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- Sphinn It!
Went Hot: January 30, 2008 - 2:18 pm
Posted By: khalid 522 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.invesp.com) my network
Category: SEO
And what an SEO consultant, a truly forward thinking kind of consultant!
19 Comments
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Comments
The guy's clearly a shyster, but FWIW, he'd have to be billing them for about 40 hours a week to charge 700k annually. If all he does is tweak meta tags, it'd be pretty tough to pad out his invoices quite that much.
If they spent 1/3 billable hours (not far-fetched) $350/hour would come out around 200k/year expense. I can't imagine a consultant spending more time than that.
I will gladly do your seo work for half that. ;)
I would imagine this guy knows someone or has some political clout. But there are shysters of all kinds out there. I've worked with many of them.
Obviously this is a high price. But what price range is fair for consulting?
How do you know he's doing 2000 hours of work a year?
At any rate, cool on the guy for finding such an easy mark!
The far more important question is, "how much money is this guy making for his client."
What if this guy is making his client an incrimental $10M per year? Not such a bad deal.
Certainly $350/hr is steep for "tweaking meta tags", but I've got to assume he's WAY beyond those basics. Perhaps at this price his real value is having the chops and political savvy to navigate a large organization-- build support from the CMO, get respect from the web dev team, do the business development required to get top quality links, etc.
If the advice given is truly like that portrayed in the article, he's not making them any money. He's not doing anything but wasting everyone's time.
@Jill, standard contarct with this client is for 2000 hours. Something close to full time employment.
Yes, but if this person truly did make the comments as portrayed in the article, they know absolutely nothing about SEO. NOTHING.
I have a hard time believe that the conversation actually went down as it did. Cuz if it did, it's pretty f'ing amazing that someone could be duped so thoroughly (the client).
The article reads as possibly sour grapes:
1. Complaining software developers get paid less
2. Complaining meta data has no real value
The cost isn't a concern - if someone is worth it, they are worth it.
But on-page SEO concerns are important - the suggestion that unique meta description and keywords on each page weren't a big deal shows that the SEO probably knows more about SEO than the software developer.
I'm not saying the consultant was a great SEO consultant - I don't know the facts. But from reading the articles, some at least basic SEO concerns were being addressed, and cynically frowned upon.
If the software developer were doing his/her job, those unique page titles and meta data would already be on the site - we're talking basic accessibility standards here - which unfortunately many developers miss the ball with.
2c. :)
@ Jill - I disagree, and he may have known alot about SEO... in 2002 ;)
@ Feedthemonkey - dead on - "The far more important question is, "how much money is this guy making for his client."
Sounds to me like this guy learned his craft in the beginning, found some clients, and hasn't taken the time to remain (or get) educated.
Also, the article says he charges $350 per hour, but then says - "If you do the math, that is close to 700k per year" - It doesn't say for how much time he's engaged, that I saw...
Good SEO's are pretty confident we can get a 30% lift in traffic/conversions after 6 months with the majortiy of the websites out there. I look at pricing from a "value" standpoint from the client's eyes - what would a 30% lift mean to their bottom line?
It's typical for our clients to see $1MM+ Rev/month, so an extra lift of $300k/mo x 12 = $3.6MM annually. It's not outrageous to pay 20% ($700k) of that new money for the efforts that got you there. The big assumtions are having the expertise to gain the lift and working on a big enough client to support the $700k.
@jeffcampbell how do you come up with that 30% number. To me that is going to vary WILDLY from site to site based on a huge quantity of variables.
Scott - it's an overall average based on our agency's expierence over the last two+ years. I'm not looking to name drop as the backlash in forums is never good, so you can find my company & the website on my profile which lists many clients. Others can be found in top rankings by searching 'tires', 'appliances', 'home improvement', 'hd dvd'.
And yes, our company website sucks, no comments about the shoemaker's shoes please. ;)
I wouldn't say this is an extremely overly priced SEO consultancy fee, but my mind does wonder what 2000 hours a year in consultancy fees, would equate to in work actually done to the website. But i can assure you, a client at $50m a year will not be fooled that easily, and if they can be fooled that easily (ie the work is that bad), the internal IT department member should be sacked for being negligent.
How many people here have worked inside a giant corporation? Dropping $700K on something that doesn't do anything would be a substantial improvement in a lot of places. At least the overpaid SEO consultant isn't actively hurting the effort.
As Feedthemonkey said, just being able to navigate through the various committees and multiple lines of businesses can be worth quite a bit. I once (back in the 1980s) worked with a consultant whose only skill was that he intimately understood the AT&T purchasing process and could get a PO through in about two weeks. They couldn't even agree on the times for the meetings about when they would have their meetings in that amount of time. The consultant was worth every penny.
So no more info on this topic?
That's a lucky guy. Got a good client :). Yes, I would wonder if he was able to manage the client expectations and earn customer satisfaction to end up with. Intersting story also to share while talking to client who argue about price. Let them know they are getting quite a reasonable deal :)