When is the right time to invest in a Trusted SEO firm
-
My website www.dealwithautism.com is a 3 month old website. It currently has 50+ quality pages that are KW targeted and on page optimized (usually grade A on Moz page grader).
Over the next 12 to 15 months, I plan add a total of 300 to 400 kw targeted pages to strive for topical authority. I am launching my first product (an ebook in the next couple of months) and would eventually move into a membership subscription model in next 15 month.
I want to invest in a long term SEO strategy with a reputed and trusted SEO firm. Being just a 1 person show at he moment, my budget is small (about $250 a month) but over time, as I acquire more revenue I will increase my SEO budget accordingly.
I believe, if I get traffic, my content has the guts to absorb engagement. From analytics, any page that is not bounced and has received organic traffic (only less than 10 per day though) has an average time spent > 12 mins. So my content seems to be doing its bit now.
My question: Is now a good time to invest in SEO for my budget? I need a long term and natural seo strategy, no quick wins - happy to play by the CPC model for my money pages till I see an organic growth. Or should I wait for 5-6 more months to let my site age a bit and also y that time I should have 150+ quality pages, so the authority should be more.
-
My firm has tried working with cheaper ($300ish a month) SEO companies, and the results were inconsequential. It felt like throwing money away - over many months, we never made any real headway. I would suggest looking for a qualified freelancer versus a company at this point - with less overhead, they are sometimes able to work for a lower rate.
If you have a solid idea of what needs to be done, perhaps you can find an intern to do the actual tasks?
I agree with all the other comments - the sooner you start, the better, and you do have some catching up to do now. But all isn't lost. Keep plugging away and you'll get there.
-
Here is a thread where "finding an appropriate SEO is discussed".
http://moz.com/community/q/where-do-you-find-an-individual-freelance-seo
-
Thanks Laura and EGOL,
So if I understood you correctly, then I am already late and have a fair bit of SEO catch up to do!! My last question is.. where do you think should I land up with my kind of budget. I don't want to get clutched by a scam site promising me x links and SERP 1 in y days.
But I need to know what kind of service should I be expecting from a quality SEO firm for about $250 pm. I know it is probably shoestring, but then again I have heard the some successful firms like Qualified Impressions, etc have starter packs for $200 upwards.
-
I am talking about off-site SEO: PRIMARILY link building, but also social interactions, image and brand building, etc. When would be the right time to start those?
All of those should have been started in the planning stages.
If you want links, social interactions, brand building, etc... all of that was best planned before you even decided upon the topics of your content, selected keywords, started writing, or determined the navigation structure and internal linkage of your website.
-
Thanks EGOL,
You are right, but as far as on-site SEO is concerned, I have tried to do due dilligence (to the best on my knowledge, which is probably intermediate) from the start - right from niche selection.
All KWs carefully researched, content built in an engaging and page-optimized way. Structure is easy to navigate, etc. Off course there are opportunities for improvement, but I guess it should be pretty much under control.
I am talking about off-site SEO: PRIMARILY link building, but also social interactions, image and brand building, etc. When would be the right time to start those?
-
In my opinion, the best time to start investing in SEO is when a website is in the planning stages and throughout the development process. Technical and structural issues can have a tremendous effect on how a site performs in search.
While you are actively developing content, it's a good idea to engage an SEO provider to work with you in the process.
-
In my opinion, SEO should have been started in the planning states of your project. Before you started writing content and before you published anything.
Keyword research, website structure, style of coding, content topic selection, are all things that can be optimized by an SEO.
So, instead of thinking about $250/month. I would think... "I got $3000 for 2015" because a healthy spend on planning now might save you from doing some of the work over again.... or allowing it to persist in a suboptimal form.
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
-
How do I optimize dynamic content for SEO?
