First of all, who am I? I have been working in the Internet marketing field for 16 years, of which 12 years I have been actively involved in SEO. During this time, I advised website owners and checked the work of various contractors. Based on this experience, I can identify several types of contracts that I would not sign.
- Limited number of keywords in work — if a contractor offers to work with 100-200 keywords (at best, 500), this should raise red flags. An effective SEO strategy requires the development of all commercial queries (queries with the intent to purchase) and at least basic information queries. A really working project should cover at least 1-2 thousand keywords. Otherwise, it will be difficult to achieve results even for the designated 500, not to mention 100-200 keys. For example, many of our projects include 3000-4000 or more keywords.
- When a contractor guarantees results - this almost always raises doubts. At best, this is an inexperienced specialist, and as the team works, it will begin to look for ways to “work around” the problem. Most often, such offers hide the cheating of behavioral factors (which is “black” SEO and is fraught with sanctions), or it is simply fraud.
- Low budget — budgets below 50,000 rubles may only make sense in niches with low competition or in regions with a small population. In most cases, if competition is high, such a budget will not allow achieving results, and the process will drag on for a long time. To obtain a noticeable effect, you need to spend at least 600 hours of work.
- Lack of understanding of the scope of work - If the contractor cannot clearly explain how many hours will be spent on the work and how exactly the budget will be allocated, this is a cause for concern. Prices for hours of work can vary from 700 to 3,000 rubles, and for different budgets, for example, 80,000 rubles, the effect can be very different (from 25 to 100 hours!).
- Work without a contract — SEO requires prepayment, which automatically increases risks for the customer. In such cases, it is best to split the payment into weeks with weekly reports, or enter into a formal agreement. This provides at least some legal coverage and creates at least the formal appearance of work.
- Large agencies with low budgets — large agencies, as a rule, do not work effectively with budgets below 100,000 rubles. If the budget is lower, projects are often handed over to less qualified people. This is because large companies incur many additional expenses, such as office rent, accounting, marketing, etc.
What do you need to check with the contractor? The main question that needs a clear answer is control over work performance and reporting. SEO is a long-term process, and the results are not always immediately obvious. But many steps can be easily checked even by a non-specialist: creating pages, writing content, conducting audits, collecting keywords, correcting errors on the site. Yes, it may be difficult to understand how well the money is being spent, and specialists may try to “inflate” budget items, but if the work is carried out actively, the results will be noticeable. Therefore, before concluding a contract, it is worth asking for examples of reports and agreeing that all work on the site will be reflected in detail in the report. Even if this requires setting aside 1-2 hours of paid time, it is worth it. This approach allows you to quickly identify fraudsters or unprofessionals, saving a lot of time and budget.
If you have questions about SEO promotion, you can write to the SEO studio "SEO COMPUTER" with any question at email info@seo.computer.
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