seo contracts Archives by Mark Murnahan

SEO and Social Media Reward: $5,000 for Introduction

Updated 13 June 2011 — This offer is re-opened through 30 June 2011.

I am going to give you an opportunity to pick up $5,000 just for making a simple introduction. This is not a hoax, and I really will put $5,000 in your sweaty palms for introducing me to “the right one”.

Great weather is coming, and I am pretty sure that most people can find a way to spend a surplus of $5,000 this spring. Cruise ships, sandy beaches, mortgage payments, utility bills, and many other amazing delights are right around the corner.

I hope that $5,000 will be worth a few minutes of your time to rack your brain, peel through your list of contacts, and think hard about whether you know this person I am seeking. Mostly, I hope that you will do it because I am a good fit for that acquaintance of yours, and because we deserve to meet each other.

So that you can have a better idea of who you are introducing, I offer you a link for more information about me, but you can come back to that part.

First, I will briefly explain why I am making this offer, what I offer, and who I am looking for. If you just want to skip to the details, click here.

I just reviewed the response to an engagement letter I sent out a couple days ago, and I almost wet myself with laughter and dismay all at once. I send out what seems like a squillion responses to companies that contact me hoping to benefit from my work, but this one was different. It was for a company that was referred to my services by somebody who was referred to my services. Somewhere along the line, it seems that I have picked up a reputation for what I do. This still does not mean that everybody I meet has a brain in their head, a dollar in their bank, or a sincere desire to improve their business.

As I have seen many times before, the recipient of my engagement letter hit me back with something resembling “Duh, wut duh ya mean … ya want us tuh pay fur it?” This was not their exact words, but that was my interpretation. To say the least, I am not very tolerant of cheapskates, or people who talk about action more than actually taking action.

It was after this response that I seriously realized that I had hit the wall at the end of my patience for dealing with this equivalent of The Abominable Snowman on Looney Tunes (video reference). As a husband and father of three, I am all grown up and reasonably mature, but if I must tolerate another of these abominable snowmen who insist I am a rabbit, I will likely use much stronger language than good old Daffy Duck.

Yes, I am a snarky guy, and I prefer to send a good booger from your nose to your computer screen than to make this sound too serious. After all, I am trying to put 5,000 bucks in your pocket, and that should be fun!

In this case, I am going to spell something out in sobering terms. I love the work I do. I help companies to be successful with their online marketing. It is an awesome feeling to see companies succeed. However, I must say this in true Murnahan fashion: “Business is great if not for all the damn customers.” Is that crazy? Perhaps, but it is very true. I am inundated by requests each day to offer my services to build an uncommitted company’s success for a fraction of what my work is worth.

The size of the company doesn’t matter. Building bigger and more profitable companies is my job. Even a small company with a focused desire for business growth can be extremely successful with a good strategy and a decisive marketing approach.

I broke my magic wand a long time ago. So, these days I build companies with other tools like market research, strategy, customer modeling, and well-crafted ideas to help companies look, smell, and feel like sex, bacon, and other things people crave. Yes, you read that correctly. In layman’s terms, my job is to make companies more like sex and bacon. You know what I mean, the things that people like.

That is how companies become popular. It improves their search engine rankings because all of the sudden the whole world wants to link to their website. Understanding their best value proposition and knowing the customers who want their “sex and bacon” improves their social media reach, and response rates. When it all comes together, it makes a lot of other great things happen for a company, including much higher profit.

Seeking a Frog Hair in a Fiberglass Factory

Although I am a very experienced and creative marketing guy, finding the best clients is like searching for a frog hair in a fiberglass factory. I sort through a lot of people rubbing their lamp and hoping for a genie, but a much smaller number of people are ready and able to put a signed check in my hand. They still want their fill of that sexy bacony stuff that comes when I rub a couple brain cells together, but that comes with money.

I have said it many times, and even blogged that “When I go to hell, they will have me selling SEO“. I say that, because I simply do not enjoy the selling process. Sure, you can search Google for How to Sell SEO and find me right up top, but the truth is that I love the work, and not the selling. This is why I am seeking an ongoing project, rather than the short-sighted marketing that many people ask for.

To make this fun for both of us, I am offering you a $5,000 reward to help me find that one special “frog hair in the fiberglass factory”. I want the one who wants the benefits that a great SEO and social media marketing guy can provide.

Claim Your $5,000 Social Media Reward!

The details are easy: If you introduce me to my special someone who is ready to take their marketing to a new level of success with a minimum six month engagement of my SEO and social media marketing services, you get the money.

This could be either contract work, or in-house, working directly for the company. You can introduce me by email, telephone, blog about it, tweet about it, direct them to my resume, or whatever you like. You only have to be the one who brings us together, and the money is yours. I just need to know that you are the actual person who introduced us, so I welcome you to contact me.