Hello, folks! I'm wondering how I optimize a site if it is built on a platform that works based on dynamic content. For example, the page pulls in certain information based on the information it has about the user. Not every user will see the same page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geonetric
Lindsey0 -
Onsite SEO vs Offsite SEO
Hey I know the importance of both onsite & offsite, primarily with regard to outreach/content/social. One thing I am trying to determine at the moment, is how much do I invest in offsite. My current focus is to improve our onpage content on product pages, which is taking some time as we have a small team. But I also know our backlinks need to improve. I'm just struggling on where to spend my time. Finish the onsite stuff by section first, or try to do a bit of both onsite/offsite at the same time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
A few important mobile SEO questions
I have a few basic questions about mobile SEO. I'd appreciate if any of you fabulous Mozzers can enlighten me. Our site has a parallel mobile site with the same urls, using an m. domain for mobile and www. for desktop. On mobile pages, we have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the matching desktop URL and on desktop pages we have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the matching mobile URL. When someone visits a www. page using a mobile device, we 301 them to the mobile version. Questions: 1. Do I want my mobile pages to be indexed by Google? From Tom's (very helpful) answers here, it seems that I only want Google indexing the full site pages and if the mobile pages are indexed it's actually a duplicate content issue. This is really confusing to me since Google knows that it's not duplicate content based on the canonical tag. But - he makes a good point - what is the value of having the mobile page indexed if the same page on desktop is indexed (I know that Google is indexing both because I see them in search results. When I search on mobile Google serves the mobile page and when I search on desktop Google serves me the desktop page.)? Are these pages competing with each other? Currently, we are doing everything we can do ensure that our mobile pages are crawled (deeply) and indexed, but now I'm not sure what the value of this is? Please share your knowledge. 2. Is a mobile page's ranking affected by social shares of the desktop version of the same page? Currently, when someone uses the share buttons on our mobile site, we share the desktop url (www. - not m.). The reason we do this is that we are afraid that if people are sharing our content with 2 different url's (m.mysite.com/some_post and www.mysite.com/some_post) the share count will not be aggregated for both url's. What I'm wondering is: will this have a negative effect on mobile SEO, since it will seem to Google that our mobile pages have no shares, or is this not a problem, since the desktop pages have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to mobile pages, so Google gives the same ranking to the mobile page as the desktop page (which IS being shared)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Shopify and multiple stores for seo
Hi, We have a potential client who has multiple stores targeting different countries using Shopify. He has set the domains for specific countries using geo targeting in webmaster tools. Anybody had any experience on how fool proof this is? (all the sites have the exact same products/content on them) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OnlineAssetPartners0 -
Local SEO for a community.
How would one go about best doing local SEO for a townhome community? It seems to fall in between the traditional imformational SEO and the brick and mortar, G+ page model. There seems to be no way to attack the NAP, directory and traditional citation model for a certain region they build in. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AESEO0 -
Seo Site Analytics - Server Logs Vs Real Time Visitor Tracking
Seo Site Analytics - Server Logs Vs Real Time Visitor Tracking I host with hostgator & they provide a tool Awstats to provide statistical data on site activity How does this AWSTATS type data fall short for lets for people more advanced in seo practices like seo companies ? What is the difference between real time visitor tracking and hosting companies servel logs data being provided by Awstats ? How thorough is Google Analytics so what data does google anlaytics provide that Awstats does not provide and how does it differ from google webmaster tools ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | helpwanted0 -
Time To Throw In The Towel?
I have a website that has some good rank on competitive terms. Most of the organic search traffic goes to the homepage, but some generally newer and better constructed, more user-friendly sub pages get organic rank/traffic for a variety of different terms/subjects as well. Then, I have about 8 pages that are older and suck. They fail in the SERPs and there's nothing much of interest from a user point of view. Rather than do the work to completely re-do these pages, I'm thinking of just 301ing them to the homepage. My hope is that this will help the homepages terms/rank which are similar to these pages subject & terms. Do you think this will help the homepage and it's terms or merely end the existence of some old pages and sort of evaporate the link juice? Is there some way that Google might see the site on the whole as being less relevant to their shared subject matter, if these pages go away? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
SEO Reco?
We're looking for a recommendation for a very good SEO agency that has experience with link building (white hat only). Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceMillard0