Nocturnal Poïesis

Of the many motives I have for writing this column, one is aimed at helping the common person understand the intricacies of SEO. It is an art and once they understand that, they would be willing to set proper SEO budgets.

SEO as a process is far too complex to understand easily but if you don’t understand it at all, you will not know what you are paying for.

Getting a pay per click ad campaign running is easy enough in comparison, simply anyone can go online, create an account, choose keywords and type out an ad. Even though a proper PPC campaign takes understanding, experience and training, the basic concept is easy for anyone of any experience level to understand.

But SEO is not that simple, it has far too many factors and areas involved to grasp quickly in a short time. SEO experts struggle and learn through years of trial and error, countless projects and endless hours of studying the techniques involved. So a lot of hard work goes into the knowledge that has been gained by the expert.

In that perspective, it is understandable that that knowledge comes at a premium to the expert and hence he would not part with it that easily.

Even then, I often ask my readers to submit their websites to me for doing a brief SEO analysis and then offering some advice, free of cost of course. This I do to in order to find out some common areas amongst the variety of websites that are online. It gives my readers some valuable SEO tips and I get an opportunity to learn a bit more.

But as a result of this offer, more and more requests are pouring in because everyone wants a free analysis. And they are not meant for this column either; they are just looking for a free meal.

This is still a smaller problem. The bigger SEO companies have a bigger problem with ‘freeloaders’. These are people who have no intention of paying for the information. But they pretend to be clients and offer the project to the company.

Now my practice has always been clarity. I frankly tell them what I think is wrong and ask them if their own employees (if any) would able to support the initiative. Do note that this is just the initial stage where no agreement has been signed or anything.

What these ‘freeloaders’ do is that they take that advice and implement it themselves, without paying a penny to the SEO company or expert they had consulted. But thankfully not many such clients exist, but that does not change the fact that quite a few do exist.

So the question here is what can SEO companies/experts do in this situation? The initial proposal is always drafted with the problem areas mentioned. The proposal will contain the keyword/s that the client is aiming at and the areas where they need to be implemented. But that is at the risk of giving away information that is meant to be paid for.

I would like my readers to comment on this specific problem, what do you do in such a situation? How much information to divulge and how much to retain till the project agreement has been signed?

It is more problematic because I think it is better to prepare my prospects in advance for the work that needs to go into the project.

Of course, it is not like those who steal the information can implement it correctly, it is very likely that they will do a dodgy job. But it is still my loss.

Let me cite a brilliant example here. It’s a joke that goes – Once a man’s car broke down in the middle of a highway and it was the middle of the night. He remembered leaving a garage behind, so he pushed the car all the way back. After reaching the garage, he woke up the mechanic. The mechanic popped the hood, took one look at the engine and then hit something with this wrench. Then he asked the man to turn the key and the engine came alive.

Very thankful, the man asked how much he needed to pay. The mechanic charged him $700. Shocked, the man asked him why it was so high. The mechanic calmly replied, “$50 is the basic charge, plus 50 because it is the middle of the night. The rest” he said “is for the fact that I knew exactly what to hit to get it running.”

The point that I am trying to make here is that SEO experts share their knowledge. It is their understanding and the consequent information that you are paying for. So even if he works for just an hour, it would probably take a commoner quite few years to learn what he knows.

Thus, when you hear that an expert charges $1000 per hour, how would you react? Would you think it is was outrageously high or would you think that it was nothing compared to what you will be getting in return.

Let’s put it into perspective. The $1000 that you spend each hour will make sure that your site gets traffic that is worth thousands of dollars or more to you, per month.

Here’s a real life example.

One or two week back, an agency called me up with an urgent project. It so happened that that agency had built a website for a very high profile client. I cannot take names here for obvious reasons let’s call them ‘XYZ’.

Now this agency had built the website in flash and had handed over the site to XYZ. The site wasn’t ranking very well so XYZ called up the agency and asked why it wasn’t ranking as it should.

It was an absolute SEO emergency for the agency, at which point they contacted me. They assured me that they wanted a long term relationship with me. The agency of course had to get the XYZ website fixed immediately and XYZ being a high profile client, I had a good feeling about working with some high up people.

So I prepared a report and pointed out the steps that both sides would take together to get the work done. They had told me that the long-term agreement was just waiting for some nitty-gritty to get smoothened out.

After that, they stopped responding to all my emails and voicemails. Then after a while I got an email from my contact at the agency saying that they were currently implementing the steps and they would let me know as soon as they were done. The email ended with a “thanks” but I was none the richer after having given them my advice. Now that I think about it, I simply should’ve sent them an agreement and started charging hourly rates for consultation.

As you can understand, it has left a bad taste in my mouth. So, what I would like to know is what other SEO companies/experts do in such situations. It is obvious that the areas have to be discussed before the agreement is made. But what if the client just takes the information for free and uses it without paying you a cent?

Of course, it takes an expert to do the work properly, so like I said before, clients will probably not get it right. But still, how to know where to stop? If you have ideas, relevant experience, etc, I would love to hear them.

Yeah another piece of web content and this happens in content writing too. Like I rewrote this article and did not get paid for it. So I am putting it up here because well, this is a PR2 blog and it gets indexed quite fast!!! Mu ha ha ha ha

Got some nice paying clients. A really happy writer now!

On the music front, been getting better at getting the tunes out of my head and on to a real track. Expect new stuff in June July rounds. :)