When do you get the money? I am sure you were thinking that, right? I will pay the $5,000 reward within ten days of my acceptance of a paid contract, or within 30 days of joining with a company full-time.

This is a limited offer! This is limited to just one … my special one. I don’t take on a lot of clients, and if somebody wants me enough to make me their Marketing Director, that is clearly a one-time offer. I am also limiting it in time, so stop dilly-dallying and claim your five grand!

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Enterprise SEO Services: How Enterprise Justify SEO Cost

Enterprise SEO Sounds Great: But What is Enterprise?

I often find myself visiting with everything from small emerging SEO clients to mid-market SEO clients and large enterprise SEO clients. A commonality I find is that each of them have a hard time justifying the initial cost of SEO services, but I want to help explain how they are able to do so. In each instance, there is a clear understanding that they need SEO. After all, it is what makes them visible to more people searching to buy what they sell. Let’s not get silly and start questioning whether SEO works or not.

We surely all know that SEO provides an excellent return on investment when it is done just right. If you don’t know this already, there are a squillion solid case studies to back it up. If you are reading this, you know very well that it works. I wrote this and SEO’d it for you, and now you are here to read it, so let’s not be coy. You want more people to see your brand and your value proposition, and this is something that enterprise search engine optimizers do well. The challenge lies in how to justify the stroke of a pen that puts your money into the SEO’s bank account. So let’s look at that and consider how everything from the enterprise SEO service level all the way down to a “let’s fail fast and get it over with” marketing budget is justified.

What is Enterprise SEO?

Let us first look at the term, enterprise SEO. What does it really mean? Somehow the word enterprise has been used to define an elite level of businesses that spend a lot of money on marketing and have thousands of employees in huge skyscrapers. Let’s put that definition of enterprise to bed right now, and start looking at this a bit differently. I like the definition provided by Princeton University which states as follows:

Enterprise: “a purposeful or industrious undertaking (especially one that requires effort or boldness)”

Using this definition, it seems more obvious how we can categorize SEO and create a description of “enterprise SEO” as opposed to other SEO … call it “hobby SEO” or maybe “wasteful SEO”. This is because, as the definition describes, it is a “purposeful or industrious undertaking”, which is too often not the case at all with SEO. I often witness huge errors when the initial cost of SEO overrides the value of good SEO. I mean, let’s consider this: If you are shopping around for search engine optimization services, are you likely to look for the SEO with the highest cost, or the one with the lowest cost? If you do not recognize this as an absurd question, you should. If low cost is the biggest deciding factor, you have it all wrong. Instead, I want you to imagine seeking the search engine optimizer with a better strategy and a bid that you can justify to yourself, your company board members, your wife, or whomever you answer to.

Tragically, the initial cost of SEO is a big factor to a lot of people, while the “effort or boldness” part of the enterprise definition is devalued due to fear of loss overriding expectation of gain … even when it is substantiated with logic. I stand behind what I said in the article “Fear Affects Success in Marketing More Than Logic“, because I know from experience that it is true.

Common View of Enterprise SEO

Considering a common view of enterprise SEO, it is easy to imagine a team of bright and creative marketers gathered in a meeting room providing consultation to the big company’s internal SEO staff. They craft plans based on a lot of facts and figures, they meet repeatedly to define objectives, they strategize at great length, and they carve out a huge piece of marketing budget justified by real-world estimates based on known variables. Then it is time for implementation on a grand scale to put all of those great plans into profit-producing action.

Enterprise SEO starts to look really costly, but the risks also start to look smaller with all of that valuable data and planning. Most people agree that search engine optimization would be a whole lot easier to justify in this scenario of the enterprise-level SEO campaign. After all, it is no longer a unicorn hunting expedition or an elf-chase … it is a real-world Internet marketing campaign. Large enterprises like Amazon.com, Intel, Pepsi, and eBay would not spend all of that time, effort, and money if it did not improve their bottom line. An important question is how to bridge the huge gap between your efforts and enterprise-level SEO efforts responsibly and without waste?

Bridging Unicorn Hunting SEO and Enterprise SEO

A big difference between the large-scale enterprise SEO campaign and lower-level efforts is how far it is pushed to the point of diminishing return. Let’s look at the bell curve and understand that enterprise SEO strives to reach the top of the curve or a little beyond, while cautious SEO is generally at the very bottom of the curve before the big rise. In any market, and in any medium, there is a point of optimum value to the company. While many smaller or fearful companies are out to “test the water” with their SEO campaign, the bold and purposeful enterprise is pushing forward as closely to the point of diminishing return as possible with their SEO, and often just a little beyond it. All the while, the cautious company is often only reaching the beginning of the curve and wasting time and money. In the process of either instance, much efficiency is lost along the way. There must be a good balance, and reaching that balance is where SEO is most successful.

