SEO Consultant Ireland

Performance Related Search Engine Optimization Service is very, very interesting business model.

Let us compare it with the other forms of advertising.
Pay Per Click (PPC) is the first one that comes to mind straight away. In the PPC model, you place your advertisements for free, and pay only when someone clicks on your advertisement.
Pay Per Action is the next step, where the placement of the advertisement is free as well, and the payment is due when an action is created on your web site, like a product is sold, user have subscribed or in general – a conversion is made. Affiliate schemes work in the same way.

Both PPC and PPA are great advertising models to start with, since there is no setup cost. You only pay when the service is delivered successfully. You also pay only as much as many visitors or conversions you have made you your web site.

Applying the same way of thinking to the SEO – where it is 100% performance related SEO service has a few problems the need to be overcame for the service to work.

For SEO your site will need to be changed. Meaning SEO people will have to do it themselves or instruct you web development people on how to do it. If you have an interactive site, or an online shop, it will almost certain need to be your web developers who will need to make changes for the SEO on your site. This puts the SEO company completely at the mercy of the Web Development company. Yet the Web Developers get paid by the hour and SEO company is paid only by the performance of your web site in Google?

Would you go into the relay race (where you depend on all other guys in your team), where they are all paid for each race, and you are paid only if your team wins?

That is what a performance related search engine optimisation service really is (in most cases). And that is why performance related SEO projects fail so often.

Thanks again there is ‘The Dark Side’ of the SEO, where performance related SEO projects thrive. In most cases those are variants of the black hat SEO techniques involving hacking other web sites and placing large amounts of inbound links to your web site. The result is the instant top ranking of your web site, but in most cases fairly quick addition to the blacklist, and removal from the Google search results.

So without trying to use any scare tactics, you have to know your SEO Company very well, before accepting any kind of performance related SEO service deal.

As any other work, the Search Engine optimization has its Cost, that has to be part of you Online Marketing Plan, and your SEO Budget.

The most common question I get is:

How much does the search engine optimization cost?

The cost of SEO is in most cases far greater than the majority of those who asked me imagined. For some reason there is a huge percentage of people who not only think but are convinced that they should be able to get on top of the search results in Google, for next to nothing. The majority of those who had their web site designed by a younger family member or some student for a bit of cash, really strongly believe that the cost of search engine optimization should be the fraction of what they paid for the web site.

I wrote in a post SEO Budget, about the search engine optimization costs and how to estimate it.

Search Engine Optimization Cost is Determined by YOUR Marketing Goals

Do you need 100 or a 1000 visitors to look at your web site every day? The difference is 10 times in those two examples. The search engine optimization cost will be almost 10 times different to achieve those two marketing goals.

How Many Web Site Visitors do You Need?

Calculate your web site conversion rate. Let’s take it for example that you need 100 web site visitors to make one sale. Your conversion rate is therefore 1%. Now, how many sales do you want to make every day? 50 Sales? 50 sales times 100 visitors per sale equals 5000 unique visitors a day. You can calculate it for your site with the same formula.

Web Site Revenue

Now let’s take web site revenue into the equation as well. Imagine your revenue is 100 per sale. 50 sales from 5000 visitors a day with the conversion rate of 1% is 5000 a day. Note that if you manage to change the conversion rate for just 1% higher, to 2% your revenue doubles to 10000 with the same 5000 visitors, and therefore the same search engine optimisation cost.

What is your Profit per Sale?

Let’s say that your sales costs eat half of the revenue and your profit is 50. 50 sales a day and your profit is 50 on each make the daily profit of 2500.

Now let’s look at those figures on the annual basis. We had a web site with 5000 visitors with 1% conversion rate. Each sale is worth 100, and sales cost deducted the profit per sale is 50.

1 day: 50 sales of 100 each make 5000 in revenue with 2500 profit.
1 year: 18250 sales of 100 each make 1825000 in revenue with 912500 profit.

The number of unique visitors was 5000 a day so therefore 1825000 visitors in the whole year.

