SEO – Why Bronze, Silver and Gold Just Don’t Work for us

It’s not particularly uncommon for us for us to be asked about our ‘standard SEO packages’ or whether we have a ‘gold, silver, bronze’ type set up we can quote based upon. The short answer is ‘no.’ At Tecmark, we simply don’t entertain the idea of a bronze, silver and gold standard and generic pricing model. But this isn’t a post about the horrors of this type of SEO. It’s not a post about what ‘not to look for’ in a SEO agency. This is a post about why that type of pricing doesn’t work for us.

Generic vs Bespoke SEO

For us, SEO should be bespoke. No two campaigns are the same and as such, the pricing cannot possibly be the same. We don’t quote a standard priced based on a certain number of keywords because no two keywords are the same either. The resources and budget required to achieve rankings for a certain keyword depend upon:

• Your domain – its age, existing link profile, Pagerank etc.

• Your website – how much needs to be done to your site to optimise it for certain keywords.

• How many competitors you are up against for that keyword

• The level of active SEO in and around that keyword

So a generic pricing model just doesn’t make sense.

SEO ROI

Ultimately, SEO shouldn’t be a cost. It should be an investment that provides a healthy return. As such, each campaign has to be formulated in such a way that this can be achieved. This, again, leads to variables that make standard pricing impossible:

• Value of a visitor to your site (which in itself depends upon your goal, the nature of your business, value of your products and services and the cost to deliver them).

• How many people are searching for the products and services you sell and thus how many qualified visits it is feasible to drive to your site.

• The conversion rate (rate at which your website converts visitors into sales or inbound enquiries) at present and how much could be done to improve it.

The SEO strategy put together for each campaign has to ultimately meet a set of objectives – invariably the ultimate one being ROI. And in order to achieve this, a bespoke solution simply has to be applied.

For us, SEO isn’t just about rankings. It’s not just about picking out keywords and chasing positions in search engines. Rankings will generate traffic but only if:

• The keywords are right, based on relevance and volume
• The keywords are relevant to your services
• Your rankings are incredibly high

Then there is more to consider still:

• Is the traffic delivered by the rankings proving to be qualified?
• Are users interacting with your site?
• Are users ultimately making a purchase/enquiry?

Not unless all of that is so, will rankings result in ROI.

Bespoke SEO

With all that in mind, it would simply be impossible for us to adopt a gold, silver, bronze model of pricing SEO campaigns.

It doesn’t work for us. It would not allow us the flexibility to build a campaign based on facts, research and a set of clear objectives tailored to each client.

That was the long answer to, ‘Do you have gold, silver and bronze packages?’ I guess the short answer is simply, ‘nope!’