Wanted : SEO professional / company

I need our website to have SEO performed.
We request top 10 placement for 5 terms.
_____________
Before you bid, please meet these requirements
- proof of sites you have optimized in the past
- guaranteed results
- terms of payment are:
1/4 of total to start project
1/4 when page is within top 20 in results
1/2 after 2 weeks of sustained top 10 placement

_____________________
please reply with the following
information:
- proof of other sites you have optimized
- description on how you plan to SEO our site
- your final price for the project.


email me if your are intrested
shirleysmith500@hotmail.com

You need to provide a little more information... do you want good positions for a difficult term such as "hosting"... or do you hope to rank for "green monkey pajamas". One of those might cost an awful lot more than the other.

And what about down the road... somebody could blast your site full of PR from a few of their own sites, collect the bounty and take down the links next day.

I can get you a top position for the keyword "green monkey pajamas"...

PM me if you are interested ;)

Promising top 10 placement is misleading. Asking for top 10 placement isn't really good for your business. SERPs are denpendent on a lot of factors (change of search engine algorithm, competitors' SEO among others), most of them are out of your control.

The real goal of SEO should be the development of a comperenhensive strategies for building qualified traffic, the strategies that can suit array of major search engines, change of algorithms, and seasonality of traffic fluctuation.

dejaone you pointed out something very intresting.

what im looking for as you said is "evelopment of a comperenhensive strategies for building qualified traffic, the strategies that can suit array of major search engines, change of algorithms, and seasonality of traffic fluctuation"


- in a nutshell, i need to promote and bring useful traffic to our site. We would like to hire a SEO professional to do thats for us.

- to answer another question: we are looking to optimize search terms such as: online shopping, old navy, macys, etc.

thanks again dejaone and EGOL and fryman

Samsmith, I think the first thing you need to do is find someone to help you pick some good keywords. I really doubt you have all the products that macys has, so even if you did get a top position for this keyword, you would end up with thousands of untargeted visitors just wasting your bandwith.

You are not asking for much...
Here's a little true story, that hopefully amuses you (and others).

One day I received a phone call from a client who wished to achieve top3 listings in 14 countries with five semi-competitive terms. And naturally he wanted those as guaranteed results.... I said no-can-do, mister - we don't give out guarantees. He then plead that other SEO companies give. I stayed firm and told him the truth: no SEO can give that, otherwise they are playing with fire and giving away false promises. He was really disappointed and said would call back after checking some sites I told him to visit.

After about an hour he called back and said ok, let's do business. Then he asked how much? I said [BIG PILE OF CASH]. The silence unbreakable. After about 20 seconds there was a tiny voice : I can't afford that. I was thinking maximum of [1% OF BIG PILE OF CASH]....

In the end, we did make an agreement. However, there is not a single word about the guarantees, top10 nor anything else he requested. He paid us [1% OF BIG PILE OF CASH] and got three pages with basic level optimization

End of story

Did he end up with any keyword ranked, or was the payment just to have the pages optimized?

I must agree that many people want to get a top spot for 10 bucks...

samsmith, your keywords are too general. It's very expensive to SEO general keywords which actually have very low conversion rate. Instead of targeting 5 general keywords, you probably should target 50 less competitive but more specific keyword phrases.

The payment was just for getting the pages optimized. Currently he ranks somewhere around 10-25 depending on keyword which is relatively good considering the time we spend doing our *magic*.



Some things don't seem to change, no mather where you live. ;)

It is kind of interesting to see what happens to pricing and quality as SEO and SEM goes mainstream business. In Finland the number of new companies that offer SEO / SEM services have boomed within last few months. It's pretty amazing how the prices (and quality) vary.

Dear Sir,

We would never bid for a project like the described, first of all
we NEVER give out examples of our previous work, and this is without any exceptions. We NEVER make any guarantees, no serious SEO firms would ever do that, and if they do they are just making a bet with you, just like playing on the horses.
We always bill for each hour worked, for larger project we normally bill for each 20.000 NOK (aprox. 2500 USD).

Good luck finding someone to work under the terms you suggested ;-)

Good for you!... and even better for your clients.

I do believe SEO pros should offer some sort of traffic guarantee based on cost-benefit analysis. Otherwise, client can spend the money on PPC campaign.

How can an SEO offer a gaurantee if Google itself does not disclose it's ALGO and/or RANKING REQUIREMENTS and therefore no SEO IMO can ever be certain he will achieve gauranteed results.

Good SEO's I think would use practices that have worked before, and could offer some insight on the probability of acheiveing rankings, but no gaurantees!

Cheers!

Critter
:-)

closing SEO prospects is one of the most difficult things to do. I've worked in Sales for almost 10 years, but I started my seo consulting firm only about 1 year ago. The difficult part about it is that your typical prospect has no idea of how seo works so their expectations are unrealistic (I want top 5 for the term "web hosting" but my budget is $100/mont...I have a generic affiliate site pushing someone else product with no real content but I want to optimize for "weight loss", monthly budget...I want just want a "one size fits all" solution that will give me permanent top 10 rankings).

What's worse is that some of my prospects have already worked with less than scrupulous firms that were "optimizing" for the "mybiglefttoe.com" search engine and achieving top 10 rankings for $79.95 month. Now this prospect want to get top 10 in Google because their current "SEO firm" can't do it, but they are accustomed to paying $79.95.

Even after signing a legitimate client, and explaining to them beforehand that optimization is a gradual and ongoing process and that they won't see significant results (top 5-20) for 30 to 90 days, I start to get anxious and sometime outright angry e-mails saying things like "I don't see anything new on my site" or "what am I paying you for", even though their site is acquiring all sorts of new inbound links, their non existent or outright spammy content (tags, etc..) has been totally revamped, their rankings though not top 10 yet are improving by leaps and bounds, and their traffic is doubling or tripling.

I have learned that the key to running a smooth optimization campaign is education. The educated customer is the most grateful and loyal customer. I encourage my customers to visit webmaster/seo forums, I lead them to relevant articles/info, and I encourage them to shop around even. I want my clients to appreciate that my techniques are legitimate and exactly how difficult it is to achieve and sustain solid rankings in the long term.

I would like to kind of bounce some idea of you guys though:
I've been billing on a monthly basis with no extended contract. I also charge a small initial fee for consulting and on-page optimization.
That seems to work well at first, but occassionally I'll have a client discontinue after 1 month (due to lack of knowledge or lack of patience or lack of money) even though their site is moving up in SERPs well and getting a solid increase in traffic. Should I consider making an initial fee that would cover the first 90 days of optimization (initial fee and 3 months worth of optimization), then giving the client a monthly maintenance fee (which would be disclosed to them upfront).

Also, should I focus more on increasing qualified traffic as opposed to strictly ranking contingencies? (I think I already know the answer to this).

I would appreciate feeback on these questions.

Thanks
Hugo

P.S. My greatest source of optimization leads is www.seoconsultants.com. It's not easy get accepted into their directory, but it if you do get in, it gives a tremendous amount of credibility to your firm.