Counting up the cost of SEO in its entirety

Another productive SEO week has shot by much like that of a shooting star, seeming to last only a moment.

All in all, I’ve helped a few companies progress their SEO efforts forward in a sound and positive manner.

I truly love what I do to the point that it’s not considered to work to me.

I find joy and am reinvigorated by every audit, optimization, coaching and consulting session, blog post and response.

I love the challenges as well as the handsome rewards in driving sound SEO that generates more customers and revenues for those I serve on a daily basis.

But enough about me, and onto today’s post about the discovering the true cost of SEO services in its entirety.

If there is one thing that is constant in my line of business, it is customers being conscious of what they spend on SEO.

The cost of SEO never fails to make itself known in weekly email inquiries and phone calls.

Most of the time, the cost of SEO is sometimes more important than the overall goal the customer want so achieve which is always weird to me.

I only say that because as it relates to why SEO costs so much, there is truth in the saying, “it takes money to make money.”

But my point is that some customers are and can find themselves paralyzed by the cost of SEO in its entirety.

From doing SEO themselves to hiring in-house or outsourcing to a 3rd party agency, each carries its own hefty tag in regards to time, money and labor or effort.

Labor and time are of the essence when considering the cost of SEO

One my favorite books to read from time to time is Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. In short, the premise of the book discusses factors that contribute to high levels of success.

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Gladwell discusses in great detail with a variety of notable people how cultural differences play a large part in perceived intelligence and rational decision making, and how people with exceptional intelligence can end up with such vastly different fortunes.

The mainstay of the book is positioned around the “10,000-Hour Rule”, claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

I’m constantly reminded of this rule when I have small business owners question my professional experience based on what they’ll pay me for performing SEO.

Small businesses discount, and at times dismiss, the numerous years of success and failure I’ve attained practicing and finessing the art and science of sound SEO.

They forget that I’ve fine-tuned a sound process over time, automating a good bit of what small business owners will have to perform by hand starting out.

In most cases, what would take me a week or month to perform in SEO takes the average person years to perform, delaying positive results or exasperating results beyond repair and recovery.

Small business owners’ hurt their business in all aspects because they’ve robbed other areas within their business to create time to perform ineffective SEO and tasks outside their area of expertise.

Small business owners, especially those who have been in business for quite some time and considered successful, think they can acquire the knowledge of my 10,000+ hours of SEO only investing a half-heartedly few hours in a week.

Pressed for time, money and labor to increase customers and revenue, small business owners perform SEO expecting to achieve the same results, if not better, as SEO professionals in the same amount of time.

Most small business owners fail and miserably at performing their own SEO, and pay a very big price tag in lost business opportunity all for the sake of attempting to learn and perform SEO on their own.

Time can never be replaced, so why lose time and cost yourself an exponential amount of money and labor trying to learn a skill outside of your area of expertise?

Are you really saving money doing SEO yourself?

For those of you that find yourself rolling up your sleeves and doing SEO yourself, I always ask the question of, “Is this the best use of your time?”

I understand the cost of SEO can seem a bit exuberant when you are ranking in position 30 or beyond, or not ranking at all for a single keyword other than your company name.

But have you really put pen to paper and done the real math to find the true cost of performing SEO yourself?

Most customers don’t and blindly assume that they are saving money based on the difference in their hourly wage versus that of a SEO professional.

In reality, their skewed math at times fails to compensate for the number of hours more it takes them to perform what an SEO professional can do in a fraction of both the time and cost.

Not only do they short themselves in lost time to focus on making and keeping their customers happy while generating more revenue, but in most cases they also cause great injury and harm to their websites.

This only leads to calling a real SEO professional to clean up their inexperienced mess of do-it-yourself SEO.

Most of the time this inexperience costs double and triple the cost it would have normally cost had they hired the SEO from the start.

So really, are you saving or costing yourself more time and money doing SEO yourself?

Counting up the cost of SEO saves you more than you think in the long run

For every potential customer and customer that have decided to go it alone in a do-it-yourself SEO project, most always eventually come back to hire Kickstart Commerce or another SEO professional agency.

And for those that don’t hire Kickstart Commerce for SEO services, their competitors save time, money and effort hiring us based on the value we bring to their company and not the SEO price tag by itself.

Don’t get me wrong, the cost of SEO is important, but SEO services must be firmly aligned to a business plan based on the value to be delivered.

Then and only then can one really define, measure, and know the true cost of SEO in its entirety.