Help Me find a Great Seo for my Budget!

[chrisyak]

I am looking for a Good SEO for my tech news site and would like your help in recommending a good SEO that will fit in my budget of 300-500 per month.I have contacted many firms in the Moz directory of recommended firms but found they are out of my monthly price range.Google search for a decent SEO can be scary with so many so called SEO companies.I would like to work with a experienced SEO individual who can come up with a great plan for our site and also implement them.We just had a SEO forensic audit done with Alan Blieweiss and implemented his suggestions and are now looking for someone to work with long term for the rest of our SEO needs.I understand that I cannot afford the top SEO firms or industry leaders but with your help and suggestions I am sure we can afford and find a great SEO.

Please reply here or message me.

[PhilNottingham]

I think that actually, SEO is still far too cheap.

Many companies are willing to spend thousands on PR agencies who will put in far less hours and have less technical specialisms than good SEOs; who I feel often don't get a reasonable share of the overall budget available. While, obviously, small business owners will not be able to afford this level of consulting; they equally won't be able to afford PR/Creative and I don't think SEO should be seen as any less valuable than those services.

Good SEO should be really expensive, because if it's not, then people won't value it.

[chrisyak]

At 2-3K a month I won't be getting a SEO for a while.

[chrisyak]

We have reduced stuff on the front page already...ha,ha....Just throwing up our CDN now.

We did a redesign in the fall and went for the clean look with no excerpts/text from articles but have often debated if that may effect things.Sometimes pretty does not always work.I will look to fix this up as i have actually been debating on doing this already.

Ads are a unnecessary evil as they pay the bills and staff.We are doing some testing so their is some more ads than normal once we are done we will reduce them for sure.

[FedeEinhorn]

As mentioned in my previous posts, tho. Tested freelance SEOs and results were non existent or even getting worse rankings.

Based on my experience: DO NOT HIRE any SEO which isn't known in the area and specially if the prices are low. Below $2-3K monthly, you will NOT get anything good.

[Nick_Ker]

Were any of those recommendations to reduce the amount of stuff on the home page? Like, the number of links to articles or number & prominence of ads?

Compare the approximate date your ranking dropped to the Google update history here: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and see if anything seems like it would have affected your site. I'm thinking the update about being top heavy with ads, or possibly one of the pandas may be part of the problem. The home page is really just a lot of links to articles (and ads), so you might do well to add some introductory text to tell users (and Google) what to expect from the site. Even adding article excerpts to the thumbnails or the featured articles at the top could be helpful. I know that sounds silly since it is clearly about Android, but some text that isn't a link would be useful for the sometimes stupid googlebot. (Yeah, I know, I am a hypocrite since I always say "for people not search engines").

Took a very quick look at the links in OpenSiteExplorer and it does look pretty clean.

Still doesn't hurt to either spring for a link audit, or try linkresearchtools.com to get a good start on finding suspicious links.

[joseph.chambers]

Take a look here: http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/reviews/buzzbundle-review-how-i-drive-traffic-to-my-blog/ - its awesome.

[chrisyak]

Building links would be for serp's.

We use a lot of video and infographics when possible but when you are breaking news and leaks and want to be first to press with that type of info a video and info-graphic are not always applicable.We plan to do more infographics though.

[chrisyak]

Looks like some interesting software for managing our social media more efficiently and save us some time.We do everything it offers manually right now.

[chrisyak]

certainly agree nothing in GWT stands out in regards to bad links , or other red flags so we would need some help on where that issue may be.

[joseph.chambers]

exactly.

[DavidKonigsberg]

If you got hit you may need to fix some bad links or onsite issues before you can build links to recover.

[joseph.chambers]

Just do it yourself. http://www.link-assistant.com/buzzbundle/

Buzz Bundle is awesome. When you set up a new article and publish that - add in your keywords and then promote it. Do it for a hour a day and you will save money and get results.. just from using buzz bundle.

[chrisyak]

We are always looking to improve our traffic and rankings, so is not a lack of, it is about getting more.Our traffic comes from direct and social media/never fake and search.We ranked well for our main keyword page one and had great traffic with no SEO.We dropped to page 3 though and it affected our traffic obviously and trying to get back to page one is our goal.I am focused on our main keyword as it does drive a lot of traffic for us.

In regards to our auditors recommendations we have followed all of it exactly and are just finishing up now.A lot of it was on site fixes.However the next stage is link building which we will need help for and hope for someone else to come in and give us some other suggestions and help with off site stuff as well.

[DavidKonigsberg]

Try not to build links try to attract them - This is the better long term goal. Think can your break news , Curate news better, use a better medium like video and infographics etc

[chrisyak]

I certainly understand and see your point of view and totally agree with what you said. Unfortunately that is all the budget I have right now and trying to make it work, but basically from what i am hearing that is that kinda money wont hire a decent seo.

On site wise i think we are pretty close with a little more work.Here is our site

Search engine rankings and link building is where i feel we fall short.

[Nick_Ker]

I hate to spin this off in another direction, but if you have great traffic and a huge following (assuming most of the 200k are real, not paid/fake profiles), where is that traffic coming from?

What I am getting at is maybe you are focusing too much on keywords, or looking at the wrong ones. Like, if you are hoping to rank for the generic "tech news", but your individual articles are all ranking well for whatever they are about, then maybe you are doing better than you think?

And the auditor recommendations - you say you followed a lot of the recommendations but not all. The ones you didn't follow may have been more important than you think, or the whole plan the auditor mapped out may be at its best when everything is done as per recommendations.  You might want to revisit the audit recommendations and do them all and see what happens before shopping around.

[Nick_Ker]

Agreed, and that is where a lot of small businesses end up in trouble with Google - by hiring the SEO provider they can afford, and that often means one that doesn't know or care what they are doing wrong.

$300-$500 is not unheard of for small business SEO, particularly a local business. The problem, I think, is how "small business" is defined when it comes to online marketing. If a company has only a few people or lower revenues, it is "small" by real world standards - but that doesn't matter if the site is competing online with huge companies that are in the same niche, marketing-wise. For example, a hardware store may only be competing with other "mom & pop" stores locally, but they still have to compete with Walmart, HomeDepot, TruValue, Lowes, etc online. Those all have been around a long time, have strong reputations & branding, and as a result have tons of links. It isn't impossible to rank among them or even above, but it is going to take a great deal of time and the best possible SEO & promotion.

This is why a lot of SEOs don't quote a flat rate. Getting a site about "bamboo handled solar powered grass trimmers" to rank well for all possible search terms is much easier than for a site about "lawn tools". SEO should be priced according to the level of competition.

If you think about all that is involved with doing SEO right, and then try to apply an hourly dollar value to it, $500 gets used up pretty quickly. Even if a site only has 5 or 6 pages and is not a total mess, there is at least an hour or two of analyzing and improving the site itself, just on the first go around. Those adjustments will usually have to be tweaked throughout a campaign. Even if you can get someone to do that at super-cheap hourly developer rates, it runs out quickly. A larger or more complicated site will require more, obviously.
If the SEO is going to be doing any content work and link building, you have the cost of the creative work which is not going to be cheap for good stuff, and the time to track down possible link sources and do whatever is needed to get those links. Even if the link builder is going the easier, riskier route of things like directory submissions, they still need to know what they are doing well enough to not do more harm than good.

[DavidKonigsberg]

You can find good freelance people not agency's but you need to seek out specialties.

[DavidKonigsberg]

Pm me your site and ill let you know what i think - But $500 will not be enough to compete in a competitive market ever.

[chrisyak]

We have done a forensic audit with a great SEO already and implemented a lot of those changes.But he specialized in audits only so now we are looking for someone to take over the day to day and long term seo strategies.

We have a great name already and near 200k social media following and great traffic during our busy season.Content wise we have a tons of great content.

Where we are lacking is rankings as we are in a competitive market.

[FedeEinhorn]

Question: Who charges 150/hour for SEO consultation (without minimums)? I always saw a per hour pricing but with minimums of $5K or so. If you know a GOOD SEO consultant charging 150/hour, tell me his/her name now, I need him too

[DavidKonigsberg]

You can find good onsite seo's for $500 montlhy but the link building and brand marketing is what costs alot these days.Take your money higher someone to do a onsite audit and changes.

After that is all done you need to get a name for yourself and have people talk about you and link to you in a natural way. You can do that in 2 ways

1- Offer something amazingly valuable on/off your site and let people in your niche know about it (easier said then done)

2- Higher someone to help you add value to your niche in a real marketing way (a seo's role and why it costs so much and why the good ones can charge alot)

The days of cheap seo's building links with no brains are over

[DavidKonigsberg]

Your probably not going to find anyone good for that price range. You need to pay for quality work especially post penguin where quality work is in high demand. That being said i would recommend paying a good consultant $150 an hour to hold your hand and explain what you need to do then you can go do it yourself or higher someone cheap to do the work with the consultant driving the ship.

Good luck

[Nick_Ker]

Low budget "good" SEO is rare, but it can be found. There are trade-offs that you will need to be willing to make, though.

If you can find someone who is relatively new at SEO, but does know what they are doing, you may be able to to get an affordable rate while they are "hungry". But this is not a great long term plan because if they are indeed good, they will outgrow you and will be likely to put more of their time and energy into clients who are willing or able to pay.

Another option would be to find a provider who can work with your monthly budget, but do less work than they would for their normal rates. For example, let's say an SEO would normally do an analysis of the site and keyword research in the first phase of your campaign, then move into content strategy, social and other link acquisition. If they would normally do this for say, 1500 per month, and you will be paying 500, you could expect the set up of analytics and whatever other tracking & dashboards that will be used and analysis of the site's current state during the first month. More fine tuning of that next month, and maybe get into setting up your social presence. Keyword and traffic/usage analysis to start off your new content strategy after that. Then after a few months they may really start getting into outreach for link building. These are just examples, but the point is that SEO is really no different from anything else - you can only do so much with limited resources. If you need good content developed, like video or maybe some decent infographics, there goes your budget for a couple of months. Need a really good press release distributed by an above average press release site - that's a month or two of the budget...
This will take a heck of a lot of time to get anywhere, especially since there are thousands of tech news sites to compete with.

One other thought - you could have a reputable SEO do a thorough analysis or audit, and strategy development. Then you handle all of your own social media and other link building efforts. That should run you the same as about 2-3 months of your budget and could end up being much more effective than trying to turn a full time job into part time.

[FedeEinhorn]

Well, you can go for cheapest companies. But believe me, the less you spend on what really matters, the less results you will get. Unless you magically find someone cheap and delivering good results.

I myself tested over 3 - 4 cheap ones, not ONE delivered results and even some delivered worse.

But where you put your money is your decision, I wish you the best!

[chrisyak]

As I had said I have given them a try but they were out of my budget.

[FedeEinhorn]

Moz has a specific section listing all recommended services, that means they are to trust.

Don't expect low prices from them, but quality isn't cheap

http://www.moz.com/article/recommended

[joseph.chambers]

I would ask for references. Ask what industries they worked with then get specific. If I were to suggest anyone it would be: http://signup.terrykyleseo.com and I would also reach out to josh bachynski: https://plus.google.com/103148597495865728968/posts