The Endless Quest For Affordable SEO
January 24th, 2012 |Affordable SEO is the holy grail of webmasters everywhere — if you can offer the struggling business owners a surefire way to rank them on Google for ‘an affordable amount’, you have business in your pocket. Of course, every business owner has a different idea of what they consider ‘affordable’. It would actually benefit most SEO companies to have a few different payment setups to take advantage of different small business’ SEO expectations. Let’s look at a couple of different examples to show what I mean:
Business 1: Clever T-shirts
This shop was set up by a college student with some wit to him. The student spends $300/month purchasing cheaply silkscreened shirts from a shop in Bangladesh that put his .png files onto the shirts for $3 including shipping. He sells those 100 shirts for $9 each on campus and in the town’s gaming shops. Of his $600/month profit, he spends half on beer and World of Warcraft, and is interested in putting the other half toward improving his business — and half of that into SEO so that he can do web sales. He’s going to be in business for at least the next 6 months (until summer break), and if he’s doing well enough, he’ll keep going over the summer and into next year.
What kind of services can your company offer someone with a consistent and long-term but relatively low amount of money to spend like this guy? How long will it take at $150/month before you can get him ranked for some quality keywords?
Business 2: The Solopreneur’s Niche Site
This website was set up by a man who lost his job, and it’s his last-ditch attempt to avoid collecting unemployment. He’s going to sell African mango supplements, and if he makes even a mild profit, he’s going to invest in further such niche sites. The gentleman in question just cashed in his last big tax return, and he has $4000 up front to spend on SEO to get his business off the ground.
Can your SEO company do something helpful for this guy to get his business kick-started given a budget that large? Or would you simply treat this as a down payment on several months of SEO?
These are extreme examples, but the point remains a good one: there are an infinite number of differing circumstances in the marketplace, and a one-size-fits-all billing plan is going to leave some significant chunk of that marketplace looking elsewhere for SEO they can consider “affordable”.

If you meet both of those qualifications, and you go up to the upper right of your search screen and click the “Show Personal Results” button, you’ll find that any relevant content created on Google+ by people in your Circles gets filtered into the results. I follow Ed Dale, for example, and when I search for “Search Plus Your World” on Google and click “Show Personal Results”, I get a few of Ed’s blog entries in and amongst my other traditional results.
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