What is the cost of a visitor?

The cost of a visitor in search engine optimization is a theoretical figure. The cost per visitor can only be calculated in the search engine marketing terms. In the example above where there is 912500 a year profit and we know that to make that profit we require 1825000 visitors, we can simply divide the required number of visitors by the profit (marketing budget in SEM terms) and get a cost of a visitor of 0.5. That number is a defining number if the search engine marketing can or cannot be used to drive traffic to our site. If the traffic can be bought for less than 0.5 the business will be profitable. If the average visitor costs more than 0.5, the business will be in red by the end of the year.

As well as the cost of the visitor from the search engine marketing perspective, from the search engine optimisation perspective we can calculate the value of a web site visitor. It is again the same in the sample above 0.5.

How to determine the search engine optimization cost?

In the sample above there is 1.8 mil visitors required to generate 0.9 million in profit. If spread evenly during the year this means we need 5000 visitors a day. Divide the profit by the number of visitors per day and you get the value of each daily visitor of 182.5. This means that if you can pay your search engine optimisation less than 182.5 per the single unique visitor a day you will be making profit. If you are paying more you will end up in red.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Costs Vs. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Costs

NOTE: See the post about: Search Engine Optimisation vs. Search Engine Marketing.

Let’s get back to the beginning and compare the business running with investing in SEO and in SEM. You know your market so ask yourself a question:

Is it likely I will be able to pay 0.5 per click (per visitor) for a sale worth 100?

In my opinion there are not that many examples where this is possible. Now let’s look at the SEO avenue, and ask yourself if you know of a SEO company who will bring your 5000 unique visitors for 0.9 million? Now I know many SEO companies that would do it in many markets.

And now the fun part. Year 1 ended. The second you stop paying your SEM your business is on the flat line. With SEO the truth is that on the last day of year on and the first day on year two you will make the same profit, without paying anything for SEO. The search engine optimisation investment is a long term investment. When you build you rankings and inbound links, you will not really lose that traffic that quickly. At the end of the second year, you will even without investing anything in SEO still have some two thirds or more of the traffic you started the year with.

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.

The vast majority of the web sites have almost no traffic at all. How about yours?

Almost anyone who sad published a web site realised after the hype in the office quietened, that there is something missing. There was no visitors to the web site. You learned to be patient, and have been watching the web logs, but time is passing and there is still just a ‘flat line’ A few visitors, mostly from your own IP. When a first referral from a search engine showed up, it gave you hope, but in reality the keyword used was you domain name. Months pass by and still nothing really. No visitors, and a spider visiting a home page and a few more pages only, once in a week or a month.

Then you realise, I need to do something to bring this visitors to my site. SEO is the magic word there. Let’s invest in it, but…

How much does SEO cost?

I have been asked that question a million times so far. And still there is no definite answer, but here is the sentence that made me thinking today:

The budget for marketing a site in the first month should be equal to the budget for building the site in the first place.

To anyone who has just purchased a new web site this is most likely shocking to say at least. You have paid through the roof for the web site, and now you need t spend as much into online marketing of it. And all that in the first month only? What happens the next month, and any other month later on?!

SEO is Expensive

Paying a few dollars per inbound link to a company in Asia is cheap. And every day you receive an offer for such services in your inbox. Just check your SPAM or Junk folders. Will that bring you any good (visitors). Quite unlikely.

SEO is Time Consuming

A SEO Consultant will most likely have to rewrite the majority of the content on the site. In some cases the whole site (code) will have to be replaced by something the search engines can read and understand. The top SEO Consultants will if at all possible look into replacing the whole web site with a completely new one. The look and feel will be the same, the content will be retained, and a lot of new one added (in most cases), but the code will be completely replaced in the end product.

Is SEO for You?

SEO is not for everyone. That is the fact. SEO is a viable investment to any web site owner who will make a return on investment from the direct on indirect sales from the traffic on the web site.

What is your SEO Budget?