Follow the saga here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Here’s what’s happened:
* The client got back to me and accepted the quote without a worry
* We did the job
* They got back to me today ande accepted the quote that resulted from the review
They’ve been a delight to work with.
Billings so far are $2,700.
Sometimes I get it wrong. (Most of the time actually!)
Brendon
I try and avoid doing what I’ve done with this and the last post – refer to an article or post and then add a comment to it. But rules are made to be broken!
If you’re into search engine optimisation at all, then read this article – it’s a very detailed account of the factors that are considered by the search engines when ranking pages.
Regards
Brendon
Over on Webmasterworld.com there has been a post made about duplicate content.
It’s an excellent post well worth a read. It brings me a reminder of a site we had that was doing really well. So well in fact that we had to set up a duplicate sites to cope with Australian orders and a site for US orders.
Soon after the site wasn’t doing so well!
If I only knew then what I know now.
Be careful out there – one simple mistake can be very costly.
Regards
Brendon
Here’s the update for the situation I first mentioned below on 22 September titled Charging For A ‘Quote’.
It’s been a few days since I alerted the prospect to the page we uploaded that was optimised and achieved great rankings almost immediately.
I’ve emailed and spoken with the prospect – his boss was going to review the page and my email. I haven’t heard back as yet.
My guess is we won’t get this job – the longer a person takes to make a decision the more likely that decision is to be ‘No”.
What do we do? Our options are:
1. Continue liaising with the client
2. Wait for them to contact us
3. Remove the well-optimised page and move on
I’m going with # 3. My gut tells me this is not a client we want even if he does move from being a prospect to a client.
So we’ll move on and try band attract the clients we do like and enjoy working with.
Cheers
Brendon
One of the things I know is that I don’t know much. Like most web developers I’m always learning.
With search engine optimization I know a little bit. But the guy I follow and learn from most is Aaron Wall. Click here for a review I just did on Aaron’s book.
BTW, the page I did for the site below is now # 4 worldwide and # 1 here in Australia. Thanks to Aaron ;o)
Cheers
Brendon
In the case I detailed below this has been the follow up.
On Wednesday afternoon I quickly optimised a page for this company’s most desired key word. Others had worked on their site and gotten nowhere over the past couple of years.
48 hours after I uploaded the optimised page the page is # 5 on Google.com. I emailed the prospect to let him know.
Here’s The Math
The site would generate probably 8 leads a day (based on a whole lot of information I’ve gathered) if they have good search engine rankings. They should close at least 1 sale a day.
Average sale is $3,000.
So with some decent search engine optimisation this site can generate an additional $1 million in revenue for the company. At present it generates approximately $6,000 a year.
Let’s see what happens from here.
Brendon
(I’ve just posted this on my Tailored Consulting web site but thought it would make more sense here.)
In the last issue of the SitePoint Tribune (that’s the newsletter I write for SitePoint) I wrote about the hard copy newsletter I write for clients of Tailored Consulting. This newsletter works wonders for us in generating new business – this is what I wrote:
“Well, firstly I think people are far more likely to read printed material because they don’t receive a lot of it. I’m sure I’m like a lot of people: I get so many emails that any message would have to be darn good to be read amongst all the clutter.
I also feel that, because a hard copy newsletter is a tangible and ‘real’ thing, people are reluctant to toss it out. ‘If it’s printed it must be worth reading,’ seems to be the thinking.”
The other reason more people buy from the hard copy newsletter is because they already know us personally and have often bought from us before.
I’ve had a few people email and ask what the hard copy newsletter is about. I’ve converted it into a pdf file – it’s here (it’s just 89 kb).
Why It’s Formatted Like That
By the way, it is formatted like it is because we simply print it in black into our colurful newsletter ‘shell’ – saves us hundreds of dollars in printing costs and we get very professional looking newsletter.
Read here for more details on how we do that.
Hope that is of some interest.
Brendon
I have an interesting situation at present.
We’re in talks with a company regarding their web site marketing. One of the initial steps for us to to comprehensively review their web site using a range of tools, experience and expertise and providing detailed report with recommendations for improving the sites ‘findability’.
We generally charge for this initial report ($200 – $1,000 depending on how comprehensive it needs to be). We then move on to quote on completing the recommended changes.
And I charge for this report for a couple of reasons:
# 1: We know our stuff when it comes to search engine optimisation – we have skills, equipment, contacts, experience, etc that most others don’t. I don’t want to give away the benefit of all those and then have the client say “Nope, we’ll do it ourselves or get someone cheaper to do the actial search engine optimisation.”
The review takes anywhere from 1 to 10 hours work.
# 2: It qualifies the client a little for us – if the client isn’t prepared to pay for this comprehensive report then there is little chance they understand the importance and power of search engine optimisation.
This Latest Prospect Doesn’t Want To Pay
This latest prospect doesn’t want to pay for what he essentially sees as a quote. And it looks like being a deal breaker.
I’ve told the client if it’s an issue that we’ll deduct half of the fee from any ongoing work. But I’m not sure that will do it for him.
As sad as it is to lose a potential client I have to weigh up the long term issues – will this guy be a valuable client that we can do great work for and provide exceptional value?
Probably not. There are a few red flags for us to not take him as a client already and that’s always a good indicator.
In short, if the prospect came to me and said “I want A, B & C done. How much?” then that’s fine – no charge for the quote.
But because the prospect says “Can you tell me what I need to do to get my site in the top of the search engines?” then that’s consulting.
I’ll let you know what happens.
Brendon
Michael Schultz over at Raintoday.com sent me through some initial data from a survey where they asked 200 corporate decision makers who buy professional services how they like to find their service providers and then how they ultimately buy from them.
For example, regarding how websites affect the purchasing decisions of service purchasers:
* Roughly 80% of decision makers visit a service provider’s website before purchasing their services
* 69% are at least somewhat influenced by the website in deciding whether to initially contact a service provider
* 51% are at least somewhat influenced by the website in deciding whether to ultimately purchase from you
Raintoday sell the full report here.
Cheers
Brendon
Howdy. I’ve come to the realisation that I don’t use my error pages effectively. I’ve just quickly edited a page on our eczema web site to reflect better information.
We can make it a whole lot better than that of course, but with some time pressures at the moment I’ll just use it as an example.
Instead of saying “Page Not Found” why not add a little more information to direct the customer where you want them to go? It’s quick and easy to do.
Tip # 2:
On that error page if you look at the address bar you’ll see a little bottle of oil and cream. The favicon was created in Photoshop (click here for the plugin to do it with) and simply added top the root directory of the site as favicon.ico.
Cheers
Brendon