The reality is that either level of SEO includes largely the same processes, while one is a matter of taking it to a higher “enterprise level”. At the enterprise level, the data samples get larger, the depth of market research is greater, the manpower is increased, and the action steps are more defined, but it requires the same overall steps and makes use of the same or similar skills and tools. Most waste occurs by failing to optimize the optimization.

Too minimal effort with SEO is the most common problem I find with companies. When they barely reach the edge of the bell curve, it is easy to give up early and assume it was all a waste of time and money. This is all because it was not performed with the “effort or boldness” within that definition of enterprise.

I see it more often than not that SEO proposals are dreadfully flawed on the side of what appears to be caution. It seems so much easier to ask for a smaller dollar amount and present a low-cost (and therefore low-results) plan. The same problem is seen by companies going to a bank for a loan and seeking too small amount of money. They are often turned down because their plan is flawed by seeking too small of an investment. If you doubt this, just ask any Small Business Administration financial assistance person, accountant, or commercial loan officer about downsides of underestimating. Businesses trying to work with too small of dollar amounts are very often doomed to fail, and all because they equate less money with less risk. In the real world, it just isn’t this way. Thinking too small is a common precursor to failure. You can take my word for it and save yourself the trouble, or you can go down that ugly path of failure and learn the hard way. Just don’t ever say I didn’t warn you.

Enterprise SEO Means Less Risk

Companies of all sizes are more fearful than ever to implement effective marketing including SEO, because it requires money … scarce, elusive, and coveted money. So what often happens is that SEO companies, realizing their market, will give in and offer what companies say they want, whether it is the right answer for the client or not. In these instances, the SEO will address the client’s fears and misunderstanding about the business of search engine optimization, and capitalize on those fears by assuring them that even a minimal effort will do a lot to help. The problem here is that the minimized efforts often do not even begin the climb up the bell curve of successful market reach, and will leave the client disappointed by a lack of results. It is hard to call it an outright scam when it is what the client asks for, but it is hard to view it as ethical when it is not providing the best solution for the client.

Attempting to equate lower dollar amounts with lower risk is an easy mistake to make, but also a frequent cause of failure. Thinking bigger like the enterprise in the huge skyscraper is a good start. After all, every enterprise SEO client started somewhere, and they did not grow by thinking small.

*Photo Credit to David Shankbone
via Wikipedia.

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7 SEO Guarantees: Yes, Guaranteed SEO Can Be Legitimate!

The search engine optimization (SEO) industry has attracted a lot of bad search engine optimizers. For a good SEO, there is a lot of money involved. Wherever there is a lot of money, there is usually a lot of fraud, too. It can be really hard for the average person to know the difference between good seo and bad seo.

I know it is not only me who gets the offers in my email each day offering guaranteed top ten results at Google. I manage a lot of websites, and nearly each of them will receive offers for guaranteed SEO results. I even get these offers for sites that I intentionally exclude from search engine indexing, which makes it pretty clear these guys don’t know much about targeting their market … they just have an email address. They claim to guarantee top ten results, but top ten for what search? I guess that would be pretty easy for keyword phrases like “unicorn hunting expedition”, but what about the stuff that really pays off? What about the things that create more business for the client, and not just a buck for the SEO?

SEO Guarantees Should Be Objective

A guarantee without an objective measurement, that is reasonably guaranteed to be achievable, and is guaranteed to be of value, is no guarantee at all. However, that is the type of guarantee people get suckered into all the time with SEO. It is a good reminder that it is really easy for people without integrity to make false claims. It is a constant challenge for me to try and understand why people so often believe lies more than they believe the truth about Internet marketing. They only see the bold print with great claims, but their eyes glaze over when it comes to the fine print or when common sense is necessary. You know, like the common sense that kicks in and tells you “it sounds too good to be true.”

I want to share seven legitimate SEO guarantees that are based on objective third party measurements that are very achievable by any SEO worth the water their body is made of. These are guarantees that actually have meaning, because they are measurable and not subject to individual interpretation, and they place specific responsibility on the SEO.

SEO Guarantee Number One: Website SEO Readiness

Measuring website readiness for SEO can be performed in many ways. It seems that a lot of non-SEO people do not realize how objective this can be. There are a lot of very specific deal-breakers that can preclude a website from high search ranking, and they can be measured very objectively. I will give you just a couple of examples.

