How much should SEO cost

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Maholo Hall joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights into what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the ever thrifty, the ever efficient, the ever, hey, I know how to shop for SEO, the one, the only head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, internet people. Hello, hello, hello. It is true, I do like a bargain.

Mordy Oberstein:

Everyone likes a good bargain.

Crystal Carter:

I love a bargain. I do a lot of secondhand shopping, personally, particularly for clothes.

Mordy Oberstein:

I love secondhand shopping, too.

Crystal Carter:

My best find is I have this little leather jacket, like a biker jacket, that I got for five bucks.

Mordy Oberstein:

Can I tell you, I once bought on eBay, this beautiful, light brown leather jacket, vintage 1960s. I bought it for 20 bucks, and I left it on a bus one time.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, mate.

Mordy Oberstein:

The worse.

Crystal Carter:

You build it up, and then you break it down. I was like, "Yeah, Mordy, scoring the eBay wins," and then-

Mordy Oberstein:

It comes crashing down on me.

Crystal Carter:

That's a hard one.

Mordy Oberstein:

Terrible. It hurts. It was years ago, and it still hurts. Two, three years ago, I lost that jacket, and it still hurts.

Crystal Carter:

I recently lost a jacket somewhere, and I'm a little bit upset about it.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll never let it go.

Crystal Carter:

You do have those things. When did you lose this jacket? When was that?

Mordy Oberstein:

Two, three years ago.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, okay. Unlucky, mate. I'm sorry.

Mordy Oberstein:

It still stinks. This SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only complain about losing jackets, but no, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, which comes out each month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get the most for your money as you can create reviews and share sites, their whole sections, custom templates, reusable widgets across all of your projects with Wix Studio. Look for it at wix.com/studio. You know what you can do with all that saved money, Crystal?

Crystal Carter:

What can you do?

Mordy Oberstein:

You can buy more SEO. But wait, Crystal, How much should SEO cost?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. How much should it cost, Mordy?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a great question, and that is today's topic, as we dive into how much should SEO cost like Scrooge McDuck dives into money bins. We're pulling back the curtain on one of the most sensitive topics in SEO, money. That's right. We're looking at the factors that go into the cost of SEO from project complexity to consultation versus implementation to location. If you're wondering if you're paying too much for SEO or if you're wondering if you're not charging enough for your SEO services, this episode is for you. Hey, SEOs, how should you price your SEO work?

Great question. We ask StudioHawk's own Itamar Blauer, as he'll chime in with a money answer. Plus, we talk to industry favorite, Jamar Ramos, about when you shouldn't and when you should or should or shouldn't hire an SEO agency. Of course, we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social. Tighten your belts and watch your wallets as episode number 61 of the SERP's Up Podcast goes after where it hurts, your bank account. I just wanted to say this is one of the most sensitive topics out there, and to prove that it's one of the most sensitive topics out there, it was hard to get a guest who was willing to talk about this very candidly.

Crystal Carter:

This is true. Jamar's a great guest because Jamar speaks candidly whenever he speaks, so he's a great person to talk about these things, but it is something that can be tricky. People keep their cards very close to their chest. You've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, all of that sort of stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

Are we breaking into song?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. That might remind me of when to run. We'll see about that. It's a really interesting topic, because SEO is built in lots of different ways and people pay for SEO in lots of different ways. I looked at a few pieces of research around this, and probably the best way that people generally figure out, whether this is, because a lot of people, again, are a little bit cagey about what they charge and how much they charge, et cetera, so surveys, basically, is the way that we have that information. Ahrefs has done a survey of 350 SEOs. Backlinko did a survey of 1,200 business owners and how they are doing their SEO. There was also another report from WebFX who also did a survey of 500 US-based marketing professionals, and that's essentially where we get our best information for this.

I mean, anecdotally, in a lot of SEO forums, you hear people saying, "Hey, I'm new to SEO, how should I charge, by the hour, by the word, for content writers? Should I charge by the project? What should I do?" Et cetera. It's interesting. The general consensus from all of these, though, is that people generally charge, and the main ways that people charge, particularly for general SEO tasks, is either monthly, hourly, or project-based. Personally, I have never, ever billed someone hourly for SEO. I don't know anyone who does that routinely, billing hourly. I know devs who bill hourly, but I've never done hourly. It's just something to-

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, I'll charge hourly for a small project, like if someone comes to me on the side and they say, "Hey, I have this website and I want to do X, Y, and Z with it, what would it cost?" I'm like, this is not going to take me a lot of time, whatever it is, and I'll say, I don't know. I'll tell you what I will charge. If it's someone that I know and it's someone that I feel like let me help them kind of thing, I'll charge around $250 an hour. That's my rate. If it's a little bit more complex and a little bit of a larger project, I'll charge 350 an hour.

That's me doing that very infrequently and on the side. If I do a couple of those, like maybe five or six a year, that's enough for me. But the problem with those, by the way, and I'll tell you from experience, is that you have to figure out how... They're going to say, "How many hours?" That's where I don't like the hourly, because inevitably, it is going to be more hours than I think it is. I am always not good. I'm like, "Nah," I'll be acting like it'll be fine, I'm like then it's not right.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I think again, anecdotally speaking, I find that project-based is generally the best way to do it, because then if it takes much longer, then you learn something out of it and you figure out how you want to pace that. If it takes less time, because you have better systems or you have better frameworks or it happened to work out well, then maybe you can add more value in other ways, or you can go, "Great, I'm really good at this and I'm providing this amount of value to this project and it's worth that time," and that's all good.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think, by the way, on both sides, if you're a client or if you're an SEO, to really make sure that you're both on the same page of how many hours are going to go into this, even if it's project-based, particularly if it's project-based, and to understand the full scope of what's offered, and to be very explicit, if you're on the SEO side, saying, "Here's what I'm going to offer," and if you're on the client side, to understand that's what you're getting, and if you want more, it's going to cost more and it's going to be different.

