We realize you’ll hate this answer, but … it depends.

At Webology, the cost of our SEO varies depending on a variety of factors, including the specific services being provided, the scope of the project, and the needs and goals of your business.

To make it simpler, think of your business as a car and us as your mechanics. You want your current car to run faster or more efficiently or to look better. That might mean new tires, a new paint job, adding a turbo-charger, building a custom spoiler or adding Apple Car Play. The mechanic may sit with you to discuss the options available to you based on the age, make, condition and model of your car and then build the price from there.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s pretty damn close to how digital agencies work.

And just like mechanics, there are good ones and bad ones. Ones that lie, ones that are honest and everything in between.

We work with you to develop a customized SEO strategy that aligns with your budget and marketing objectives. We do this by offering you a range of services that compliment your SEO plan so that we can build a sales machine for you that never sleeps.

We can provide a quote for the specific services or a combination of all of the above based on your business goals and of course, budget.

We understand that cost is an important factor for businesses of all sizes, and we strive to provide competitive pricing for the value that we offer. If you’re interested in learning more about our services and pricing, we would be happy to discuss your specific needs and goals and provide you with a quote.

Yes of course! We believe that communication is the main pillar for your SEO project success. If we are all on the same page, we will end up with a successful project.

We will work with you to understand your business goals and use these as our base in the decision making process every step of the way.

Before we do anything, we’ll sit down with you and discuss what your business objectives are and then help you design your customized marketing plan that fits within your budget.

We also provide you with regular updates as well as detailed (yet easy to read) reports that will keep you informed of the progress on your project or campaign. Providing you with these reports will help us (and you) measure our progress and incorporate your feedback so that we can continue to optimize our process to help you get the results that you wanted from us in the first place.

We understand that trust is at the core of any business relationship but especially when you’re looking to start a new relationship and especially if you’ve previously worked with other agencies that have not delivered on their promises.

Our goal is to provide you with far more value than what you pay for. This is why for some (but not all) clients, we put our money where our mouth is and stand behind our results by offering you guaranteed results or your money back.

You might roll your eyes at the “some, but not all” comment but working with different people in different businesses in different industries means that no two projects or campaigns are the same.

Once we’ve done our homework, only then are we able to provide you with money-back guarantee on delivering results.

Yeah so do we!

However, as someone much smarter than us once said: “there are no secrets in life, just hard work”.

What this means is, there is no magic bullet, no lottery ticket, no ‘fast-track’, to using digital marketing to grow your sales. Just a lot of hard work, experiments, iterations, improvements and continuous optimization to get visitors to your business and convince them your product or service will provide them with more value than what you are selling it for.

If you put a gun to our head (please don’t) and forced us to provide you with a timeline, we’d (very nervously) provide you with some rough estimates for each channel:

• SEO: Anywhere from six to eighteen months
• PPC: Anywhere from 24 hours to 4 weeks

The range is wide because of the many factors we’re including to cover everyone who might be reading these words. Including the size and nature of your business, the competitiveness of your industry and the effectiveness of the marketing campaign we create.

Both of those strategies also include a lot of work on your site itself, so add a few weeks, up to a few months (depending on the size of your site) for our ‘Persuasion Rate Optimization’ templates to work. SEO and PPC can only work if your business is ready to convert visitors to customers.

In a nutshell, SEO is the cheapest and most effective way to have your business show up in search results when people search for things related to your product or service.

Since search engines use algorithms (kind of like a recipe for solving a problem, a set of steps that helps solve a problem or accomplish a task) this means, maybe unfortunately so, that people can ‘game’ this algorithm and perform certain actions on their websites that drives visitors to the site by making the site appear higher up on the rankings regardless if the site is actually relevant or not to what you are searching for.

This can be frustrating for visitors who want to find the solution to their problem and for business owners who have a solution, but can’t ‘game’ or ‘optimize’ their site enough to have their site appear before their competitors and pretender / spam-like websites.

This means that we have to work hard (really hard) to get your site to the top of the search results to increase the chances of someone clicking on it.