Website Grader by HubSpot: HubSpot is a company that provides tools to help companies measure and improve their website and social media reach. As a side note, it is actually kind of funny that if you search Google for HubSpot SEO or HubSpot social media, or a bunch of other terms related to their services, you can find my thorn in their side. I have given HubSpot a hard time in the past, but they really do have some good products to measure a website’s preparedness for SEO.

Website Grader analyzes a website based on preparedness for SEO mixed with its traffic level. A legitimate SEO guarantee based on a set ranking on Website Grader is something achievable to the SEO, because it will provide details of what to improve, and it is objective data from a third party. If the SEO guarantees a HubSpot Website Grader score of 98 within 60 days, it is something that is both measurable and readily achievable to even an average SEO. Try it for yourself and see where your site ranks. If you want to improve it to 98+ within 60 days, your SEO should be able to make a legitimate guarantee. This particular site is presently ranked at 99.7, and it did not require any rocket surgery. Click the badge to see a sample report for my blog.

Google Webmaster Tools: I have previously pointed out that Google wants to index your website. Providing relevant listings for searches has everything to do with how Google makes money. They provide a lot of help for making websites more search engine ready, because it helps them meet their business objectives.

Google Webmaster Tools provides objective information to help website owners measure and maintain the SEO preparedness of their website. This provides a measurement that any SEO should be able to guarantee, legitimately. I will include a couple screenshots to show SEO standards that any SEO should be able to achieve, maintain, and guarantee.

The appropriate SEO guarantee in the instance of Google Webmaster Tools is clear and very simple to track. It is also very achievable to any SEO that has been in the business more than three weeks.

SEO Guarantee Number Two: Traffic Measurement

There are a lot of ways to measure website traffic. There are many different value metrics such as number of unique visitors, time on page, bounce rate, traffic sources (keywords, referring websites, etcetera), new vs. returning website visitors, and more. If a guarantee is to count, it must be well defined and based on historical data compared to new data.

A legitimate guarantee that the SEO can make in traffic measurement could include ongoing work in specific increments until certain goals have been met. For example, if the goal was to increase search traffic by 300 percent and keep the time on page above four minutes, the SEO will provide (and log) no less than ten hours per week in services until that goal is reached. That would be a reasonable guarantee. If the SEO wants to get to work on other projects, he or she will probably work pretty hard to be sure the goal is met without delay.

SEO Guarantee Number Three: Alexa, Quantcast, Etc.

Ranking at Alexa, Quantcast, Nielsen, and etcetera is another form of traffic measurement that is more important to websites focused on selling advertising than their own products or services. These rankings have often been contentious, and many people will argue their validity due to possibilities for falsified or fraudulent results. However, it is hard to argue that the SEO has not done a good job if a website’s ranking in two or more of these services has made significant improvements, especially if they each produce results that are in agreement.

If the SEO chooses to guarantee increases in these rankings, it can be beneficial to measure more than one of them simultaneously. A guarantee of ranking in the top “X” sites on each of these services could mean the SEO will provide the amount of increase at a specific cost and continually log efforts until the goals are reached. If the SEO priced it too low, their guarantee is to keep providing work, and proof of that work, until your objective is reached. An incentive to the SEO for higher than promised results is often an additional guarantee of another sort. It guarantees the SEO will be excited to work on your project.

SEO Guarantee Number Four: Increased Incoming Links

Incoming links pointing to your website is the most desirable and effective way to achieve higher search engine rankings. Because of its importance, it is also one of the most abused areas of SEO. The most common scams I see are from crooked SEO selling useless links. Many SEO will promise you a squillion new incoming links to your website, but what they do not tell you is they are largely links from domains that are penalized by all major search engines for being “link farms” and can actually do more harm than good. It is why this kind of search engine optimizer will generally have their own website penalized and cannot produce a single example of a website where they have created a large number of useful incoming links.

If any SEO guarantees to produce “X” number of incoming links, you should see it as a big red flag. On the other hand, if they guarantee a given MozRank increase based on high quality links, it had better come with some pretty serious content production. That means producing the kind of website content that will attract people to share your article in social media, reference it in their blog, or submit it to Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and others. Any SEO promising links simply by adding your web address to blog comments, forum posts, and link farms is likely to hurt your business in other ways, too. If you want to know how to create incoming links, read this article titled “SEO Backlinks: Why Most SEO Fail at Link Building“.

Links are not created equally, and some are not only worthless but even harmful. Any SEO guarantee including link building should be based on measurements of link value and not just link volume. A reputable measure of link value may be found using SEOmoz Linkscape or Open Site Explorer (example report). Of course, there is also Google PageRank, but a good SEO knows that PageRank is not a good measurement tool, and it is old and unreliable data.

A reasonable guarantee for the SEO to offer is to produce and promote useful content on your website and continue until it reaches your set goal. This is another example of an SEO guarantee that places responsibility on the SEO to work for their money.

