Never Commit to a Monthly SEO Contract

In the next few weeks, we’re going to tackle some of the key reasons why we’re SEO-sceptics when it comes to many businesses and the way in which SEO services are sold to customers. In this article, we challenge the need to spend on an SEO every month.

You May be Told that Your Site is Only the Start

For many businesses this is not true – you may get a high or page one ranking just by doing ‘on site’ optimisation and never need to do anything further.

If you are a niche service, or already have a popular website with a good number of inbound links, then further link building may not make a huge amount of difference.

You May be Told that You Need to Spend to Retain Rank

For most online rankings, again this is not the case – once rankings have been achieved they are relatively self-sustaining and by focusing on improving content, your site should retain it’s position.

If it does require further work then this should be done – but on a more ad-hoc basis rather than every month. And you need to set clear parameters for your SEO supplier to meet (number of links, increase in traffic etc.).

To give you an idea, here’s a popular site where we have done no SEO for the last 18 months… does that look like a downward trend to you?

You Will be Told That Link Building is Crucial

This was the case when the only off-site measure was inbound links. But now it is less so.

Google and others take a great number of metrics into account when they evaluate the SEO of a website and it is likely that as their measures get more advanced, then they will be less interested in inbound links.

In any case, the number of link-builders who can’t even get the basic ‘on site’ optimisation right is eye-opening [and if your SEO doesn’t even talk about your site, then you can be certain they don’t know what they’re doing].

Your SEO May ‘Front-Load’ Their Effort

If you commit to a monthly fee, your supplier will front-load their effort. Possibly just do some on-site work and very little link-building and then reap the medium and long-term rewards of doing very little (if anything) for you.

Important Note: This is not true for ALL businesses.

There are some types of site where ongoing spend will work. If the category of business you are in contains really high traffic search terms and valuable keywords (like ‘Car Insurance’, for example) then it is worth spending to stay at or near the top.

However, for the vast majority of businesses, despite all the promise, SEO is not the key to unbridled success – it’s just something you should do well on your site and seek other, more profitable, revenue generators.

If you want us to show you more evidence, please contact us, or call 01962 605 000.