A few ways that we do this is by creating useful, helpful and relevant content on your website and use ‘keywords’ to tag this content so that search engines can pickup on this and then start ranking your site.

Of course there is a lot more work (technical SEO, link building, site speed optimization, site-map management … etc) that goes into SEO, but that is beyond ths cope of this littler FAQ. You can read more here about everything you wanted to know (and probably a lot you don’t want to know) about SEO.

Suffice it to say, by using SEO, your business can get more people to visit your website and learn about your products or services and this can help you get more customers and make more money.

We specialize in digital marketing for small businesses. The definition of a ‘small business’ is wide, but we know one when we see it and yes, your small business (or however you might label it) can benefit from digital marketing.

In fact, we argue that digital marketing might be the only effective way for small businesses such as yours to not just compete with larger competitors, but to also make a large return on investment. How?

• Specific Targets. With digital marketing, you don’t ‘spray and pray’ as you would with a billboard, newspaper or TV. You target your specific customer and make sure all your efforts are going toward reaching this specific customer. This makes it cheaper and more effective.
• Measurable Results. There is no guessing. With each campaign comes data and by reading the data we can tell if what we are doing is working or not. We can then filter what tactics work and adjust.
  Long-Term. Your website is always on, 24/7. Our SEO campaigns operate each and every day and the content we create for you never goes away. All of this is cumulative. After the initial investment, the only other input is time and as time goes by, these inputs compound and snowball into results.

Yes, we’re biased. But how could we not be? The results speak for themselves as you can see from our client case studies.

Didn’t we answer this already in the question: “How Long Will This All Take Until I Generate Sales?”

Well, if you weren’t able to read our response, here we go again.

Our SEO efforts will take anywhere from six to eighteen months to work. We’ve worked with businesses who have started generating results in as little as 6 weeks and we’ve also worked with clients who only started to see results after 8 months.

The wide range is due to several factors. First, each business and/or client has a different definition for ‘results’. Your goal might simply be ‘more traffic’ to your site and for others it might be inquiries for services. Other clients see results as sales generated from organic traffic.

On top of how you wish to define your results, we must also factor in the size and nature of your business, the competitiveness of your industry and the effectiveness of the marketing campaign we create.

Finally, and probably most importantly the ‘how long does it take to work’ question is also contingent on your actual website. Is it built to convert visitors into paying customers? It it optimized for generating inquiries or selling products and services? As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

If we build your site for you using our Persuasion Optimization process, then we can say with a higher degree of confidence that you will have a digital business that converts visitors into customers. If you insist on hiring us just for SEO and don’t want us to touch your site, then we can only help you with traffic and you’ll have to handle the ‘last mile’ to convert those visitors into customers.

Yes we can create SEO content. We specialize in creating SEO optimized blog posts.

Why only blog posts? We’ve found they are the best bang-for-your-buck investment in terms of traffic generating content that you can invest in today. Visitors prefer learning about your products and services through blog posts far more than through your website. No one likes being ‘sold to’ but unfortunately we all have to sell something to make a living.

A blog post is truly the best of both worlds. It’s friendly, non-sales-type of content that educates
visitors on a topic that you (should) be an expert in. 70% of people would rather read a blog post than an ad. Not only do blogs increase traffic to your site by more than 434% but sites that have blogs give you almost 70% more leads than sites without blogs. This is because more people (almost 3/4 of people surveyed) would rather read a blog post than an ad.

Another and probably more important factor is Artificial Intelligence. As the world adopts GPT-4, Bing Chat and Google Bard, the algorithm in these hybrid search/output models will prioritize natural language and long-tail keywords over short, abrupt key-word stuffed content that’s created for contents sake.

When you hire us to create content for your business, we start with a deep-dive into high value, low competition topics within your industry / field that people are searching for. Specifically we look for topics that don’t have a great answer yet. We then use our in-house screening tool to rank these topics based on the likelihood of having them rank in search engines, if they should be a ‘Staple Post’ or ‘Response Post’ and the potential for the post to bring in traffic.

And yes, we realize that using GPT-4 and other A.I. Writing Tools is ‘faster’. We use them too however we use them for research and outlines rather than spitting out generic articles. Using GPT enabled tools as an assistant is far more effective than attempting to use them to “do it for you”.