SEO Guarantee Number Five: Increased Search Phrases

The number of unique search phrases that bring you traffic can be a useful measure of overall performance. I do not mean measuring the number of search phrases where you appear in results, but rather the number of search phrases that actually brought visitors to your website. It can indicate that your site is being more thoroughly indexed, and that its overall search engine health is improving. If your site was visited as a result of only 500 unique search terms in one month but then visited as a result of 5,000 search terms the next month and 10,000 the following month, it is a pretty good indicator that things are going well.

This is a very measurable metric that has meaning, but for the purpose of a solid guarantee, it should be measured alongside the number of unique visitors to your website. You know, for the skeptic to be sure the SEO is not running a script to falsify the results.

A good SEO guarantee based on the increase in search phrases could be something such as additional increments of services being logged by the SEO until “X” percent increase in unique search phrases and “Y” percent associated increase in unique visitors.

SEO Guarantee Number Six: Solid Marketing Plan

This is a preemptive guarantee that is a hard one for a lot of people to really grasp as a truly measurable guarantee … but it is! Many people will look at SEO as a commodity that is produced the same by every search engine optimizer, and is just a set of basic tasks we perform the same for each client. This is not how it actually works, but it is why I receive many visitors searching for SEO hourly rates (google it for yourself).

I recently wrote about the relationship of marketing cost vs. marketing value, and the truth is that if you want all the pieces to fit just right, you should plan to make a sizable investment. This is because a good SEO will be making a sizable investment of time and knowledge to help you achieve your business objectives. As you can perhaps see here and throughout my blog, there are a lot of tasks to perform in reaching good search engine results. The specific work of my industry is not the same for any two companies, which is why a properly outlined plan can be the greatest SEO guarantee of all.

The lack of a solid marketing plan is a guarantee to fail. If the SEO provides a well-formed contract outlining the discovery process, proposed execution of tasks, and reporting of outcomes, it is likely the best guarantee that you will get what you pay for. When it is carefully planned out, high quality SEO can become the greatest asset to a company, topping the chart for online success tools. It can take a company to a whole new level and send their profitability and market share through the roof.

SEO Guarantee Number Seven: Inaction Guarantee

Number seven is the SEO guarantee grandfather of them all. I guarantee that there are a lot of websites returned in a search for what you offer. If you do not take action to optimize your position, or you lack the proper actions, you will miss a lot of potential business. That is a guarantee worth betting on. If the SEO has a strong track record and will make specific guarantees like the ones suggested here, you will risk a lot more lost money by inaction than if the SEO took your money and split for a country without extradition.

SEO Contracts, SEO Proposals, and SEO Espionage

SEO Contracts Should Not Require a Cryptograph — SEO Should Not Require a Cryptograph

Search engine optimization can be a pretty deceitful field. There are a lot of challenges to the SEO every day which can make us look bad as an industry. SEO is a very lucrative field, which makes it prone to excessive competition and it is frequently a target for fraud. The fraud can happen on both sides; from the SEO, as well as from the client. I have a couple ideas on the topic, and I hope this will benefit you, whether as the SEO or the potential SEO client.

Considering that the SEO professional has to look over his or her shoulder at all times, there should be little wonder why even the best SEO with good abilities and intentions can come off as shady. After all, anybody who feels suspicious all the time can appear suspicious, themselves. This suspicion of SEO services prompted me to question how we must seem to potential customers when they read the SEO contracts, proposals, project scope, retainer agreements, engagement letters, needs analysis, non-disclosure agreements, and etcetera.

Many SEO proposals and SEO contracts that I have read lean toward being a bit ambiguous and one-sided. I am “guilty” of this, too, and I have even heard it from clients in my decade plus in this field. What is sometimes hard to overcome are some of the reasons the SEO contracts are ambiguous … and why sometimes they should be.

What to Include in SEO Proposals

The question of what to include in the SEO proposal is a tough one. I think a lot of SEO must have felt that little pang of uncertainty after they have crafted a brilliant SEO proposal and present it to the prospective client. Some of the questions the SEO may ponder are whether the prospective client is just using it to try and implement the proposed work internally, using the SEO proposal to shop around, or even stealing the brilliant work to provide the proposal to their shady SEO who was too lazy or incompetent to do the research themselves. I suspect that every good SEO is cheated at least once.

How much can you include in the SEO proposal before the client thinks they can implement it themselves (which seldom works well for them), and how little can you include in the SEO proposal, yet still convey a high value? There should be a balance, but my approach has often been to just put all the cards on the table and give them the gold. The problem here is that so many people view SEO as a science (see “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Art or Science?“). Clients do not always realize that SEO implementation is not created equally, and there is also an artistic side to SEO. There are many degrees to doing the job right, and even the same strategy implemented by two different SEO will yield different results. After a potential client ends up hanging themselves on that rope you give them, they lose faith in you and even the whole prospect of hiring out SEO services.

