The vast majority of the public know very little about SEO. I work for a Portland and Tacoma based search engine optimization company and you would be surprised by how very little people know about our industry. Naturally, so many of them have gotten burnt by frauds that they think we are all crooks.
Ah, if they only knew how hard we work. Unlike other industries this is a science based off theory more than anything. Goggle has never and will never give us all the factors they use to rank websites. We have a good idea on some major things we can do in order to rank a website high on the search engine but nothing is for certain. What works today could be void tomorrow and what worked for one industry could not work as well for another.
Speaking from experience I have had two websites, one of them a personal injury lawyer and the other a property management company, and spent the same amount of time on them. One did really well and the client is as happy as can be. The other one did not do so hot, I put more work into it, nothing, more work, nothing, and now after seven months its in the middle of page two. Any suggestions??? Go figure, that’s the world of SEO. Just when you think you know it all you realize you are not the hotshot you thought you were.
So when your purchase SEO services what happens. What are you really paying for. Lets outline what happens at my particular SEO Portland company.
Appointment Setters Call You
We have a team of four appointment setters who make calls to local businesses from 8AM-Noon. Many people are rude to them, call them liars, and hang up. Companies who are just Adwords resellers disguising themselves as an SEO company in Portland ruin a lot of potential customers for us. 5% of them say yes.
Sales Team Takes Over
The appointment is logged and the salesman and woman take over. They go and meet with the client. Their job is to listen to the client and see that their needs are. They then proceed to explain to them what we do, a brief description of how we do it, and prices. If the clients likes what he hears he signs a contract for a year. He pays a small fee but most of the billing is not done until he gets to page one.
Web Design
If the client does not have a website then the process is longer. We have to design a website for him from scratch and its very time consuming. Additionally, it has no age value and will take longer to rank.
Optimizers and Content Writers
These guys take the website, if they did not build it themselves, and code it. Every page must have enough content, the right amount of keywords, and be coded to W3C standards. One this part is done rankings will begin to rise quickly.
Directory Submissions
A website will be submitted to 50-100 directories across the net. Directories do not individually cary weight like they used to but collectively are still good to push a website out.
IYUs
These have nothing to do with ranking but increase traffic to a site. There are many smaller internet yellow pages and bring our clients a nice amount of hits separate from what he gets from being first page on Google.
Article Writing
1-8 articles are written for your site and distributed to good article directories across the net. Its time consuming and sometimes tedious work but gets the job done.
Link Building
Other forms of link building techniques are employed. This also is tedious work and sometimes a website needs many links just to get on page. Think getting back links is easy? Ha, I wish, if it was everyone would have them. There is an art to getting links that few people understand.
And that is how our Portland SEO company works. After paying all those guys the owner hopes something will be left over to pay him. But if a website takes too long to rank or has trouble then they actually end up spending more money than they bring in.
