SEO Consultant Ireland

Yes there is a cheap SEO. Actually there is plenty of cheap SEO around. The question is what are your exact needs and expectations – will the cheap SEO do for you?

Let’s start from the beginning. Most of the smaller companies try to do SEO themselves. Somewhere between the marketing and the IT, there is this SEO task, bounced frequently in between. Like a hot potato. No one is really sure what to do, and has absolutely no time for it. So after the initial internal effort that did not result in the desired changes in your ranking here are two avenues:

a) Keep SEO in house
b) Hire a SEO company

We all want cheap SEO so the obvious choice is to keep your SEO tasks in house. You will need:
SEO Training – do not expect to have a SEO knowledge in the company that never did any SEO.
SEO Tools – As you would buy tools for any other tasks, you will need a budget for a list of tools. IBP, WebCEO, iSnare, and similar will each help you do a task.
Links Purchase – Yahoo at $299 is where you start and Best of the web and similar is where you continue spending.

That was a cheap SEO option. Now add the time you or your staff will spend on it, and get the real cost, of our all of the sudden not so cheap SEO!

Outsource your SEO – bring in the professionals

It might seem expensive at first, but anyone who have tried to do SEO internally will understand that outsourced SEO is actually a truly cheap SEO.

Most of the SEO provides fall into the following three groups:

Marketing Agencies (€10,000 per month)
Their marketing experience is usually the biggest, but might not really be related to online marketing at all. Double check their online experience and if they actually have SEO staff internally or are just outsourcing the SEO tasks to external freelancers. Their price range cuts off start-ups and small companies.

SEO Companies (€1,000 to €10,000 per month)
Those are usually companies who had an extremely good SEO guru, who trained a team around him. They will in general do more for you than the big companies, since the founder / owner is still doing SEO or at least training SEO internal staff. There is a pride involved, and those companies will show off with the high rankings of your (clients) site (free PR!).

SEO Professionals (€500 to €1,500 per month)
Mostly students and ex web developers in that price range of cheap SEO. Do not rule them out since some of them will generate good results. The general rule is that the smaller your SEO provider is the more will you have to ask about the relevant experience and RESULTS in similar or same geographical markets and industries.

Ask for results, ask for references and ask for their plan of action.

When you compare the cost of in house SEO and outsourced SEO – what one would you call The Cheap SEO?

Search Engine Marketing in Ireland is in fact almost exclusively Google Search Marketing, simply because Irish usage of the search engines is dominated by the Google.ie. Yahoo in particular and MSN have a far biggest clients share in US than in Ireland. This makes Irish search marketing market much simpler, since the web users are using almost exclusively one search engine Google.ie.

Google has the Advertising program called Google AdWords. It is extremely easy to use and instantly starts delivering results – and therefore spending your advertising budget. Google enables you to publish your adverting on the right sidebar and above the search results on the relevant Google search results pages.

Google also have the program for the web publishers canned Google AdSense that enables them to resell advertising space on the number of other sites that are the part of the Google AdSense program. Google shares the generated revenue with the web site publishers that publish your ads.

Since with the Google AdWords program the advertiser is charged only when someone actually click on the ads, and a brought directly to the advertised web site, the program and the model is called Pay Per Click or simply PPC. Again since this is the only widely used service often is the Search Engine Marketing in Ireland reoffered to as just PPC.

Blogging is a way of building the inbound links. How?

You blog, about interesting topics (link bait). Then you put comments on related and relevant blogs with a link to your blog / articles. You submit your RSS feed to wherever you see fit, and you submit your blog to the blog search engines.

Outsourcing Blogging or not - you need a blogger who understands your (target) market and your niche. A local blogger will write in a local language, about local topics. That is far easier to read (especially in a blog) than a PR structured articles released by the professional PR agencies.

Blogging Costs - an hour or two a day to start with. That will give you a meaningful (measurable) results in a month or two. You need to decide what your targeted SEO result is. In a number of relevant visitors per day. Relevant meaning, that come from the search engines for the phrases you want them to come (relevant to your business). Scope depends of the size of the market. Google.ie is much smaller than Google.co.uk, that is much smaller than Google.com. Therefore it is most likely (depending on the industry or niche), that you will achieve much more in a smaller market with the same budget.

SEO: To Outsource or Not to Outsource?

A raising number of the businesses are linked one way or another to the Internet, and with it in some way with the search engine optimisation (SEO). Interment marketing plays the more and more important role every day, simply since people use internet more and more in their everyday life. Even if you see something in your local shop, you are quite likely to go online and just check the prices in the other shops, and the user reviews, the manufacturers web site…

Companies know nowadays they need to invest heavily in the Internet Marketing. Pay Per Click (PPC) is where almost everyone starts, just being seduced by the simplicity and the transparency of it. Of and not to forget – the low cost entry to the market. Some take a few days, but the majority of the PPC advertisers require more than a year to realise the real costs of the PPC, and get to the ‘Panic Mode’ looking for anything else but PPC after realising how little they got for their money invested.

A strategically important decision is usually made then, to stop the PPC and get down the organic listing route and optimise the company web site for the search engines. SEO usually then becomes a ‘Hot Potato’ in the company. If there is a separate Marketing Department and the IT Department, they will try to pass it on to each other. IN reality, the likelihood that any of the internal resources knows enough about SEO is fairly slim, since SEO is not what the company has been doing so far. So a new type of task is now within the company, and a new skill is required. The management usually fails to understand the fact that the SEO skills do not exist within the staff of the company. Therefore the majority of the initial SEO efforts are performed ‘in house’. When no results are achieved, or the results have no impact at the bottom line, the question gets raised:

To outsource or not to outsource the SEO, the question is now….?

Management will be guided by the costs of the both options to determine what route to go. Seeing the quotes from the SEO companies, as opposed to the ‘zero’ cost of performing the SEO internally puts them in front of the simple position to decide to keep the SEO in house!

This is the list of questions that should help determining if to outsource or keep the SEO in house:
1. Do we have a resources available to allocate to the SEO?
2. Do we have anyone who knows how to do SEO tasks?
3. Do we know what tasks are actually required to be done at all?
4. Do we know how much will the training cost to get our staff in the position to do SEO tasks?
5. Do we know how much time will be required to get the staff trained, and when will the training be available?
6. Do we know what is our SEO goal (why do we do it actually) in the exact numbers?
7. Can we measure our SEO successes (and failures)?
8. What is the budget for the SEO software and online tools required to perform the SEO tasks?

The above are really just the basic questions. If you cannot answer just one of those, the likelihood of any effect of your internal SEO efforts on your business are very slim.