These days, it’s impossible to move more than about 20 feet before you get someone trying to sell you some search engine optimisation services of some kind or another. Funnily enough they do this via direct selling rather letting you find them on Google, but generally speaking they make the same promises:
- They’ll get you to the fabled number one slot on Google
- They’ll double your traffic
However, they never tend to promise the one thing that you, as a website owner, really want … return on investment.
For instance, let’s say you’re paying a SEO “Expert” to help with your site. What would you like to see? 10 million hits a day? The number 1 slot on Google? More income?
Exactly, whilst traffic is nice from a vanity point of view, it ultimately costs you money in bandwidth and beefier servers. Only sales conversions generate you true income and I believe this is how all SEO experts should be measured.
Which would you prefer: 10,000 customers who never buy anything, or five who do?
Over time I would like to see SEO Experts moving to charging on a results based model, i.e. the more money you make you via your website, the more they get paid. If they don’t increase your ROI (i.e do their work properly), they don’t get paid – simple.
that’ll be the day!
Some of us, a rare few of us indeed, are doing just that. I have been experimenting with creating free, VERY low budget Internet “commercials” for potential clients. I then blast those videos to the top 20 video sites (including YouTube of course) with the proper keywords etc. I have been successful in getting first-page organic results on Google within a week or two using certain search phrases.
In the commercials, we usually say something along the lines of “tell them the Web Guy sent you for an additional $X off your purchase.” For every person that mentions the “Web Guy Discount”, I get an affiliate fee. The only other amount I charge is for the true cost of getting the video posted and ranked.
I agree it is comical how all these so-called SEO Guru’s contact you via the TELEPHONE to sell you their service. If they are THAT good, why not use their own magic pixie dust on their own Website/Service?