we are in recession.
During a recession, businesses rethink their budgets.
All organizations are looking for ways to spend their money more efficiently with less.
For many in the search engine marketing industry, history is repeating itself.
As the economy deteriorates, businesses are turning to search engine marketing as a trackable, efficient, and relatively reliable way to generate revenue.
But the world of search engine marketing has a dark side.
Unscrupulous and incompetent practitioners tout so-called solutions that may actually do more harm than good.
Many SEO practitioners can’t resist the temptation to attract quick and easy money from prospects or unsuspecting business owners desperate for sales.
And the road to the heart of a struggling business owner is the promise of great results for little money.
Some SEO experts offer packages for hundreds of dollars.
You think that money would be better spent on a nice steak dinner. A nice steak dinner can at least get you something, without the ability to really destroy your business.
Different strokes for different people
There are many types of SEO.
Success requires both competence and experience.
Many SEO agencies are good at what they do.
Finding the right people is often more important than finding an agency that can do the job competently.
A lot of the time, when a company tells you that you got “gotten” by a reputable agency, you realize that the problem is more with the fit than the actual job.
For example, my agency is more proactive than many others when it comes to getting things done.
We tend to ask for forgiveness, not permission
This works fine for many clients.
As such, clients who want to have close control over every aspect of their campaign are usually not the right fit for us.
That doesn’t mean companies wanting to closely manage their agencies are bad clients.
In fact, we succeed when we understand each other.
But clients who want to know everything we do all the time usually don’t last long with our agency.
It’s all about fit.
Regardless of suitability, problems can arise when a company becomes cheaper.
calculate
I am going to ask you to do some calculations.
I promise, it will be relatively painless.
Here are Glassdoor’s SEO salary stats.
Numbers have been rounded for simplicity.
| SEO Average Salary
(1-3 years experience) |
SEO Average Salary
(4-6 years of experience) |
SEO Average Salary
(7-9 years of experience) |
SEO Average Salary
(10-15 years experience) |
| $55,000 | $64,000 | $76,000 | $85,000 |
Having been in the SEO game for 21 years, I have a pretty good idea of the minimum effort required to be successful.
In most cases, I would estimate that basic SEO work for a simple site would require about 10 hours of work per month.
10 hours applies only after 1 month.
The first month usually takes 10+ hours as everything is set up, including audits, strategy and communications.
Honestly, unless you’re more efficient than anyone I’ve worked with, you’ll find that even the most basic site requires 10 hours of work each month. return.
Are there any exceptions?
yes.
Competing sites in a low-competition niche may require less than 10 hours of work per month.
But if you want to continue to receive an ROI of 3x what you’re putting into your site, you’ll have to put in 10 hours a month.
You may be able to get these results without doing the 10 hours of work you need for a few months, but eventually the results will degrade and you’ll need 10 hours to get the results back where you need them. You will end up spending more than that. .
In my opinion, advertising should provide a 3x return on the effort and money put into it. or no reason to do it all.
That ad includes SEO.
Don’t Calculate Cheap SEO
We showed salaries and talked about the time it takes to put together a quality program.
If a person works a standard 40 hour week schedule, I would consider only about 25 hours of those weeks to be billable.
You need time to perform administrative tasks, take breaks, and research trends. The list goes on and on.
So most of us who don’t want to work until our fingers bleed (as most of us should) have about 100 hours per month of actual work time available to do SEO for our clients.
When you pay someone $500 a month to work on SEO, you’re paying for that time, whether it shows up in your list of tasks or a ton of hours. increase.
Let’s assume that the minimum wage necessary for living is about $30,000 a year.
To earn that much, after taxes, an individual would have to do 10 projects for $500 a month and earn a salary of $30,000 a year.
With 10 projects and an average of 100 hours of work per month, we pay an average of $15/hr for SEO for our sites.
This doesn’t include the subscription cost of the tool (at least $200-$300 a month to be honest), overhead like computers, or other people checking your work.
Add in the usual expenses of doing business and hourly wages start to drop sharply.
This wage level may work for an intern or someone outside of the US, but take another look at the salaries above.
If you need experienced talent, $14 an hour won’t get you.
at least in America
Sure, some people can work faster than others, but the best people definitely make $14 an hour or more.
Even cutting deliverable time in half isn’t worth $500 per month per client.
Even $1,000 a month doesn’t reach the salaries in the table above for most clients who pay $500 a month.
Let’s face it, someone good at SEO will pay more than $15 an hour.
Do you want people who aren’t doing well in one of the most important marketing channels you have to get a job?
Conclusion
If you’re buying SEO costs, you’re paying yourself.
Cheap SEO is probably not perfected by experienced people.
Cutting corners can actually get you into trouble.
Bad SEO, or SEO that doesn’t follow the guidelines set by search engines, is usually worse than no SEO at all.
Clearly, low-cost programs don’t deliver enough results to demonstrate effective returns, or someone is working for incredibly low wages.
Other resources:
image credit
Featured image: August 2020, modified by the author