The other side of the coin is to show very little strategy in the SEO proposal but provide a lot of proof. In this case, it may look like the SEO strategy is weak and not show enough value. Proof of concept and SEO case studies are fine, but many people cannot relate that into their world due to inherent doubts about SEO.

What to Include in SEO Contracts

A great SEO proposal must be backed up with a great SEO contract. Putting too much information in the SEO contract can have the same results as with the SEO proposal, but worse, this time you are asking them for a signature and money. Leaving any ambiguity may look unprofessional or dishonest, but making it too rigid comes with a risk of not being able to provide the right responses the client needs under changing market circumstances. Just imagine the contract that says exactly what the SEO will do, but then you find an instance where market changes say that you should do something different.

The SEO contract can be a deal-breaker, especially if it is going before a board of directors with a bunch of people who do not have a clue about SEO, or marketing at all for that matter. When you have a company filled with a bunch of people doing all they can to be sure they still have a job tomorrow (most companies), the last thing you want is for them to vote something down just because they didn’t understand what they were approving. This applies to small companies and large, and even a one-person company has a “board” of sorts.

Consider What the SEO Contract Represents

Everybody wants to avoid a lawsuit. It may sound too simple, but let’s look at what the SEO contract really represents. It is a contract that says that the customer agrees to pay “x” money in exchange for “y” services. If everything goes just as planned, and everybody involved is on the up and up, the contract should actually be a very useless piece of paper. Looking at it this way, you can see that the contract is mostly in place solely to make everybody comfortable in case it has to go to a court to be upheld. This is the bottom line with a contract. It is really useless as an instrument unless or until it is contested by one party and is brought to a courtroom or mediation.

With the purpose of the contract in mind, it should be easier to prepare your agreements in a way that addresses these basic components of “x” money for “y” service. A lot of the fluff beyond that is mostly there to address irrational fears. Not all of it, but this is the case with much of the content in most of the SEO service contracts I have read.

I have spent a significant amount of money having contracts reviewed and prepared over the years. I recall something one of my attorneys once said when I asked him to review one of the contracts I used for my customers. He said that the contract looks great, but that he could not “bless” the contract, and for that I would need a priest. He went on to say that any contract is only as good as the people signing it or in the worst case, the judge who makes a ruling on it. Looking at it this way, I may suggest that you just be sure to use waterproof ink before you splatter it with holy water.

SEO Espionage is an Irrational Fear

To the SEO: Collaboration between SEO is great, but sometimes the SEO has to know when to watch his or her back. Right? Well, the answer is yes and no. Most of the time the fear is irrational. I know that many SEO have used my work to build upon their services and their knowledge base. They have used my contracts, my proposals, and they have used SEO espionage to take food from my kids’ mouths. Should I concentrate on that, or the fact that I have done my little piece by using integrity and ideas to make the industry stronger?

I place providing value to the industry very high. I have been giving away information and putting my ideas out here on the Internet since the 1990’s and somehow people still pay attention. They flock to things like my very old article on h1 tags, and constantly find me when searching for SEO contracts. Being useful and providing value is a good thing … a very good thing. When you look over your shoulder with fears that somebody will get a leg up on you, it is easy to miss the big picture. There are enough SEO clients out there, and even if somebody takes your prized prospect away, there is always another one better suited to be your client.

A better way to look at it is that if you are working with a good spirit of collaboration between SEO, the whole industry becomes stronger. When the industry becomes stronger, your business becomes stronger. The market for good SEO will never be saturated. Really, pay attention: “The market for good SEO will never be saturated.”

Why SEO Contracts Don’t Matter

If contracts were ever a deal breaker, it should be with the credit card industry. If people actually read everything they agree to by using a credit card, spending habits would surely be a whole lot different, and the credit card industry may not even exist. It is not because they are all that bad, but reading the contract can be a bit scary.

Think about this and tell me if you can relate. I have purchased a lot of things over the years. I love buying stuff! When I think about the things I wanted the most, I recall that I barely even paid attention to the contracts. I already knew that I wanted to buy, I had a pretty good idea of who I was dealing with, and I knew that I would not have the “thing” I wanted until I signed the contract.

An extreme example is when I purchased the house I live in. I went to the closing at about 4:00 p.m. and signed about a squillion contracts by the close of business. I did this with little more than a brief explanation from my real estate agent of what I was signing. If you have ever purchased real estate, you surely know what I mean. Your hand probably got cramped before you were done, right? Now consider whether you read and scrutinized every line of those contracts.

