Is my client getting overcharged?
-
My client has medium sized website (15k pages).
They have a company that takes care of everything related to the website.
Recently they decided to put a wordpress blog on the site, with a bought theme that only needed the yoast SEO plugin. On an extension like this www.domain.com/blog I could do this very quickly and I am not a professional programmer.
The company claims it took them 40 hours and charged 40 x 125$ = 5,000 $ for it. That does not make sense to me at all. Can anyone explain to me how a clean wordpress install with a preselected theme can take 40 hours? Especially when the people that are installing it call themselves wordpress experts and make custom themes etc.
Thanks in advance.
-
Thanks for your answer.
They did not optimize anything.... But for the rest it is plausible that it took quite some time, yes.
This blog won't need much optimization, Yoast is fine.
-
It is really easy to say... "I could do that in FIVE MINUTES."
What if this site was hand-built with lots of different page formats and huge messy code from one of those old Apple WYSIWYG webpage creators, with lots of images, captions, in-text wrap arounds, etc.
This site has 15,000 pages! So, I could easily imagine a briarpatch site that would take twice that amount of time to do a great job.
And, yes, you can plug in Yoast or any other magic plugin. That will do the SEO, but will it be good SEO, making every page into a finely crafted arrow with KW research, onpage optimization, alt tags.
I am not saying that these people did all of this work. I am just saying if you don't have any idea about what these people did, what they had to start with and what they produced.... then saying "I could do that in five minutes or five hours" could be way off.
-
You are right, I have not thought about that, but it is definitely important!
This is a simple theme, I used it on another domain of mine, it takes 5 minutes to setup.
-
good advice, thanks
-
If they are WordPress experts like you say, they shouldn't stop at only installing Wordpress SEO by Yoast plugin - there are security plugins, backup plugins, analytics plugins, cache plugins, social involvement plugins that are on the "essential plugins list" of every WordPress expert and when they care about their work they will add them without doubt.
Also, installing some premium Themes require more work then simply uploading the files to the server and hitting the "Activate" button.
WordPress install alone is a 5 sec job as we all know, but a robust installation of needed plugins and theme settings can take longer.
Even so, 40 hours looks a little too much in my opinion. You should ask for details.
-
It is ridiculous that they charge this kind of money for just installing WP.
I think you can do your client a favor by telling him it usually doesn't take that amount of time and indeed like Martijn says that they need to specify their hours.
I'm in the same situation by the way. Doing some SEO consulting for a client and the webdevelopment company is charging 125 euro's an hour (which is not specifically bad) but counting a lot of hours for small tasks.
What we did.. I made a list of things that needed to be done and we visited them (physically). So I sat next to the developer while he was changing things and suddenly tasks that took 2 hours before were done in 15 minutes
-
Thanks for your response.
All I can think of is some tweaking of the http access? All they did was install the wordpress and install the theme, they did not tweak the theme.
-
Hopefully they specified where they spend their time on? Because as you mention it, it looks like your client was overcharged. However maybe the pulled in some extra improvements which could be really worth the money.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site is getting crushed by spam traffic and Google Webmaster Tools giving crawl warnings. Also...
Currently hosting a site I'm planning on moving to a new server ASAP, 301 redirecting and have a domain that has nice authority and very old. On the current site I need to clean up the blog. I have a few questions actually.... 1. I'd like to remove most of the blog articles as I want the new site to be very high quality, but isn't it dangerous to do a 301 redirect to the same page for all these articles? 2. I want to focus on the new site as the current site has too many issues but still managing to hang in their. is highly outdated yet I don't want to spend a ton of time on the site before the 301 redirect. With the Pigeon and Panda 4.0 rumors being released soon, I want to get the new site completed ASAP. Do you think it's better if I fix the 3. Would removing cloudflare make things better or worse with the crashing of my site due to high traffic (mainly spam on the blog.) 4. My best article by far is outdated, but should I waste time updating it before redirecting or should I just get the new site going? I did way too many guest posts thinking content is king, but at least checked the outgoing links Domain Auth, Page Auth, and MozTrust in OSE, but first off I'm going to remove a page that mentions I'm looking for guest bloggers. I tried to keep the posts relevant but at the time you could get away with 5. Anything I can do to slow down these spammers on Wordpress? I noticed most of them are checking for vulnerabilities but I'm keeping it up to date, have caching setup. Thanks!