I do want to say, I wanted to say at the beginning, and I'm going to put a caveat on this, one of the issues that I think makes this whole thing sensitive, particularly if you're an SEO listening to this, is that you'll have people go on Twitter, or whatever it is called now, whatever, X, and share, "Oh, I made a million dollars last year. Look at all the money I made." First off, I don't believe you, and number two, that's nice, but that's not realistic. That's like saying, "You know what? I just ran four triathlons in three days. Look at me. I am so..." Most people are just like, even if you work out, you're just not running three triathlons in three days. That's insane.

Crystal Carter:

I think also, I think that sometimes when people, and it's not to say that you can't make a good living out of SEO, there's a reason why we work in SEO or whatever and it's not to say that you can't make a good living out of SEO, and you can. One of the things that, certainly as a freelancer, is your overheads are fairly low in terms of the service business, so as a career path, I highly recommend SEO. I think it's a great career path and you can definitely make a good living out of it, and it's a pretty flexible career path, as well.

I think that it's good to tell people that this is a career path that has some good legs on it. The thing that I find tricky when people are like, "I've made all the money in the world," is that I feel like it puts pressure on people who maybe aren't making that much money at the moment, and I feel like it makes people feel bad that maybe they're not hitting their things, because it might all be bluster, and you have no idea. You have no access to these people.

Mordy Oberstein:

You have no idea. You have no clue. It probably is, to be honest with you. They're probably doing, in a lot of those cases, I don't want to say anything bad about anybody in particular, but sometimes I get the sense that their business model is providing not the best quality services, so be cautious sometimes like who's saying what?

I'll say, the best tweet I ever saw about this was from Brodie Clark. I don't remember when it was, a while ago, and he said that I like to store up, like when I charge, I always build in mind, I'm paraphrasing here, the downturns and the slow times, so I'm not taking all of that money and spending all the money. When I'm charging, I'm also thinking about this has got to cover me when things are a little bit slower. That, to me, and that's a top notch SEO consultant right there saying that, just shows you the reality. It ebbs and flows. Like any business, you're going to have highs, you're going to have lows. You're going to have a lot of clients and all of a sudden, you might have a drought. That's what this really, I think, really is.

Crystal Carter:

I think also, the other thing that affects the cost of SEO is the impact, because, particularly if you are, and I've had it before, where I've looked at clients and they've got a massive website and I can see the revenue that they're getting every day from an e-commerce site, for instance, and I can see a technical fix that would give them a massive uplift, for instance, and so sometimes people bill according to, PPC folks do this as well, where they're like, "If your spend is this much, then we will charge you that much. If your spend is less, then we'll charge you less," because the percentage of revenue that you'll get out of it is in proportion to that. I think that that can be a factor, as well, and I think that that's something that changes. It's not worth charging someone who's making, I don't know, two grand off of their website a year, for instance, all of the money in the world. That doesn't make sense. It's not sustainable. It's not-

Mordy Oberstein:

No, you'll never get that bid accepted. You have to charge based upon... You have to find a balance between what they're earning, what they're bringing in, what they need, and find a balance between that. If you have a really complicated content strategy plan, that might be great, but that's not going to work with their budget, so why?

Crystal Carter:

Right, exactly. It has to be relative to the value that you'll actually bring to the business. This is something that Nick LeRoy has talked about, where sometimes he's looked at clients and he said, "Actually, you don't need SEO. I'm not going to be able to provide enough value for what I'm charging you from this situation." We have a great article from Jeremy Rivera that talks about SEO, ROI, and gets into a little bit of those details about that.

Mordy Oberstein:

On Nick, by the way, before I forget, and I'm saying this now to remind myself for the show notes, Nick did a great presentation with Wix Partners about how to charge clients and how he goes about it, so we'll link to that in the show note. It's a great webinar, and I highly recommend you watch it.

Crystal Carter:

To get into some of these stats, because I found stats for you. Let's talk about some stats.

Mordy Oberstein:

Go ahead.

Crystal Carter:

We talked about the different types of pricing models, so hourly, monthly, project-based. According to WebFX, they generally recommend hourly for ongoing SEO mid-size/large companies, I would agree with that, these tend to be in retainers, hourly for smaller projects, smaller companies, like you said, Mordy, for instance, if somebody's like, "I just need you to fix my site map," and you're like, "This is going to take me two hours and you're my aunt, so I'm going to help you with your bake sale website," or whatever it is, and then project-based, so one-time SEO projects, small, mid-size, and large companies. Now, when I've worked on projects like this, it works really well for technical SEO things, because sometimes with technical SEOs, they just need to fix that one thing or you need to provide them with a set of code or set of instructions or whatever, or it's something that...

For instance, I've had things where we were working on site map, like updating their site map. They had a really old Ajax sort of site map thing. You need one month to do the recon, you need one month to get all the dev stuff implemented, you need another month to make sure that you didn't break anything and all of that sort of stuff, and then you're in, you're out, bada bing, bada boom, et cetera. You can bill on that way, and I think that for technical SEOs, I think that's something that works really well. WebFX also found that in percentage, 41% of people are getting SEO monthly, 30% of folks are getting SEO hourly, and 28% are being billed from a project-based perspective, which I'd say that that probably works out well in terms of, and is probably fairly accurate from what I've seen in agency scenarios and client scenarios, because I think that's the other thing that people forget, is that even if you have a client who's on retainer, there's going to be situations where sometimes they just need an additional project.

Maybe the project is to do 50 blogs. They just need you to write these 50 blogs, and then they'll schedule them in, they'll roll them out over the course of the year or whatever it may be, and so that's the project. They'll have ongoing stuff, that's other things that you're just managing as you go, but maybe there's one project in there that's like, hey, I need you to help me with this, I don't know, setting up a web chat or setting up something or other. The relationship that you have will ebb and flow, and you tend to get more value out of some of those projects and some of the hourly stuff if you're topping up with a few things here and there. In terms of money, scrillas, dolla dolla bills, what we also found was very interesting was that I talked about client retention and client satisfaction. According to Backlinko, the average cost of SEO per month is $497. That's the average that most people are paying for SEO per month. That seems kind of, particularly if you're thinking about a wide spectrum of businesses-

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, yeah, it's an average, so it's going to include lots of small projects and then big projects. These are good indicators, but also not great indicators for actually making a decision.

Crystal Carter:

They found that most people are getting services for $497 a month. Ahrefs also did a survey and they found that they also saw people around in that area, but the biggest percentage, it was over 20% of people were getting SEO for between 500 and 1,000 a month. That's enough to do a day of light just touching up with different elements and keeping up with things like meta tags and stuff like that, and making sure that nobody's broken anything or added the wrong links or all of that sort of stuff. I think for most small businesses, that's probably enough to get good reporting, good value, out of your SEO per month.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a good point. If you're a small business or someone listening to this podcast and you're thinking, how much am I going to end up spending a month? The 500 number is a good, it's going to give or take, depending on what exactly you want to do, it all depends, but that's a solid number to work based off of.

Crystal Carter:

I think if you are, and again, another great article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub from Jamar Ramos, which was one of the reasons why we invited him onto this podcast, but he talks about how you hire a digital marketing and SEO agency. When you're talking to them, if you have a particular budget in mind that is the budget that you have, talk to them straight away. Before they start pitching and doing all of this stuff, say, "I have this much per month that I can spend on SEO, what can you do for that, or can you do anything for that, or can you recommend somebody who could do something for that?"

Mordy Oberstein:

That's the point I feel like I have to say. If you're a client or if you're not an SEO and you're looking to buy SEO, if you're an SEO offering SEO, you need to understand specifically what you want. I will tell you flat out, if I speak to somebody and they want SEO, and they're a little bit all over the place with what their business goals are in specific, I am charging more, because I know it's going be more work. If you're specific with me, this is what we want, this is where we're going, this is what we're trying to do, we want these kind of people doing these kind of things and this kind of traffic, I'm with you, and I charge less, because I know the chances of me going down a wormhole are far less.

If you're an SEO, try to get as much information from the client as possible. If you are a client, I beg you, if you're looking to buy SEO services, be as specific as possible, and before you even go to the SEO, know exactly what you want in terms of your business goals, have those in mind and have those ready for the SEO, and you'll end up saving money.

Crystal Carter:

Yes. I also think it's important to manage your expectations, because I think the thing is that with SEO, the more that you put in, the more you get back. If you are optimizing lots and lots of content regularly, then you're going to see more impact on the SERP. If you're creating more content more regularly, then you're going to see more impact on the SERP. If you're creating more web features, if you're enhancing your website, if you're making sure that everything is working really well, then you're going to see more impact on the SERP. You're going to see more impact in terms of rankings and traffic.

If you're engaging with somebody to help you to do that, that all takes time, and time is money, so that's what all of this is, essentially. If you are spending less, then you should expect your growth chart to go up a little bit smaller. It might be that you've got time for that. It might be that you're like, "Hey, we don't have a lot of money to spend on this, but we know that this is something we want to invest in, and we want to see if we can see some green shoots," so that's the thing. It might be if you have a small spend, you want to have a thing, and you want to share some of that sort of stuff.

The other thing I found was really interesting from Backlinko was the satisfaction ratings. Backlinko was saying that the higher SEO spending is actually correlated with higher client satisfaction. Clients who were spending under $500 a month were about 15% extremely satisfied with their SEO services. However, clients who were spending more than $500 a month were over 20% as satisfied with their SEO. This can be a correlation-causation thing, because it could be that people who are charging more are better quality. It could be that current people who are charging more have the ability to offer more services. It could also be that clients who are only able to afford less than that are some of the clients that need a bit more support.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a lot there. That's a lot to-

Crystal Carter:

There's a lot.

Mordy Oberstein:

It could also be like, look, I think there's two types of SEO, in my opinion. There's an SEO like this is your channel, this is where you're driving business, this is where your focus is, where you're earning money from. And then it was like I need to do SEO because I have a website. I could get traffic from here. This is not your bread and butter. I don't know, you're a mom-and-pop candy store. People are coming because you're the main candy store on Main Street. Yes, you might get some traffic from SEO and you're going to do some SEO, but it may not be the thing that is driving your business, and therefore your level of investment into it is not going to be the same. You're thinking, you know what? I'm going to do this SEO, I'm going to get so much out of it, but you're just not, and you shouldn't and that's fine, but I think there's a lot of that in that satisfaction score, also, in my opinion.

