One of the most frequently asked questions that I get from clients is about the long term, ongoing Search Engine Optimisation part of the campaign that we are working on together. It’s a reasonable question, too; one of the reasons that I was keen to work here at Vertical Leap was the emphasis put on long term client relationships, rather than a one and done fly by night sort of attitude. As a freelancer, you have to be able to deal with both, but I believe that agencies can, and indeed, should, form lasting relationships.
But the question still stands. It’s easy to see what happens in the first three to six months of a campaign; market analysis, site analysis, recommendations for on page changes. But where is the value once all of the structural changes have been made? To my mind, this is exactly the part of the campaign where we really earn our money.
First of all, let’s take a set back and ask why a company would contract an outside agency to do its website optimisation, its branding, its marketing. It all comes down to one thing – opportunity cost. Given enough time and a baseline level of ability, it’s more than possible for anyone to become capable of performing their own SEO campaign. At what cost, though? At the cost of taking away this person from doing what they are best at – running their own business, building value for their websites, selling their product.
Taking this back into the context of a long term SEO relationship, then. What advantage do you gain by continuing to have a managed campaign? To use a seafaring analogy, if the first part of a campaign is making a ship that is seaworthy, then from then on, it’s about manning the radar, anticipating stormy weather, keeping the engines running and most of all, trying to avoid icebergs. Essentially, it’s the fact that we spend our time doing the research, making the small tweaks, maintaining link building efforts that keep a campaign humming along. Long term success isn’t about boom and bust – it’s about stability.
A managed campaign provides the reassurance that a website will be in the best place to survive any external hazards, to react to changes in search engine algorithms, markets, search patterns (both seasonal and long term). If there are new products, or even a whole website to be launched, who is better placed to see things through than a long term partner?
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Hi, great article. I wondered about your thoughts on SEO vs PPC. I’m heavy in the favour of optimising converting key-terms for PPC over to SEO, thus the cost of acquisition via PPC reduces over time and you can directly view the cost savings / conversions for SEO. Sadly at interview, fairly few employers seem to embrace this fundamental idea. I’d love to hear your views on it!
Hi Ant,
That’s a good question. For me, it’s entirely down to context. I don’t think it’s ever PPC vs SEO – I think they are both part of a coherent web marketing strategy, and how much time and money you put into each entirely depends on what your business is, what stage of development you’re at, how much you want to spend, how much and how quickly you need traffic…
My basic advice for this, as with anything, would be to sit down and work out the costs and ROI for each – even then, I’m pretty sure than in most cases you’ll end up with an answer that looks something like an integrated approach. You might want to check out the blog that my colleague Kerry wrote on the subject of investing in internet marketing..