Only the most elaborate and complicated websites would could support a strategy of spending $40,000 on SEO; the ranking and placement algorithms used by Google and Yahoo simply don’t change that much or that often. Moreover, important factors such as incoming links from highly ranked websites are beyond the control of an SEO contractor, and once properly named and formatted, a page title does not need to be changed often.

Despite the basic simplicity of most SEO work, so-called “specialists” continue to play upon ignorance in the marketplace and prey upon unsuspecting businesses that think SEO is rocket science. They make SEO sound complicated and arcane and charge exorbitant monthly fees for work that takes generally only a few hours time. They make work where there is none and produce billings based upon it. Most of the time is spent formatting custom reports that do nothing more than what’s available for free through Google Analytics and other web tracking tools. Such near-fraud is profitable to be sure, but also is highly unethical. Such behavior darkens the reputation of all legitimate web service companies and increases the suspicion of customers who could really use some SEO work.

When Epiphanet is asked for a quote for SEO, we bill for a review of the website and issue a set of recommendations; this is usually one to three hours of work. As part of that, we provide a quote for the implementation of the recommendations, which varies with the complexity and size of a website. For the client project noted above, our honest quote was less than one-tenth of that of the other company. Go figure!

Larry Barnett

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