Crystal Carter:

There's a lot there. It's very interesting to see. I certainly know that anecdotally, people say people who are spending more attention to, you just send them the reports, they're like, "Great, that's wonderful," and people who are spending less tend to be like, "Well, why didn't you do this, and how come we didn't do that?" I think that sometimes it's a question that business owners have a harder time, or business owners maybe... If you're spending less, you might be closer to the bone in terms of your marketing spend, so you might need to get more out of each particular interaction. I think if that's the case, then you need to make sure that that's known upfront with the SEO team that you're working with.

And then, let's see, then we think about projects. Now, projects are interesting. The rate of projects, according to WebFX, they are saying that projects can range from between 1,000 and 5,000. Backlinko are saying that they can get even higher than that, around 25,000, and I've definitely seen that be the case. Projects are interesting because they are very much the it depends of SEO pricing, because a project can be literally anything. I think one of the reasons why they can sometimes be tricky, particularly with pricing, is because sometimes you're in completely new territory, so you're trying to optimize for a completely new SERP feature or you're trying to optimize for a completely new technology. For instance, we have a lot of AI-generated content coming out right now, and that's new.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is it new?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, exactly. That's new, so I think that that's something that people have to do additional research, people have to get additional resources, people have to trial things, have to test things, and so that can drive up the price tag for things like that. But there's some great research around pricing, around SEO pricing models. We'll share all of the links in there, and I hope it's useful for people billing, and also booking, SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what's one question we haven't actually dealt with straight on?

Crystal Carter:

What's up?

Mordy Oberstein:

How do you find my leather jacket on the bus? No. How do you price out SEO work? If you're an SEO, how do you price it out? If you're not an SEO and you are looking to hire an SEO, here's how it works behind the scenes. Take it away, Itamar Blauer from StudioHawk.

Itamar Blauer:

When it comes to SEO pricing, there's lots of different things that you need to consider. The first one is what kind of pricing model you want to use, whether that's hourly, whether that's project-based, or value-based. Also, it depends on who you actually are, like are you a freelancer, are you a consultant, are you working agency side? Because all of these are going to depend on what exactly you want to charge and how you want to price what it is that you're doing. I'll give you an example. As a freelancer, what I've done when I was consulting is charging hourly. For me, that was great because it's just me working on the project, so the client is able to pay for my time, and that's only my time. That's where I feel like hourly works fine.

Obviously, you might get people who reach out to you asking for a specific thing, so then it could be a project-based work, as well, but obviously, you have to sort of factor in what that would look like if you, say, to charge hourly and how long that project might take. Which is another thing why hourly works well, is because if you charge on a project and that project has a bunch of roadblocks in it, which you typically find with SEO campaigns, then obviously, charging for the project means that you've already set the fixed cost there. There's no variability in that. There's not going to be any changes in that, which is why hourly is generally better, I would say, for that if you're a freelancer.

But obviously, there are other types of pricing models, like value-based, which doesn't really work. I think it's quite unethical because you can't guarantee results in SEO, so generally, it's something I would stay away from. But obviously, with hours there can be downsides because it depends also on how quick you work. Obviously, if you can do a lot in an hour, whereas somebody might take a few hours, then obviously, you might want to say, "Actually, I'll charge project basis for that, because if it's hourly, I'll be able to get so much done that I won't be able to get as much money out of the client."

But let's switch this over to agency side. With agency, it's quite interesting, because internally, you can look at things based on hours and how long you spend on things, but if it's client-facing, I would usually tend to shift this towards resources that you'll need to provide for the campaign. For example, you are going to probably have multiple people on the campaign, so you may need more or less resources for research, on-page, work analysis, outreach, et cetera. It becomes more about resources within a monthly retainer, let's say, as opposed to just saying, "We're going to do X amount of hours." You may get some project-based tasks, for example, if it's a migration, then you might want to charge just based on that project, but also you need to do your due diligence and understand the scope of work before it comes to pricing up something on a project basis. But overall, it really depends on your clients, and also both hours and deliverables can be scrutinized.

It's not to say that one's necessarily better than the other, but for example, with hours, people can just maybe assume that you're taking too long on things, and you're just trying to get the client to spend more for more of your time. But also with deliverables, you can get caught up because there might be things out of your control, for instance. Well, I've said that I was going to deliver some outreach, but I can't do that because the wireframe that I made for the page that I was going to do the outreach for to build links for it hasn't been done yet. That's an example of where setting deliverables for the client might come back to bite you if you can't actually get those done. But it really depends on your use case, but there's plenty of ways that you can price SEO in a way to essentially save your skin, but also make it easy to understand for the client, in terms of them understanding exactly what they're getting.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Itamar. Make sure you check out Itamar over on LinkedIn and over on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. We'll link to his profile in the show notes, but it's @ItamarBlauer, B-L-A-U-E-R, over on X. He's right, there's many ways to skin this cat. I hate using that phrase, but there's a lot of ways to go about this. What you really basically need to do is assess the situation and what makes the most sense for this particular client and for this particular website at this particular moment.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, entirely. I think that Itamar's very measured about this. Itamar works for a fantastic agency right now. Shout-out to team StudioHawk. Love those guys. He's also worked as a freelancer, so I think he's seen many angles of this, and understands that it can be very, very nuanced, but yeah, totally. They say it depends, but it kind of does.

Mordy Oberstein:

I saw a great video, by the way, recently. I think it was Greg Finn, from Marketing O'Clock and the Cypress North that shared this, where they were going through hiring an agency and talking about all that. They said, "If the agent doesn't tell you, 'It depends and we need to look at your situation,' run," which is a great pivot to our next segment. Money aside, how do you even know when to get work done? Specifically, how do you know it's time you went all-in and hired an SEO agency to run your SEO program for you? It is a tough decision. I just mentioned, sometimes you need to run. It's why we have a very special version of our segment. Decisions, Decisions, Decisions, as someone who knows quite a lot about agencies, Jamar Ramos, joins us. Here's a look at hiring an SEO agency with Decisions, Decisions, Decisions. Hey, Jamar, welcome to the show.

