How far does your SEO provider go? That’s the question I want to get you thinking about today.

The reason I want to ask this is because so many clients SEO are underperforming and they don’t know why. “We’re doing SEO don’t worry, we hired a guy to do it for us” they will tell you thinking that one SEO provider does exactly the same as the next.

In my experience I’ve worked with a number of clients (and one just recently in fact) who were happily running their business only get a call one day and their SEO provider tells them there’s nothing more they can do, they’ve taken them as far as they can.

Taking this most recent client of mine for example, did the SEO provider mean that they had successfully gotten the client a page 1 ranking for every key phrase that is likely to generate business for the client? No, in fact the client was still on page 3 for their most valuable key phrase.

So the client had gone in search of another SEO provider who could take them to the next level and we were only too happy to oblige.

This highlights something I have seen time and time again. Something that is very hard to get a new potential client to understand. It’s the fact that what one company does and calls it SEO may be very different from what another company does and calls it SEO.

Think of it like this, if there are 200 (so Google tell us) criteria that they take into account when determining what search results pages a website should appear on, isn’t it at all possible that the SEO company you spoke to whose proposal came to £500 covers far fewer of those criteria than an SEO company whose proposal came to £5,000?

Isn’t it also possible that there may be a difference in the results the two companies are able to get for you? The answer is OF COURSE.

If some of these criteria are:

• H1 H2 Tags optimization
• Title tags optimization
• Meta tags optimization
• Keyword optimization
• Alt Optimization
• Website Structure optimization
• Body text and content optimization
• Sitemap for Link Optimization
• W3C validation

Then isn’t it likely that a £500 proposal only covers 1 or 2 of these things? How many other things does the £500 proposal leave out? Is it worth the risk?

A wise man once said “the most expensive marketing of all is that which produces no results”.

Written by Chris Coney BSc, Simplify Internet Marketing