When to Pay for Search Engine Optimization Services

Posted in SEO

Might seem a dumb thing for an SEO company to discuss, but search engine optimization isn’t for every website.

ROI (Return On Investment) is a critical factor in the decision to hire an SEO Consultant, not much point spending thousands of dollars on SEO services if it doesn’t result in many times more in increased income.

So how do you go about deciding if search engine optimization is for your website?

Has your site the potential to pull in lots of traffic from Google?

Google has a delay in rankings called the sandbox effect. A new website or site with few backlinks (low PR) is not considered ‘trustworthy’ to Google. To be trusted by Google a site must have long term links and a reasonable PR (minimum PR4). Through experimentation we’ve found it takes at least a year to become trusted. Prior to this period a site will tend to rank poorly for anything but the easiest of SERPs.

Since Google provides far more traffic than all the other search engines if you have a site in the Google sandbox traffic growth is going to be slow even if you do well in the other search engines.

Is this the time to hire an SEO firm?

Depends on what they are offering you. At this point in time (sandboxed) your site needs long term links. If you can’t supply these yourself an SEO service that sources text links could be what you need. This could be a managed reciprocal links program or text links for renting on a monthly basis.

What might not be that useful at this time is actual SEO advice or on page optimization of content. Although these won’t hurt a site, since your site is sandboxed the best SEO advice and optimisation in the world won’t be able to optimise your content to obtain competitive SERPs. So could be argued it’s not the time to spend a lot of money on this type of SEO service.

So to summarise if you have a new site or website with few links (low PR) look at SEO services that supply text links and think twice about advice services (BTW we can supply text links for just £1 each, email for details).

If you have an older site, with a fair number of backlinks (at least PR4 for at least 9 months, out of the sandbox) and you aren’t seeing much traffic that’s when it’s a much easier decision to hire an SEO consultant.

With an aged site (aged links) content tends to rank much quicker and so harder SERPs are within reach especially with the help of an experienced SEO consultant guiding you through the on page optimization process. For some websites several months of SEO advice (from SEO services like the SEO Consultant Retainer Plan) can be just what is needed to push traffic to a poorly optimised web site.

With an aged site you might not need more text links, depends a lot on the industry your site is in, some main SERPs can be obtained with a PR4 home page others no chance without at least PR6. As a rule of thumb more links is always a welcome addition to a struggling site.

So with an older struggling site look for an SEO service that offers advice about content optimization.

Search Engine Submission Services

Whatever else you do don’t waste time/money on SEO services that offer search engine submission. They are a complete waste of time and money.

Google for example will eventually spider/index a new site after it’s submitted (which is free BTW), but if that site doesn’t gain links from other sites it’s going to be removed from the index quite fast. Even if you resubmitted your site to Google daily it’s not going to gain any decent traffic until it’s got those so important aged text links.

I would go as far to say if you come across an SEO company that as part of their SEO services offers submission to Google “RUN AWAY AS FAST AS YOU CAN”. The fact they are offering search engine submission means they are either completely clueless or are unethical SEOs and will probably take your money and offer nothing but worthless services.