15
Nov
2009
Search Engine Optimization V Pay Per Click – We Profile The Many Advantages Natural Rankings Have Over Pay Per Click Listings
I have recently been asked to provide a quote for SEO to a site selling car insurance. No other particulars were provided, just an enquiry as to how much SEO would cost for this site. Pricing a job for SEO is a lot like pricing up a house, There are just to many variables to allow a set and fixed pricing agreement. Do they want a tiny 1 bedroom flat or a 20 bedroom manor house with a private pool and tennis court? The most imperative factor is always competition. Car Insurance as a niche has a lot of competition, there are plenty of businesses all trying to get a piece of the pie, A lot of the high ranking websites have been on the scene for years and will therefore have trust and seniority over a new site in the eyes of Google.
That said ranking on Google on the first page is possible, if a customer is prepared to invest the required amount to assure success then of course it can be done. I would even suggest that it would be possible to rank in first place of Google for the keyword “car insurance”, knocking confused.com out of first place If the resources are available to support such a big campaign. Even then I still wouldn’t have enough information to provide an accurate quote. The important question is what keywords do you want promoting and do you want first page or first place rankings. The majority of business have net to no idea which keywords carry the best traffic and the concept of keyword research is as alien to them as a little green man in a flying silver disk.
But lets hypothesize for example that “car insurance” was given as a keyword. The first step should always be to analyze the competition, this would allow you to see the number of back links that they have and give you some idea of the strength of their ranking by looking at the anchor texts used in their linking. Its also helpful to look at the companies that are using pay per click, and use ad words keywords tool to find out what they are paying for each click. Then look at variations of the keyword, “car insurance student” “womens car insurance” “over fifty car insurance” “business car insurance” etc etc.
There are some massive corporate names on the first page of Google, and pay per click advertisers are paying between £250 and £3k for advertising each day. The average price for each click is £5.25, but lets round that down to £5 to simplify things. So, if you are looking at even the mid range of pay per click of £1500 a day, and presuming the campaign runs every day of the week each month, then by ranking on the first page you are looking at saving £45000 a month on ad words, you shouldn’t really expect to achieve a first page ranking by paying a consultant £2500. Yet you would be astonished at how many businesses actually do expect that kind of price. And furthermore clients expect first page results within a few weeks, this just is not possible.
On the other hand though, if the client invested an amount equal to 4 months of the cost a mid ranged pay per click campaign would cost, they would see some inspiring results. So for this example that would mean £1500 a day times 120 days giving an SEO Services budget of £180k. That’s actually a little more than I expect this campaign would need to see good results, but the strange fact is that there just is not any business that would be willing to spend £180k on getting their site to rank well in Google, even for forty different keywords or search terms. Most business owners just cannot see that by doing this they would then save the difference of the remaining 8 months pay per click budget that year, and even more the following year.
In the world of big business world £180k just isn’t a great deal of money, you can bet that most big corporations will spend more than this on other forms of advertising on a monthly basis. The Internet is a powerful marketing tool, and whilst large corporations seem to understand this, they simply do not see the savings that SEO Services can bring compared to massive expense of PPC. Additionally, organic listing actually bring far more traffic than pay per click results.
Find out practical recommendations about SEO Services – read this webpage. The times have come when proper information is really only one click of your mouse, use this chance.