Web Design | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
How do we get search engine bots to the item detail pages?
The problem we have is that we have lots of inventory pages. These inventory pages have a bunch of links at the top linking to different styles of the item, up to 56 links in some cases. Then each item listed has a link to the item's detail page and a link to the item's shop owner's page. So if a page has 50 items shown, there are really 100 links just for the inventory. This is not taking into account the header links, footer links, sidebar links to other sections on the site. We have all these links to help consumers move through the site. The problem is that every item detail page on the site is not getting indexed and actually I think it's more like over 50% of the item detail pages are not indexed because the search engines are too busy following all these other links. Should we nofollow, index the links to the different styles of the item, the shop owner page? Or what should we do to get the search engine bots to index our item detail pages?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Getting a highly ranked site a better result for 1 search term
I have a highly ranked website for a niche category. My site ranks higher in SEOMOZ than all of my competitors, but I can't get any higher than 4th on a page for one specific search term. What can I do to help my site increase its ranking on a specific search term?
Web Design | | tadden0 -
Wordpress Frameworks for SEO - Genesis - Does it Get Any Better?
I'm sure there's a ton of people in this community running Wordpress, any Genesis developers/users out there? For anybody who doesn't know, Genesis is a parent framework for building wordpress child themes. It saves a ton of time for people that aren't too handy w/ php (like me). I'm working on a few sites locally with it right now, and it's really impressive. I'm seriously never planning on using another WP framework. It also integrates perfectly with Yoast SEO, which is something not all frameworks do. So I thought I'd try to get some input from the community here, anybody have another framework they like? Or have an opinion on the SEO benefit of genesis? Would love to hear...
Web Design | | SVmedia0 -
So apparently SEO moz will get us de-indexed according to a SEO company!
Each and every day i get called up from an SEO company who promises to get me top spots in Google rankings if i quickly get on their special offer they have today normally i would say "no thanks and put the phone down" but i had a bit of spare time so i indulged the guy and we got talking. After the introductions and speal about his company he was showing me what his company does and how they go about it to get me top ranks (they don't get me ranks but create a website they own which then passes leads to me- kinda clever since they could then start charging me per lead or my competitors) We continued to talk and i mentioned i used SEOmoz to check my rankings and back links etc and he told me that Google are cracking down and anyone using these types of software/websites will get their websites de indexed. This struck me as BS but i wanted to get your thoughts on the matter, i personally don't believe Google would ever do such a thing as this since it would be so easy to get your competitors websites taken down (i.e. negative seo) but its certainly a talking point.
Web Design | | GarethEJones0 -
Getting a lot more duplicate content warnings than I expected.
I run WordPress on many of my sites and a site crawl has found MANY duplicate content pages on the latest domain I started a campaign for. I expected to see quite a lot on the tag pages that only had one post but even tag pages with multiple posts and author and category pages with many posts are showing as duplicate content. Is this normal for a WordPress site to have so much duplicate content warnings from the taxonomy pages? I have the option to bulk noindex, follow the category and tag pages but should I do it? I get some traffic directly to the tag pages so removing the pages from search results would dent the traffic of the site a little (generally high bounce rate, low engagement traffic anyway) but could removing the apparent duplicate content actually improve the article pages themselves? Or does anyone have any WordPress specific advice for making the pages not duplicate content? I've toyed with the idea of just displaying excerpts but creating manual excerpts for the 4 years worth of posts, some of which I have no personal knowledge of the subject matter so other suggestions are welcome.
Web Design | | williampatton0 -
Getting ranked on google
I help run a small real estate site in ireland www.aplacetorent.ie and Im in charge of seo. I have read lots of books over the last year or so and while they offer lots of advice some of them dont actually show you what to do. I have joined distilled and I think its the best thing i have done in the last few weeks and am learning a lot but if anyone has any advice i would be very grateful. Thank you
Web Design | | Kessie0 -
Does hidden content in jQuery ui tabs still get ignored?
I am looking for a more current answer to this question. I know that google leaves out the js and css. But since the code usually has display:hidden inline with the code while using jquery ui tabs I was curious to know if google considers this hidden or from what some articles have said, "tries to ignore the content". Is this still true today? I would assume no but looking for some back-up.
Web Design | | sknott0