Help Me find a Great Seo for my Budget!
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Agreed, and that is where a lot of small businesses end up in trouble with Google - by hiring the SEO provider they can afford, and that often means one that doesn't know or care what they are doing wrong.
$300-$500 is not unheard of for small business SEO, particularly a local business. The problem, I think, is how "small business" is defined when it comes to online marketing. If a company has only a few people or lower revenues, it is "small" by real world standards - but that doesn't matter if the site is competing online with huge companies that are in the same niche, marketing-wise. For example, a hardware store may only be competing with other "mom & pop" stores locally, but they still have to compete with Walmart, HomeDepot, TruValue, Lowes, etc online. Those all have been around a long time, have strong reputations & branding, and as a result have tons of links. It isn't impossible to rank among them or even above, but it is going to take a great deal of time and the best possible SEO & promotion.
This is why a lot of SEOs don't quote a flat rate. Getting a site about "bamboo handled solar powered grass trimmers" to rank well for all possible search terms is much easier than for a site about "lawn tools". SEO should be priced according to the level of competition.
If you think about all that is involved with doing SEO right, and then try to apply an hourly dollar value to it, $500 gets used up pretty quickly. Even if a site only has 5 or 6 pages and is not a total mess, there is at least an hour or two of analyzing and improving the site itself, just on the first go around. Those adjustments will usually have to be tweaked throughout a campaign. Even if you can get someone to do that at super-cheap hourly developer rates, it runs out quickly. A larger or more complicated site will require more, obviously.
If the SEO is going to be doing any content work and link building, you have the cost of the creative work which is not going to be cheap for good stuff, and the time to track down possible link sources and do whatever is needed to get those links. Even if the link builder is going the easier, riskier route of things like directory submissions, they still need to know what they are doing well enough to not do more harm than good. -
I hate to spin this off in another direction, but if you have great traffic and a huge following (assuming most of the 200k are real, not paid/fake profiles), where is that traffic coming from?
What I am getting at is maybe you are focusing too much on keywords, or looking at the wrong ones. Like, if you are hoping to rank for the generic "tech news", but your individual articles are all ranking well for whatever they are about, then maybe you are doing better than you think?
And the auditor recommendations - you say you followed a lot of the recommendations but not all. The ones you didn't follow may have been more important than you think, or the whole plan the auditor mapped out may be at its best when everything is done as per recommendations. You might want to revisit the audit recommendations and do them all and see what happens before shopping around.
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I certainly understand and see your point of view and totally agree with what you said. Unfortunately that is all the budget I have right now and trying to make it work, but basically from what i am hearing that is that kinda money wont hire a decent seo.
On site wise i think we are pretty close with a little more work.Here is our site
Search engine rankings and link building is where i feel we fall short.
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Try not to build links try to attract them - This is the better long term goal. Think can your break news , Curate news better, use a better medium like video and infographics etc
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We are always looking to improve our traffic and rankings, so is not a lack of, it is about getting more.Our traffic comes from direct and social media/never fake and search.We ranked well for our main keyword page one and had great traffic with no SEO.We dropped to page 3 though and it affected our traffic obviously and trying to get back to page one is our goal.I am focused on our main keyword as it does drive a lot of traffic for us.
In regards to our auditors recommendations we have followed all of it exactly and are just finishing up now.A lot of it was on site fixes.However the next stage is link building which we will need help for and hope for someone else to come in and give us some other suggestions and help with off site stuff as well.
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Just do it yourself. http://www.link-assistant.com/buzzbundle/
Buzz Bundle is awesome. When you set up a new article and publish that - add in your keywords and then promote it. Do it for a hour a day and you will save money and get results.. just from using buzz bundle.
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If you got hit you may need to fix some bad links or onsite issues before you can build links to recover.
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exactly.
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certainly agree nothing in GWT stands out in regards to bad links , or other red flags so we would need some help on where that issue may be.
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Looks like some interesting software for managing our social media more efficiently and save us some time.We do everything it offers manually right now.
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Building links would be for serp's.
We use a lot of video and infographics when possible but when you are breaking news and leaks and want to be first to press with that type of info a video and info-graphic are not always applicable.We plan to do more infographics though.
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Take a look here: http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/reviews/buzzbundle-review-how-i-drive-traffic-to-my-blog/ - its awesome.
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Were any of those recommendations to reduce the amount of stuff on the home page? Like, the number of links to articles or number & prominence of ads?
Compare the approximate date your ranking dropped to the Google update history here: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and see if anything seems like it would have affected your site. I'm thinking the update about being top heavy with ads, or possibly one of the pandas may be part of the problem. The home page is really just a lot of links to articles (and ads), so you might do well to add some introductory text to tell users (and Google) what to expect from the site. Even adding article excerpts to the thumbnails or the featured articles at the top could be helpful. I know that sounds silly since it is clearly about Android, but some text that isn't a link would be useful for the sometimes stupid googlebot. (Yeah, I know, I am a hypocrite since I always say "for people not search engines").
Took a very quick look at the links in OpenSiteExplorer and it does look pretty clean.
Still doesn't hurt to either spring for a link audit, or try linkresearchtools.com to get a good start on finding suspicious links.
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As mentioned in my previous posts, tho. Tested freelance SEOs and results were non existent or even getting worse rankings.
Based on my experience: DO NOT HIRE any SEO which isn't known in the area and specially if the prices are low. Below $2-3K monthly, you will NOT get anything good.
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We have reduced stuff on the front page already...ha,ha....Just throwing up our CDN now.
We did a redesign in the fall and went for the clean look with no excerpts/text from articles but have often debated if that may effect things.Sometimes pretty does not always work.I will look to fix this up as i have actually been debating on doing this already.
Ads are a unnecessary evil as they pay the bills and staff.We are doing some testing so their is some more ads than normal once we are done we will reduce them for sure.
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At 2-3K a month I won't be getting a SEO for a while.
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I think that actually, SEO is still far too cheap.
Many companies are willing to spend thousands on PR agencies who will put in far less hours and have less technical specialisms than good SEOs; who I feel often don't get a reasonable share of the overall budget available. While, obviously, small business owners will not be able to afford this level of consulting; they equally won't be able to afford PR/Creative and I don't think SEO should be seen as any less valuable than those services.
Good SEO should be really expensive, because if it's not, then people won't value it.
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