Jamar Ramos:

Hello, everyone. How are you? I love how we're doing our radio voice.

Mordy Oberstein:

Groovy today.

Jamar Ramos:

We've all got our radio voices on. I love it.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want you to know that as I was saying it, I'm like, "Wow, I sound way too happy, radioish right now."

Jamar Ramos:

Hi, this is Mordy talking to you on five after the hour.

Mordy Oberstein:

Weather on the five, sports on the 20s.

Crystal Carter:

The 505 is really backed up right now. We're going to the chopper report and we can see that there's a bad... No, I don't know. I ran out. I ran out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Jamar, plug away. What should we know about you? What should folks be looking at? Time for plugging before we get started.

Jamar Ramos:

Oh, know about me? I love long walks on the beach.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, me too.

Jamar Ramos:

I love strenuous games of pickleball.

Mordy Oberstein:

Me too.

Jamar Ramos:

I love good food, good alcohol, good friends.

Mordy Oberstein:

Me too.

Jamar Ramos:

Oh my God, Mordy, marry me.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay.

Jamar Ramos:

Swipe left on each other, or swipe right or whatever it is on the apps.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know what it is.

Jamar Ramos:

Me, I'm digital marketer multichannel for 11 years now. Wow, over a decade. Love it. Find me on Twitter @JamRam33, where I talk about some digital marketing, but mostly misogyny, anti-racist, anti-stupidity. If you're into all three of those things and fighting against them, come holler at your boy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Check, check, check. Rolling to your, what do you call it, Twitter now, X, Twitter X? Twitter X profile.

Jamar Ramos:

It's mama named it Twitter, I'm going to call it Twitter.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like that. I'm going to use that. I'm going to steal that line. We're talking about how to know when you should hire an SEO agency. Maybe we should start with how do you know when you should not be using an SEO agency?

Jamar Ramos:

When you don't have the budget for it, and when you don't have the time to find someone or an agency that you trust. People will know that they need SEO, but they don't understand that you can't pay bargain basement prices. Yes, there's different levels and there's different places you can go and they will charge you different amounts, but every time you find something where you're saving money, look at what you're saving on, because you're probably saving on the expertise, you're probably saving on the platforms that they have, you're probably saving on the time they're going to spend with you. Yes, you can get it for $99 a month, but they're going to give you $99 of time, and you're going to come to find out 3, 6, 9 months down the line, you needed a little bit more.

Crystal Carter:

I think that's a really interesting place to start. Sometimes people say, "Oh," like you said, "Do you have the money?" I think one of the things that I've seen clients sometimes misunderstand is how they know whether or not they can actually afford it, not just in the neat terms, but in whether or not they will get the ROI that will be worth the investment. Do you find that people struggle with understanding that part of the sort of getting involved with an agency?

Jamar Ramos:

It is, because just like if you're in SEO, it's not a science, it's an art. The same way when you're hiring an SEO agency, it's not a science, it's an art. You've got to find someone who not only can you afford, but people whom you can talk to, where you can go back and forth with them. In my mind, I'm going to say, I don't want to paint with broad strokes, but in my mind, the biggest thing that an SEO agency should be able to do for you is educate you as a client. If they're going to do something, I as your client need to understand it. You need to tell me, "We're going to do X for Y reasons, and we think that it could potentially get you Z outcome." That's how you need to talk to people, because you can't assume that everyone knows what you're talking about.

I think one of the benefits of graduating with a degree in English, this is all I had to do. Every time I wrote an essay, I had to tell you what I was about to tell you, I had to then tell it to you, then I had to go back and tell you what I've just done told you. That's how we need to do it when we're talking to our clients, "Hey, client, we're going to make sure that all your local listings are done. The reason we're doing that is because all the searches are going to take in this information, they're going to see who you are, what you sell, where your brick-and-mortar locations are, and the more information they have from that, the more they're going to say, 'Oh, this business, we understand it. We're going to rank it higher than other places that don't have this stuff.'"

It's a low-hanging fruit, but because I've explained it to you in a way that you understand what we're doing, why we're doing it, what you're going to get out of it, the buy-in is so much easier. Plus, you as the client, you now feel, oh my God, this person cares enough about me to educate me, so going forward, when we talk about local SEO, I am now on a higher level than I was and we're now having conversations, rather than this expert is talking down to me or has to consistently explain. I'm going to give you all the tools in my toolbox. The difference is you're not me, so maybe you can't do it like me, but I'm going to make sure you understand it, so when I'm talking, we don't have to sit at that jargon level. We can sit at a conversational friendship level, and you're going to get more buy-in from your clients when you do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a warning sign if your agency is not educating you and they're not trying to uplift you as a client. We say this all the time when we talk about the SEO Learning Hub, we say, "Who's our target audience? Who are we writing content for?" Chris and I always say, "Hey, it's complicated," because what is a site audit may not seem like it's an SEO really needs to really know, like you don't know what a site audit is or how to run a site audit, but agencies will, and they tell us, they share our content with their clients, and that's what agencies should be doing. They should be telling you exactly why this works, why this is happening, why you have to do it, and if they don't, that's a warning sign.

