As the SEO world evolves it’s only fair to assume that so will your SEO strategy. However, it’s become increasingly evident that not everyone realizes that it does need to evolve. Especially for our B2B customers, who rarely have time to eat lunch, much less evaluate how mature their seo strategy is.

Many industrial companies I’ve come across will evaluate SEO programs based on price. You really do get what you pay for many times when selecting an SEO partner. One person might tell me, why should I pay your price when I get get monthly optimization for $50 a month?

Let’s seriously break down what you could possibly get for $50 a month. Pretty much: a report. And a report is one tiny fraction of a comprehensive SEO strategy. It’s really a by-product, isn’t it? $50 can rarely get you 1 hour of HTML updates, much less search engine optimization.

That aside, price alone should not determine a vendor. It should be the overall strategy of the program that determines if an SEO firm is a good fit for your organization. A while back, I wrote an article called what to look for in an SEO company. It does not talk about the actual program itself; rather, it’s more of a warning of what I’ve seen shady SEO companies do to make a quick buck.

Aside from the $50 a month firms, there are the SEO firms that charge you a bit more to do the following:

- Update Meta data
- Submit your site every month to the search engines

Sounds great, huh? Not only is submitting your site often times unnecessary, but how much changing of your meta data can you do EVERY MONTH?

The strategy of your SEO partner should be comprehensive and able to evolve without incurring masses of additional fees. Ask yourself these questions:

- Does my SEO strategy include changes to my site? And are these updates going to be documented?

- If I decide to enable ecommerce on my website, is my SEO partner going to be able to optimize my ecommerce solution?

- Does my SEO strategy include link building?

- Does my SEO strategy include any consultation time?

- Can my SEO strategy cover any article promotion and optimization?

- Can my SEO strategy include Blog Optimization if I choose to Blog?

- Will my SEO partner explain the ROI, if any, on my strategy and track conversions, traffic, and where my traffic is coming from?

I’m not saying all these services should be available for the low, low price of $19.99. However, your SEO partner should be able to accommodate for these elements that make up a comprehensive SEO strategy. Websites do not thrive on content alone. Make sure your partner realizes this and is forward-thinking enough to include a broad span of SEO services.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 8:13 am and is filed under Advanced SEO Concepts, General, Industrial B2B Marketing, Industrial SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.