One of our web host­ing cli­ents emailed me today say­ing that he’d received a cold called from a search engine mar­ket­ing com­pany prom­ising to get his web­site lis­ted on page 1 of Google’s search res­ults pages (SERPS) for “only” £75 per month.

The cli­ent wanted to know if it was a “good deal” or a com­plete rip off. So I asked him to for­ward their pro­posal to me for comment.

This was an inter­est­ing exer­cise on two fronts. Firstly, because I was happy to give our cli­ent some hon­est advice with a view to help­ing him out: if I thought it was a good deal they were offer­ing, I’d tell him. Secondly it allowed me to arm myself with more inform­a­tion about our SEO com­pet­it­ors with respect to how they pack­age and present their ser­vices and their prices.

On the face of it, £75 a month for a first page list­ing of a web­site on Google sounds a good deal. After all 80% of UK search­ers use Google and every­one knows that if a site isn’t on page 1 of Google’s SERPS it has a sig­ni­fic­antly reduced chance of being found and vis­ited. So surely get­ting on the first page is good and £75 per month isn’t really that much is it?

Hang on a mo’ though before every­one gets car­ried away! Let’s dig a little deeper here and see what these guys are actu­ally offer­ing. Exper­i­ence has taught me that “good deals” like this inev­it­ably fall-short of what the cli­ent expects from the arrange­ment in the long term by which time their money has been wasted.

I examined the client’s for­war­ded pro­posal which con­sisted of a single email with a couple of small para­graphs and a four point bul­leted list extolling the vir­tues of their ser­vices and the bene­fits of a page 1 list­ing on Google’s SERPS. Not par­tic­u­larly impress­ive or inform­at­ive in itself.

There was noth­ing in there about the tech­nique or strategy the com­pany would be using, an import­ant factor if the site owner is to be reas­sured that the deal they are enter­ing into isn’t going to dam­age any exist­ing Google list­ings they may have. Secondly it tran­spired that their “prom­ise” only applied to one keyword phrase that the site owner nom­in­ated them­selves. So in other words, for £75 per month this com­pany prom­ised a page one list­ing for only a single phrase irre­spect­ive of whether that phrase had been cor­rectly researched or not.

An incor­rectly researched phrase could be too broad or poorly tar­geted which at best would only attract “browsers” not “buy­ers” and at the worst would attract the wrong type of vis­itor altogether.

Thirdly it became appar­ent that the site owner was locked into their ser­vices if he wanted to main­tain his page 1 pos­i­tion for his nom­in­ated phrase. Once the site owner’s con­tract ended with the SEO com­pany, so does his page 1 pos­i­tion. That is to say; through­out the dur­a­tion of the site owner’s con­tract with these guys, there was no rank­ing his­tory being estab­lished with Google. If the cli­ent wanted to move to a dif­fer­ent SEO com­pany at any point the whole pos­i­tion­ing pro­cess would have to start again.

So on behalf of our cli­ent I pre­pared a list of ques­tions that would explore and hope­fully address the points I’ve raised above. The cli­ent sent off my ques­tions and a short while later, back came a reply.

As I sus­pec­ted the strategy to be used was Pay-per-click (PPC) using Google Adwords™.

This allowed them to prom­ise a page 1 list­ing and accoun­ted for the loss of the pos­i­tion at con­tract end as well as the lack of pos­i­tion­ing his­tory. In a nut­shell these guys were only selling one PPC advert mar­keted against one keyword phrase for £75. This advert is no doubt part of a high spend­ing PPC account con­tain­ing many dif­fer­ent adverts for a whole list of dif­fer­ent cli­ents, which they run under their own name.

From the SEO company’s point of view it’s not a bad busi­ness model and I can see plenty of oppor­tun­it­ies for mak­ing profit from indi­vidual site own­ers. How­ever from the site owner’s per­spect­ive it offers little value. £75 per month for one phrase in an Adwords cam­paign that does not allow the site owner to man­age or access them­selves is not good value. The lack of effect­ive keyword research could lead to a wasted cam­paign deliv­er­ing little or no res­ults for the site owner’s. For any Adwords cam­paign a wide range of keyword phrases need to be researched with indi­vidual adverts being writ­ten for seg­men­ted groups of phrases.

So if any­one calls your busi­ness with “good deal” prom­ise, dig a little deeper before you sign-up. Be sure that your expect­a­tions match what will be delivered in the long term.

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