I don't usually solicit comments with my blog posts, but this is one on which I would genuinely like to get your opinion. The more negative your opinion, the more you can poke holes, point out flaws, expose idiocy, the better.

MWI will soon be launching a new SEO service. It's not that the service or results are different from anything out there, it's the way it's provided. We believe it will be a new, refreshing experience for some customers, but even more importantly it will make our SEO business highly scalable, not that that matters to customers so much. I'm going to describe how it would work for the customer, and what I would like from you is feedback on why it won't work, what would need to be changed, how we're missing something obvious, etc.

The Problem. You want to make more money. You see that with SEO you can get your site ranked higher in search engines which leads to more traffic which leads to more leads which leads to more sales which means more money for you. But you've hired a firm in the past, or you've tried it on your own, and you haven't gotten the results you expected. Or if you're new to SEO, you're hearing all sorts of different things from different people and you're not sure where to turn. Some companies sound reasonable, but they're too expensive. You don't want to get ripped off, but you're not even sure it's worth $2-4K per month even if it does work.

The Solution. The SEO Consultants. It's an SEO firm, like other SEO firms, but with some key differences:

1. No Long-Term Contracts - Pay as you go, no long-term contracts. Many SEO companies lock you into a 12-month contract so that if you're unhappy with their services you're stuck with them for 10 more months, or you have to pay a high fee to get out of the contract. With The SEO Consultants you pay on a monthly basis and can quit at any time. That means we keep working hard for you to keep your business.

2. Flexible - Use them a little, or a lot. Maybe you just want an SEO professional to tell you what you need to do, but you can make the changes to your website on your own. Maybe you're just looking for an outside perspective to make sure you're on the right track. Or maybe you're looking for someone to do it all for you and you don't want to touch it. Through our nifty online interface The SEO Consultants can provide you with monthly recommendations, containing specific examples and instructions, about how to optimize your website. If you don't want to do the heavy lifting yourself simply click a button next to the recommendation and for an additional fee we'll do it for you.

3. Organized - We've built an online tool that allows you to view reports and track progress, communicate with us, pay your bill, and otherwise manage projects. It's easy to use and gives you insight into our process.

4. Money-Back Guarantee - If you're not satisfied with our services we'll give you your money back, no questions asked.

Results and ethics are built into our process. If we don't get results for you, you'll cancel the service. If we don't use ethical methods, we won't get long-term results. With The SEO Consultants you'll have the peace of mind of knowing you're getting good service at a fair price. No more uncertainty, no more getting ripped off.

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Ok, a bit cheesy in parts, but that's the pitch. The question now is what do you think? Does this sound any different from other SEO companies or like more of the same? Is something missing? Does anything not make sense?

Thanks for your responses.

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Comments

A really daring approach would be pay per result (tricky, I know), but if you could define certain milestones and end-results, you'd get pay'd! This month's Inc. magazine has an article about a pay-per-result PR firm (i.e. $2k for an article in this type magazine) rather than the traditional retainered PR. The company is blowing up.

Yes, price point is one of the big issues with all this, and we are considering "free" options or pay for performance. If anyone else has any input on that front we'd love to hear it.

This idea sounds really cool. I think there are a lot of things I could do on my own if I just knew where to start. Also, I think there are things that I could do to supplement the things you are already doing. The interface with the suggestions could help me decide which of those things to go ahead and try on my own.

Josh:

A couple of thoughts:

-SEO takes time. If people don't see results in the first couple of months and dump you they may be doing it prematurely. You have to find a way to get that point across or you will loose a lot of customers.

-I like the idea of pay as you go but is this a profitable model for MWI? There are a lot of expenses associated with SEO on the front end of a new campaign (ie research).

-While these things are a nice differentiator for you they are also risky. But heck, you're an entrepreneur so I'm sure you've calculated the risk. What does your gut tell you?

-If someone asks for their money back, I would ask lots of questions. In fact, I would require an explanation. Its called market research. In doing this, you get a more clear idea of what is and is not working for your client.

-Your tools seem to take a lot of human interaction out of the SEO process. Remember, people hire SEO firms usually because they don't know what they are doing. This means lots of face time with clients. If you don't explain the process and in alot of case, hold the clients hand in the first six or so months then they will bail on you before their campaign starts to show results.

-The SEO business is very competitive in Utah. Are you going nationwide? You're running up against everything from basement heros to 10x(you know who). How are you going to promote the service? A lot of SEO guys don't like Web development firms getting in their space and will actually try to use that against you. I would position it as an advantage. So, what's your marketing and sales plan?

-Do you guys already have a track record? If I'm worried about getting ripped off then I want referrals. When I was the VP of eCom at Speaking Roses I hired a firm I was skeptical about only after I talk to three client referrals.

-Chris

Thanks for the comments Chris, those are great. By way of response:

- We've already been doing SEO for a number of clients for some time now with great success. SEO already makes up about 20% of MWI's revenues and is the fastest growing portion of our business. So we do have experience, references, a track record, etc.

- We already work with some out of state clients. I don't know if that means we're "nationwide" per se, but if not we intend to be.

- The way we already work with all our clients is on a monthly basis with no long-term commitments. We've found it to work quite well.

- Everything's competitive, right? But we seem to do well. Go to Google and see who's coming up first for "utah seo" and "utah search engine optimization". At least for today...

- We actually feel our tools will increase the amount of interaction between us and clients, or at least the perceived interaction. One of the main problems our tools will solve is clients saying "What is going on?" With our system they'll always be able to log in at any time and see exactly what's going on.

- Profitability, that's the big question. We are really struggling with how to price this stuff. Companies like SEOmoz charge a pretty penny for what they do. We don't pretend to have the same level of expertise, but pricing is a big issue as well as how to manage exactly what is being provided for the price we decide on. I'm sure we'll learn some lessons as we go.

I have seen other SEO companies do similar things in the past, its a great idea and gets you alot of repeat business and referrals by word of mouth from your customers.

I have used #'s 1-3 in my own SEO company and have never been in want of more customers and only had a couple of companies, all of whom had a hard time understanding the value of SEO in general, discontinue my services in under 1 year's time.

Being organized was a huge problem at my last SEO job. We took on huge amounts of work, and had no defined tools or written processes in which to follow. I basically did my own thing. I then was fired for basically being an Intrepreneur. I felt I was being innovative by creating my own tools and systems, but it was never appreciated.

In the end I was able to keep all my tools including: my site crawler for code analysis, project management data base, customizable dynamic link request email form, and others. All these tools were never recognized. Instead they wanted to keep doing things by hand.

I never understood why they would use a keyword service like wordtracker.com but wouldn't use a html site crawler to find duplicate content, meta tags, and hidden elements.

So being scalable or franchise able (even though you may never want to franchise) is the ultimate goal. Especially for a company in a growing maturing market, where prices get lower and quality goes up. It becomes a necessity just to survive!

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