Now that you have had your website optimized and you are improving your organic search placement, it’s time to ask your service firm exactly what are you getting for your monthly service fee.
It is not uncommon for a business that has had optimization done by an SEO firm to be paying a monthly service fee of anywhere from $300 to several thousand dollars a month. But what are you really getting for this monthly service fee? Do you even know?
For $300 a month times 12 months that’s $3,600 a year, not an insignificant amount of cash, it is important to know what you are getting. To find out, it is key that you ask the right questions to evaluate the answers in order to identify if this expense is warranted or is just an income stream for your SEO firm that they are hoping you will not challenge.
Here are the pointed questions you should ask your own SEO firm:
- What is my monthly fee paying for? If this is for link work, how many links did you get me last month and the month before?
- If this is for your code to remain on my web page and is just a monthly subscription fee to keep the code there let me know this clearly. What happens when I stop my services with you?
- I understand that no one can pay their way to the top of Google so if I am paying you $300 a month and $3,600 a year exactly what am I getting for my money? Anything?
- If you say you are tweaking my code weekly or monthly for my $300 investment. I would like to see what tweaks you actually did last month and the month before. Were these done only to my home page?
- If I stop my services with you what exactly on my home page will be changed if anything?
Pretty pointed questions if you ask me, but questions that you as a business owner should ask and know the answer to, to make sure that you know exactly what your SEO investment is doing. It is important for you as a business owner to know that many SEO firms have this model for pricing and that they do not do much on a monthly basis to help you retain or improve placement after their initial work is done. This is an income stream for them and they just hope you are not asking the questions to pin them to the wall to really tell you, if they even will, exactly what they are doing monthly for you for this payment.
I would be highly surprised to hear that the things that an SEO firm does to earn the $300 for a monthly subscription fee is actually worth the actual cash value if your webmaster billed you by the hour to do the same things. Especially if your SEO worked does not include blogging, content creation, or any changes you can notice on your website. You may simply be paying $300 a month for a “feel good” report at the end of the month to encourage you to continue to pay monthly services.