage. You’ll have a much less confusion mid project if you and the client are on the same expectations for how long it’s going to take to make with SEO.

Now, I thought I had that with this client. But apparently I didn’t because their expectations and my expectations and what I know to be true is not really in sync.

So, I hope my real world example and my story has provided some value and insight for both web masters and developers. It was a good learning lesson for me and it was a reminder of what really needs to happen for SEO projects to be successful.

Thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode. We’ll pick up again next week and continue our SEO journey together. Thanks and have a great day.