Jamar Ramos:

Yep, it's a red flag. It's why are you hiding? Transparency, but also, I'm sharing the information with you that you need to in order to make an informed decision. There can be too much transparency when I'm telling you all this stuff and I'm getting in the weeds and I'm getting super granular. At a certain point, everyone glosses over. Tell them what they need to know in order to make an intelligent, informed decision, and also, to trust you more. SEO is so difficult to do, especially on the agency side, because so many times I heard clients on sales calls say, "Well, we had an SEO agency or we had an SEO," and this right here always got me, "But they burned us, but they bleeped us, but they took our money, but we couldn't trust them."

It all boils down to the same thing. Those people were just putting on ski masks to rob those clients of money. They didn't care about actually doing right by the client. I'd rather do right by the client. There's been people who wanted to work with me who I've told, "Yes, I would be happy to take this monthly pay, but here's why I'm saying no to you. You're already at the best spot you need to be. Here's what you actually need to do." I'm being helpful. Yes, I am screwing myself over by not taking that client on, but I'm not screwing that client over. We need to have dangerous levels of transparency, dangerous levels of honesty, and not dangerous for the client, dangerous for us, because we as an industry need to be trusted more, and that trust needs to be built on a foundation of honesty and truth, and I don't see that enough.

Crystal Carter:

I think this is interesting, because I heard Nick LeRoy say something similar about qualifying clients, and how people have come to him for a discovery call, he's had a look at their site, had a look at their situation, and been like, "Y'all don't need SEO right now," and they've been like, "Oh, oh, but we want to..." Because sometimes people hear about it and they're like, "Wow, I'm really excited," and they get really bought-in at first. They're like, "Yeah, let's do SEO." And then sometimes, it's true, you look at their spec, you run the stats, and you look at their operation and how their business works, and sometimes SEO isn't the answer just then.

Nick LeRoy said this, and I've seen this in my personal experiences, as well, working with clients, is that sometimes SEO ain't the thing right then, but when SEO is the thing, you'll be the top of their list for the person that they need to speak to about that. They may come to you for something else. Maybe they don't need you to do SEO for them just then, but maybe they do need you for an educational thing, like can you help this exec to understand this thing so that they can implement something or whatever? Maybe they don't need an agency to do a long-term thing. Maybe they need a short-term project or something to that effect.

Jamar Ramos:

Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a really important point, because first off, they might come back to you down the line and say, "Hey, now I do need some SEO work and it does make sense," but let's go back to the first point. I have the money. Money is not the problem. What should I do? How do I decide whether or not I should go and start hiring an SEO agency for work?

Jamar Ramos:

This is going to sound like I'm telling a joke, but I'm not. Clear out two weeks, go to as many agencies as you can and sign up for a discovery meeting. Talk to as many as you can, hear as many stories, hear as many experiences, have as many pitch calls as you can. Collect as many in-depth decks as you can from these agencies, and start to look at which ones are saying some of the same things? Which ones did I trust? Which ones did I have a great conversation with? Which ones asked more questions about our particular pain points, about our current client base, about our future potential client base? Who is more about our goals versus their goals? Because you're going to find that a lot of agencies, they're offering some of the same thing. It boils down to how much you can trust what they're saying, because in the end, that's what you need to do.

Just like if you're hiring someone, you always want to have three to six months of their pay put aside, we have this ramp-up time to say, "Hey, the first two to three months is going to be onboarding, you're learning about us, everything. Those next three months is you showing improvement." When you hire an agency, that's also what you should do. If you're hiring them for SEO, make sure you have three to six months of paying for that agency put away, because then you know we are invested in this, and they have the time to be invested in making sure our SEO is cleaned up, good foundationally, and they can start building on that time and investment. If you're looking for instant gratification, instant wins, talk to a PPC agency. They're the ones who are going to get you that instant stuff. SEO, there's going to be low-hanging fruit that's going to get you some quick wins, but it's going to start taking some time to build up.

I have a client right now, their keyword profile, it's all pointing to their homepage. I'm talking to them, "Hey, we've got to clean this up. We need to make sure these pages are helpful to start getting some of these ranking keywords away from your homepage to these other pages that people are looking for. Not only to get those pages ranking, but we want to make sure get that page ranking, your homepage ranking, your GMB up there, get you in that local Map Pack, so not only are you outranking your competitors in one way, you are basically in the face of your current and potential customers as many times as you can, because that's going to show them not only do customers believe in them, search engines believe in them, and they're right there in front of my face.

This is all the stuff clients should be looking for when they talk to their SEO agencies, but a lot of them have trained themselves, and been trained to just look at, let's go to that last slide, what's your price? You're within our pricing structure. Let's go. That's not it. Sometimes you have to pay a little bit more than you expected, but you're going to get a lot more when it comes to experience and work and care from that agency if choose the right one and take your time.

Crystal Carter:

Results. That's the other thing, is the results, and also business opportunities. A really good agency will be able to identify opportunities you'd never even thought were capable. One of the good things about working with an agency is that they will tend to have lots of different experts within their team, so you'll have somebody who works on SEO. It's very rare to find an SEO agency that doesn't have someone doing PPC somewhere in the team, for instance. There might be somebody who's good at links. There might also be somebody who's able to help you with CRO, other things like that, and somebody who could do the strategy and help you sort of scale things out.

I think one of the things I did want to touch on, though, is the mindset of somebody who's ready to hire an SEO agency. You were talking about decisions, and this is Decisions, Decisions. I think one of the decisions you have to think about is how much time do you have towards the agency thing? I think a lot of people think like, oh, I got an agency. I just hired someone, like you hired somebody to wash your car. Oh, they'll do it now. I don't have to do it now. They'll do it now. Generally speaking, it's not like that. Generally speaking, it's more of a partnership. How do you decide that you have the internal capacity to get the most out of your agency relationship?