We then write the posts for you and ensure they are SEO-optimized with relevant keywords. All you need to do is edit for context and your in-house expertise.

We bill you for SEO on a monthly basis so we can torment you and have you hate us a little more each month.

Actually, no. But it does kind of feel like that sometimes and we get it. Everything is a subscription and the monthly bills are like little paper-cuts that slowly build up. Especially if you don’t understand what we’re doing and if you don’t “see” anything your first few weeks and sometimes months.

We play with the cards we’re dealt in the game we want to play. In this case, the cards are tools and man-hours and the game is trying to increase your websites rankings. The only way to play this game is to perform long hours of manual work every single day. Your competitors are doing it so unfortunately, if you hire us, we have to do it too and we have to work harder for longer to get you to the top then to make sure people actually visit your page and then convince them to join your sales funnel, give you their contact details or subscribe to a service.

However. We are pretty damn confident that your monthly (or quarterly) bill will be an after-thought once you see the results we generate. We want you feeling awful for how little you pay us for the results we provide you.

Do you have to do SEO forever? Well, maybe. Who knows. Maybe in a few years the game changes completely and we (all of us business owners) do something else to sell our products and services. SEO is kind of like a hamster-wheel. Once you stop, all momentum stops and you start slipping in the rankings, so best to think about it more like a utility. If you want to keep the lights on you do what needs to be done.

In a nutshell, everything. We start with focusing on your users rather than search engines. There’s time for the technical aspects later. The hard part is making sure that your website is solving a problem for your potential customers and presenting the solution in an easy and helpful way.

We then start with conducting Keyword research to define possible targets. Next is on-page optimization where we use the keywords to optimize your content, meta tags, titles and everything else we can get our hands on. Then we work on your site structure, using schema markup and making sure your site is fast and optimized for mobile. We then start with off-page optimization where we build you back links.

It depends. If you’re a Superannuation Provider or an Insurance broker … then no. We probably won’t get you to Page 1 anytime soon unless you have a massive budget for SEO and content production. For most other businesses, yes we may be able to get you to Page 1 with a lot of consistent hard work and time. We won’t guarantee this and you’d be wise to be skeptical of anyone that claims they can guarantee this, especially if they haven’t put in considerable time into your audit.

You can’t do one without the other. That’s the gist of it. You must produce good content that your potential customers find helpful in solving their problem. That content needs to be SEO optimized, meaning that it has to feature keywords that google looks for to index your website for the business that you do.

Sort of. Most agencies claim that there are a half-dozen different types of SEO. However they say this in order to create more pages that feature the keyword “SEO” on it so they can rank on Page 1 for the term SEO.

As we mentioned above in an earlier FAQ, we do what we think works best to get more potential customers to convert into paying customers. If you’re a local business and have a physical location or businesses that only serve a certain geographic area then you’ll want more so-called ‘Local SEO’ which is specific to Google. This means that we’ll work on your Google My Business profile, build plenty of name, address and phone number citations and target more specific keywords (a common one is adding “near me” to whatever it is you do).

Another specific type of SEO is “International SEO”. This is when we focus on optimizing your business to allow search engines to identify and index your site for the countries that you are targeting. It’s also used to optimize your site for multiple languages. Speaking technically, this involves matching organic search results to the location (or language) of the users conducting the search by geotrageting, using hreflang tags and other so-called ‘localization signals’.

Yet another specific task that may not apply to all businesses is Website SEO Migration and Retention. When your website undergoes any substantial changes it can affect your search engine visibility. A substantial change includes any change to your websites location, changing platforms, structure, content, design or UX. When you migrate a site it’s very important to not, to put it mildly, f**k it up. We work to retain your websites rankings and we do this by creating a detailed plan which consists of URL mapping and content gap analysis. This means we need to match your old URL’s to the new ones and make sure all your content (text, images, videos … etc) retain their original state so you don’t lose any hard-won SEO gains.

The other types of SEO aren’t really ‘types’ they’re simply the tactics that all SEO’s should be using anyways.