As I consider the people who signed contracts with me over the years, I recall that some of the happiest ones barely even scanned through it. They had an absolute faith in my work, my integrity, and they wanted the help that I can provide them. The ones who got hung up on fine details of the SEO contract simply did not have that faith in me. I had failed them long before it was time to sign the contract.

I hope that you will consider this, whether as a prospective SEO client or the SEO provider. Getting the job right and having a signed contract is really the last thing that should matter. Gaining the client’s trust should never come down to the contract, but rather all of the gains that the SEO contract represents.

SEO Contract Examples

If you would like sample SEO contracts, proposals, or other documents, just leave me your comment here on my blog. Let me know what you think of the matter, and what kind of document you need help with. If I have something I believe will be useful to you, I will post an example here in the comments. If you can provide some input to help others, whether as SEO or client, add your piece. Collaboration is a good thing, and usually a whole lot more useful than coming off as shady to avoid somebody stealing your work.

11 Common SEO Questions Answered by SEO

Here are answers to some of the most pressing questions about SEO that are asked of SEO professionals. I am not ranking these questions in the order of urgency or frequency, but these are some of the most common things I hear when people call me, search the Internet and find me, or meet me and ask what I do.

SEO Question One: What is SEO?

Answer: I suppose I should start with answering the big question of “What is SEO?”

SEO is both a noun and a verb, kind of like Google. It can mean search engine optimization or search engine optimizer. You can usually tell the difference based on the usage.

It involves many aspects of improving a website’s ranking in search engines, and thus increasing website exposure. However, it goes a lot deeper than that. Being listed at the top of search results does not always mean a visitor to your website, especially if you are not listed for the right search terms. Finding the right search terms (keyword phrases) is very important, and often involves many lateral keywords.

SEO has a lot to do with converting more searches into clicks, but clicks alone do not always mean profit. So it also has a whole lot to do with converting those clicks into an action, such as a purchase or a new business lead.

SEO Question Two: How Much Does SEO Cost, and Why?

Answer: I get this question more than perhaps any other, and it comes in many variations. I get it in person, on the phone, and I get it in searches for “SEO hourly rates“. If you Google that term or a number of others like it, you will understand why I know this is a common question. You will find an article I wrote a while back titled “SEO and Web Development Hourly Rates” The funny part is that really great SEO is not done based on an hourly rate, and simply asking “how much does SEO cost“ is not a well-qualified question.

I know it is a scary thing to imagine waving goodbye to money. If a person can look at this without the hair on the back of their neck standing up and consider it for a moment, the better question is actually “how much will a lack of SEO cost?“ Sure, that just sounds like a guy trying to sell you stuff, but I am serious. What happens when you do it wrong? Doing SEO wrong or not doing it at all is what becomes really costly.

I realize that the real question people want to know about SEO is how much they will have to invest in order to get the results they want. The problem is that at the same time, they often do not really have a finger on what results they are after. “More business” is not a good enough answer to the question. The best answer for your individual case requires planning, and planning means developing better questions with better answers.

If you just want three more sales, it will probably not require a large upfront investment. On the other hand, if you are selling custom purple pajamas for botfly larvae, all the SEO in the world may not help you much. Neither of these represent a good plan, and if you start without a plan, you will end without a plan. Here is an article to help you consider your planning, and why you don’t just want to be along for the ride: “Business Evolution and Crash Test Dummies“.

What is needed and how much you should spend will be different for each individual business case. The answer that will provide the best results will usually be uncomfortable. My short answer is usually “bring your lunch money” because if the SEO is done well, every additional dollar you invest will produce a greater return.

Does it cost, really? I thought it was supposed to pay money, not cost money. I wonder what the cost is if you don’t do it? My really super smart-ass answer to the number one most important factor in your business success (your marketing) would be “how well do you want the job done?”

In answer to the last part of the cost question (why), I would like to refer you to an article I wrote only yesterday titled “Where Does Marketing Talent Come From?”

SEO Question Three: Can You Reduce the Upfront Cost?

Answer: Yes, there are ways to minimize the upfront cost of SEO, and the best one is with a contingency SEOcontract which allows the provider to earn money based on performance. Be mindful that there is generally still an upfront cost involved. After all, there is often a lot of risk mitigation for the SEO in making sure your company and your products are market-ready and something they want to partner with.

When you contact a good SEO, you should be ready to afford the cost. Again, this is an investment in your business and you are seeking a professional service to build your business. If you ever wonder why a good SEO’s phone keeps breaking up and the call drops, consider this: If you are asking them to deliver you the moon but to do it “cheap”, this could very well be the reason.

SEO Question Four: Can SEO Help a Small Local Company?