Jamar Ramos:

You have to be able to, if you're hiring this agency, put someone on as their point of contact, and that person should be able to, at the very least, and I'll speak from my agency, running links. Every client that we had would get at least two monthly meetings we'd have at the start of the month, where it would be both a look back and a look forward. Hey, this is what we did last month. These the goals we set up, this was how we got towards those goals. These are some things that were headwinds for us, and these are the solutions for those. These are some things we didn't anticipate, but here's some ideas for how we can move forward with that, and a look forward, hey, this is what we're going to be doing over this next month, or if it's at the end of a quarter, this is what our next quarter looks like.

And then at the end of the month it's, hey, this is what we're doing. Here's what we're getting ready for. Of course, someone who's going to be able to ask questions, send emails. There has to be an investment on both sides. It can't be a set it and forget, and I know a lot of SEOs talk about, "Oh, SEO is set and forget." No, no, no. Some things, yes, are set it and forget it. It's that 80% of stuff where it's like it's not going to get a whole lot of lift, but we just need to keep monitoring, looking at the keywords, making sure we're not dropping, how are featured snippets going and everything? But your SEO agency should always be bringing new stuff, and it should not always be SEO, because sometimes, especially for small companies, SEO is going to look the same month-to-month. This is something where I'm afraid of what agencies are doing to digital marketers, where it's like they want you to be 1,000 miles deep and not wide at all.

If you're a technical SEO, you need to know how to code, you need to know how to do this, and you just sit right here. For me, SEO is not a channel. SEO is organic marketing, so your organic marketers should know local SEO, should know content marketing, should know a little bit about social media. Maybe they don't run that for you, but they're able to discover things like, hey, I know we were looking at your keyword profile and I noticed that you have a blog, but you don't do a lot of content marketing. We think that in order to get some of these content-based, long tail keywords up, we've got to get you social media channels. We've got to start putting your content out there. You're running paid advertising, but you're not digging up your blogs. We think that putting together some of your blogs, putting a couple of dollars out there, just getting them out there, because people want six to eight different touchpoints before they'll interact with the company, even when they've shopped with you before.

The shirt I have on right now, you can't really see it, guys who are listening to this, but I buy from this company called Reason Clothing. I've bought from them for two years, but they still have to reach out to me through social, through email. I have to go to their website a couple of times before I, a shopper who is committed to them, will buy. Think about that. You need to have all those touchpoints for people. If all you're doing is SEO, you have one touchpoint, one time to get them. If your competitors are doing SEO, local SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, they're touching them multiple times. You're going to lose that client no matter how long they've been with you or if they're new. Get someone who is wide enough to help you with good planning, but can help you with that SEO channel, as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

With that, don't forget to reach out to Jamar across all of his channels, as time has ebbed away from us.

Jamar Ramos:

I'm sorry, I just talk so much.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no, no. It was a good time. I had a good pivot, so it was a good time to end the interview. That's how I decide to end an interview or not. Oh, good time, good pivot. That's how podcast is-

Crystal Carter:

Speaking of pivoting... No, I'm kidding.

Jamar Ramos:

Check me out on Twitter at @JamRam33. That's @J-A-M-R-A-M, the numbers 3-3. You can find me on LinkedIn at Jamar Ramos. Hit my DMs up. I'm happy to always answer questions, talk shop, or just if you have a bad day and you need someone to rant that, go ahead and hop my DMs, rant, end rant, we're good.

Crystal Carter:

I should also say that Jamar is also the author of a fantastic article called How to Hire an SEO Agency on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, so do check him out there, as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. Thanks, Jamar.

Jamar Ramos:

Thank you, everyone. Appreciate it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks again, Jamar. Big shout-out to Jamar. Make sure you give Jamar a big follow over on LinkedIn and X, Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it, I still don't know what the hell to call it, @JamRam33. J-A-M-R-A-M-3-3. Make sure you give him a follow, please. One of the great ways you as a client can make sure that your SEO agency is doing right by you is to keep up on the latest SEO news, so you can make sure they're following the best practices. Keep an eye on your SEO agency, eh? The way to do that is by catching up on the news. Here's our version of the news, our Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News.

Holy cow, there's so much going on this week. Let's start it off with Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern, who says, "Google rolls out November 2023 core update. This comes, by the way, after the October 2023 core update, just basically finished rolling out, which comes after the October 2023 link spam update finished rolling out, which comes after the September 2023 help of content update, and which comes after the August 2023 core update." It's madness. There is speculation, of course, oh, this will be a reversal of either the August 2023 core update or the October 2023 core update. I don't think this is what that's about at all. Looking on the data from the October update relative to the August update, I don't think October was a reversal of August. Of course, there are reversals in there, that's not what I'm saying, but fundamentally, I don't think that's what this is all about. I think this is about a heck of a lot of changes in the entire ecosystem. Too much to get into right now about that, but I don't think it's about reversing previous updates. That's my SEO intuition.

Now, on top of that, Google also said that there is a review update coming after that. This from Barry Schwartz, over at SEORoundtable.com, "New Google reviews update coming next week. It will be the last confirmed reviews update." Basically, Google's saying, "After the core update, we're going to have a reviews update," and this targets review content, like content around, I don't know, what's the best microwave? You have a whole post about five different microwaves and which one is the best, so that kind of review content. It doesn't have to be just products, it could be services, as well, all sorts of review content. Google says that's coming, as well, so not only goes to the August update, the September helpful content update, the October link update, and the October core update and the November core update, and now, there's going to be a November reviews update. But what Google also said is fascinating, is that this is the last one. This is the last review update they're going to announce.

They wrote, I'll read to you from their blog posts, "We expect an update to review system to start rolling out next week. This will also mark a point what we're no longer be giving periodic notification of improvements to our review system, because they will be happening at a regular and ongoing pace." In other words, it's like a real-time algorithm. I couldn't have said it better myself than I actually said it on Twitter, or X, whatever you want to call it, I wrote, "Regular and constant updates for the review update. This is extremely significant. It means Google feels very confident in its machine learning in this space. I think it also means that Google realizes in this current environment, it needs realtime updates to keep up."

I wrote about this a year ago, if you want to go deeper into the weeds, I actually wrote about this for Search Engine Watch in November 2022. I'll link to the article where I go through why I think we're headed to a real-time algorithm update system, whatever you want call it, but meaning that Google's not releasing these big, official updates, but they're constantly updating rankings in real time. I'll link to that. It's definitely worth the read, I'm biased, obviously, but I think this is where we're heading with the algorithm, and I think it's entirely significant and fascinating.

The last one I want to briefly mention, this comes from Search Engine Land from Danny Goodwin, seven must-see Google search ranking documents in antitrust trial exhibits. Google has this whole antitrust trial that it's going through and documents are being released, and Danny goes through some seven must-see documents related to Google Search. I don't want to get into it all here. It's a lot. I will link to it. Read through it, but the overall takeaway that I took away is that Google is looking at wider user behavior to try to understand what people want, and trying to adjust the algorithm to it. This is a point I think SEOs don't think enough about. We think in the confinements of the algorithm, what the algorithm wants, but what the algorithm wants is really what people want, so we should be looking at content trends and what people are consuming, what people are not consuming and how that's changing, where they're consuming and how it's changing.

All of the trends around content creation and consumption, I think we should be looking at that far more than we already are. I think we have a little bit of resistance around that. We're going to do an upcoming podcast episode about that topic. Because Google is looking at that, if you really want to stay ahead of the curve, you should be looking at where content as a whole across the web is going, because that's where Google will have inevitably follow. With that, that was a mouthful of news. I think it was pretty snappy, so I'm going to say that was this week's Snappy News.

Crystal Carter:

So snappy.

Mordy Oberstein:

So snappy. Now you know if your SEO agency is keeping up on the latest trends from Barry.

Crystal Carter:

Dear listeners, you have no idea how pleased Mordy was with that segue.

Mordy Oberstein:

So good. So good. I was doing virtual conference recording for SMX and I had a great pivot at the end to the thank you slide, and I almost stopped and said, "Wow, that's a great pivot," but I didn't. I didn't. I didn't do the podcast thing where we congratulate ourselves on the pivot.

Crystal Carter:

It's fine. You can just pat yourself on the back. It's fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

I did. Mentally, I was like, that was so good. Nailed it. Nailed the last pivot. Because it's always awkward at the end, like all right, now they go like, "We're done, goodbye," but I nailed it.

Crystal Carter:

My best one was I did a presentation on E-E-A-T, and I was talking about Dolly Parton as an example of somebody who has a lot of authority and expertise and is very trustworthy and et cetera. We love Dolly Parton. At the end of it, I was like, "If you need help with this, call us, because our office is open from 9:00 to 5:00." Big picture of Dolly, end scene, drop mic. Let's go. Best ever.

Mordy Oberstein:

So good. Anyway, what you should be doing next is following people on social media so you can learn more about SEO and pricing SEO and learning about SEO. This week's follow is someone we had on our webinar a little while ago, Ross Hudgens over at Siege Media. Give him a follow on Twitter, X, whatever, @Ross, R-O-S-S, Hudgens, H-U-D-G-E-N-S. RossHudgens. Follow link in the show notes. Please follow Ross.

Crystal Carter:

Ross is brilliant. He's brilliant, so smart, and also really straightforward. He's super smart, but doesn't talk to you like either he's trying to impress you with how smart he is or like he thinks that you're dumb. He just explains it in normal, plain English. He's a great follow, he shares some great resources from his team. Shout-out to Ross.

Mordy Oberstein:

Big shout-out to Ross. Make sure to give him a follow. I'll say, Ross is one of the more, I'll say, transparent people out there in the SEO and content marketing world. You get real takes on real things, which ties into what we're talking about today, getting a real take on SEO pricing. Follow Ross, that's what we're trying to say. Anyway, I think we're done.

Crystal Carter:

I think that's it. I'll send you my invoice.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was going to make a money joke, and you beat me to it. Nuts. The bill has come due, you must depart. Well, our retainer is complete. I'm all out of hours.

Crystal Carter:

I'll put the checks in the mail.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't take checks.

Crystal Carter:

Does anyone? Nobody does.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like in The Big Lebowski when he writes a check for 79 cents for the milk at the grocery store.

Crystal Carter:

Honestly.

Mordy Oberstein:

I've been wanting to do that just as like a thing.

Crystal Carter:

I want to make this check out for 13 cents.

Mordy Oberstein:

Stop & Shop, $1.13 cents.

Crystal Carter:

I can't even remember the last time I saw a checkbook.

Mordy Oberstein:

Someone asked me, I had do a check for something, I'm like, "I don't even know if I have checks. I don't have a checkbook. I have no clue."

Crystal Carter:

Can I Venmo? Zelle? Send you some Bitcoin?

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you want me to put it in the mail when I'm done writing this check? Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the wide world of E-E-A-T. Look for it wherever you can consume your podcasts, or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content of webinars we have over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seohub/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.