What to expect from an SEO company

[heatherglant]

Hi everyone,

I've been researching SEO firms and still can't figure out what I should be expecting from a quality firm/ person. I was wondering if members would be willing to outline what their SEO services offer.

I'm mainly interested in:

1.) What exactly do your SEO services provide (content writing, content editing, link building, article distribution, social bookmarking, programming, code changes, SEO friendly site strucutre code changes, etc.)

2.) Do you typically charge on an hourly or set rate? What is that rate?

3.) Do you offer ongoing maintenance for free or charge? What is the fee?

4.) If content writing is not included what do you charge to write and article?

Any help would be greatly appreciate!

Heather

[AussieWebmaster]

Content writing is generally not included in an SEO service but it can be.... most services expect the site owners to have the information about their industry and would be in a better place to write it.

They then help restructure the writing to include best SEO practices.

Many will give you a flat rate for the initial optimization report with recommendations on what would be needed to help imrove the sites ranking.

This could be link building, all on page changes needed, addition of analytics, etc.

Then they will charge a monthly maintenance fee depending on what they are going to do moving forward.

Content writing can be done... I have people that do it... but is generally not included unless people ask about it at the start.

[shaneekirk]

Hi, there,

The SEO firm you hire should be able to put together a proposal for you of what needs to be done for your site. What are the "low hanging fruit" opportunities, what will work for your budget, and what will be good for future, ongoing programs.

1. We mostly work with general best practices, if we spot some no-no's or some obvious areas to improve, we will make those suggestions.
2. Plans/Strategies for incorporating new content. We have SEO copywriters, and can also outsource large scale projects (or allow you to do this yourself).

I would guess that different SEO's will have different specialties or pieces of the puzzle that they are best with.

We charge project rates (based on an hourly rate and time estimate.

We definitely charge for ongoing consulting. There's not really "maintenance" as much as ongoing project management of new strategies.

The content writing fees depend on what kind of content, and how much content is to be written. For example, a industry white paper would cost more than an informative resource article, which would be more than a "news" type article. Depends on how much research would be involved, etc.

Good luck finding a good firm/person to help you out!!

[textlink969]

thanks for this information, but i will still like to more what other we can expect

[AussieWebmaster]

increases in traffic and conversions should be part of it... saying you will get sites to front page for the most competitive terms ... long tail terms yes and movement on major terms... but it should be in terms of improving traffic numbers and conversions... so working with designer and site developers is also sometimes needed

[shameendevina]

The main objective of an SEO company is to give your site a top search engine position. for this both the on page and off page factors are considered. Right from your meta tags to your hieracy of the page to see if its search engine friendly. Content is analyiZed to check the key word density and then accordingly strategies are planned and implemented to give you better quality links and better position.

The charge is on hourly basis and the fees depends from company to company.

:rolleyes: