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 -
Is this going to shoot people and my clients in the foot?
I have mentioned before about rewriting search URLs to look like landing pages, in e-commerce sites. Is this going to be a bad practice to use on a wide scale? I took the time to make a module for the platform I develop on which is going to make it easier to do. Normally a search would look something like shop.com/search_controller?search_term=searchword and the search pages are disallowed in the robots.txt file. But the module I made lets you configure them to be like site.com/searchword or what ever you want it to be. It also lets you configure the meta title and the meta description of the page too. Here is a screenshot of the options. http://screencast.com/t/PwhBfSia5k The module also appends the urls to the site map of the site too. Will this get people a penalty by google? Or will it get their pages indexed? I have done similar on a small scale of like 5 words per site, I am wondering how it will be seen on a large scale.
Web Design | | LesleyPaone0 -
How to change the entire contents and design in my site without getting troubles with google?
Hello everyone This is my first post over here. In the next few weeks we going to change the entire content and design in our site. The site has 240 pages with poor contents and design. Except 301 redirects for all the old url’s I wanted to consult with you what is the right way to do it without harm my organic traffic that come from google? How google refers to this kind of changes? Which steps should I need to take to do it properly? Hope to get your help in the issue. Tahnks in advance.
Web Design | | JonsonSwartz0 -
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 -
Changing design for a client. SEO concerns.
Hi there! A client requested me to change the look of his website entirely. It currently ranks #16 on Google with one of their main keywords. My problem is: The current site was made in a CMS I'm not familiar with and all of its pages urls are not SEO friendly (EX: http://www.mysite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=95). It is the first time I have come up with this situation so I would appreciate any tips or links to useful information. I tried searching in SEOmoz and came up with nothing. I'm sure this is a common problem though. Since they want a static website, for starters their page extensions will change from .php to .html I'm not 100% sure but I think this will be a problem for their current ranking in Google. Any ideas? Edit: I forgot to mention that all of the backlinks this site has points to their hompage as www.mysite.com, I guess this is good.
Web Design | | Eblan0 -
Hom much does getting a mobile website improve the "mobile ranking"?
There's been speculation about Google totally not ranking sites that are not mobile, but as far as I can see many sites rank THE SAME on mobile devices as on regular stationary PCs/lap-tops. I had hoped for a radically improved ranking once a mobile site was built. Or is it just that it takes a TON of time for it to go through and then it gets better or is it like with regular sites that a new mobile site on a sub-domain is parked in some form of mobile-sand-box? Also, does putting a mobile site on a ranking domain, as subdomain help, e.g. m.testingsite.com instead of testingsite.mobi ? Thanks.
Web Design | | yvonneq0 -
How not to get penalized by having a Single Page Interface (SPI) ?
Guys, I run a real estate website where my clients pay me to advertise their properties. The thing is, from the beginning, I had this idea about a user interface that would remain entirely on the same page. On my site the user can filter the properties on the left panel, and the listings (4 properties at each time) are refreshed on the right side, where there is pagination. So when the user clicks on one property ad, the ad is loaded by ajax below the search panel in the same page .. there's a "back up" button that the user clicks to go back to the search panel and click on another property. People are loving our implementation and the user experience, so I simply can't let go of this UI "inovation" just for SEO, because it really is something that makes us stand out from our competitors. My question, then, is: how not to get penalized in SEO by having this Single Page Interface, because in the eyes of Google users might not be browsing my site deep enough ?
Web Design | | pqdbr0 -
Will I get penalised for display:none ?
I have initial content that is dislayed for 10secs and then collapsed and replaced by a div that was hidden (display:none). Will the hidden text be used by Google or will they consider it as page stuffing? If so, is there any recommendations on how to handle this. The goal was to maxamize screen real estate for the human visitor without adding clutter.
Web Design | | oznappies0