Answer: Yes, it can also help a small local company stop being small and local if they choose. Can it help a small and broke company? Well, I like to remember a term I learned in grammar school: survival of the fittest. If your company is already too broke to sustain the basic essentials of marketing, it may be too late. I said it may be too late. I think it is still better to go down fighting than to just roll over. SEO is likely the best chance you have.

SEO Question Five: How Long Does SEO Take?

Answer: This is another one of those sticky questions with a whole lot of answers. I generally expect to see results the moment I click “publish”. Once you have a site that is worthwhile to users, a squillion good incoming links, and a good reputation with Google, things can happen very quickly. A better answer may be how long it will take you to make the decision to take action. It is like planting a tree. If you want shade, it is best that you did it a long time ago. In lieu of that, I will let you answer the best time to plant it.

SEO Question Six: How Long Does SEO Last?

Answer: I have written articles for competitive keyword phrases that are still at the top of searches since nearly a decade ago. Things change, but the search listing aspects of SEO are generally designed to last. Other areas of SEO work are also designed with longevity, such as an emphasized call to action and other matters of Website usability. If you really want an understanding of how long SEO can last, I invite you to read “Can You Value Each Blog Post at $10,000?” where I explain it more clearly.

A pay-per-click campaign will last until you stop paying for it.

SEO Question Seven: How Can I Measure SEO Success?

Answer: The short and sweet answer should be “in your wallet” but it is a bit more than that. You can measure success of specific traffic results and user actions very easily with statistics from tools like Google Analyticss and Clicky Web Analytics. If you can get beyond the big task of planting the seedling of good SEO, the results can mean a whole lot more than just how much more money you have. It can mean that your business is on a path to a sustainable marketing platform where every time you have something to say, your content will rank much more easily in search engines. So your measurement should extend beyond today alone, but also include a longer term look at where your business will be down the road.

SEO Question Eight: Isn’t SEO Mostly Just Title Tags, H1 Tags, and Meta Tags?

Answer: I want to be nice about this one, because I know that the SEO industry has talked a lot about these things and it may seem there is a lot of emphasis on these items. I will touch on each item individually, but just for a moment. Then I will explain how little they do in the big picture.

Title tags are important to SEO, because they are the top-level on-page item to tell a search engine what the page is about. If the content matches the title, and all other things are perfect, you may have a win. There are clearly a lot of other factors. Otherwise, some of those pages titled “Home” (and sadly there are millions titled just “Home”, because somebody got lazy) would show up somewhere. Instead, when you search for “Home”, you find “The Home Depot”, and “Lowe’s Home Improvement”.

H1 tags hold importance due to the proper structure of a page. They are like a headline on a newspaper and they are the starting point of an article. The H1 tag tells the overall subject of the page, and ideally the rest of the page matches the subject. There are a lot of SEO who will argue until they are blue in the face about the subject of H1, and sometimes rightfully so, but if you want to know more just Google it. You will find an article I wrote years ago right on top. Here is my article titled “H1 Tags Improve Search Engine Placement” and here is the Google Search for H1 tags. You be the judge, but please do not assume it is there just because I used the H1 tag.

Meta tags? Don’t even get me started about meta tags. This is like a joke that spread widely back in the 1990’s to make SEO sound smart. Kidding! Actually, they once had some bearing on SEO, but many search engines do not look at meta tags as a factor any more than the haircut of your pet chihuahua.

The Big Picture: If these simple items of title tags, H1 tags and meta tags did the trick, don’t you think the Internet would get pretty messed up with totally irrelevant things in the way every time you search for something? It takes a whole lot more. I mean, wouldn’t you rank yourself a lot higher for “2010 Olympics” or “Brittany Spears” if that was the case?

SEO Question Nine: Are There Any Guarantees to SEO?

Answer: Yes, there are a few guarantees with SEO, and they are not all lies, either. First, I can guarantee you that if you do nothing, you will get nothing. Some SEO will provide outrageous guarantees, and I hope you do not fall for it. One type of reasonable guarantee is based on additional work until a set objective is met. The most reasonable SEO guarantee is one that the professional you hired will work hard and work smart to meet your objectives. If you ask for guarantees, you will usually pay for guarantees. In many cases the customers pay for them the hard way … by believing something that is not true.

SEO Question Ten: Can’t I Just Do My Own Google Adwords?

Answer: Yes, absolutely! You can do it all yourself. Just be aware that you have another job to do … running your business. If you think you can do the job as well as the professional who makes it their career, I just hope you don’t make the same kind of decision about professional football or dentistry. You are likely to get hurt.

SEO Question Eleven: Can’t I Just Read Your Blog and Do It Myself?

Answer: Sure. Subscribe here. If you need more help, don’t be too proud to ask.