“We need you to help get us to page one of Google, but our budget is limited.”

“We are willing to become partners with you if you can get us to page one of Google in two months.”

“We are looking for an SEO intern who can get us to page one of Google and get some real-life experience in the process.”

“I’m looking for someone to help us get more links back to our website. We will pay you per link if you obtain 100 or more PR4 links within 30 days.”

Here’s my favorite:

If you can find someone willing to work for $9/hour who has some sort of experience and is worth anything, more power to you. But, a lot of times, website owners and web design/web marketing companies looking for SEO help don’t have realistic expectations of what an SEO consultant is worth or what QUALITY SEO work actually costs.

Here is what the average SEO-related salaries currently are according to Indeed.com:

SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) published a report last January based on a survey that asked a number of in-house SEM professionals what they make per year. Here are the results:

A few things are true when it comes to hiring someone to perform SEO on your or your clients’ site(s);

1. Yes, the economy is currently struggling. People are looking for work and you could probably find someone for cheap.
2. Yes, you could hire someone to do freelance work at a lower hourly rate.
3. Yes, you could always outsource your project to someone overseas for a lot cheaper.

However, while all of these statements are true, is SEO REALLY something that you want to pinch pennies over? Because most of the time, you get what you pay for.

Do you really think that paying someone $9/hour is going to keep them motivated and dedicated to making your project a success?

I always like to think of this statement when looking at SEO as a whole: “If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.”

If it was as easy as paying someone $200 bucks a month to get your website to number one for “personal injury attorney” or “Los Angeles accident lawyer”, don’t you think someone would have thought of that by now??

Legal SEO is a very competitive market. Lawyers are never scared to spend money on marketing, especially after they have realized the ROI that is involved. If you think that you’re the only lawyer in your city that has thought about having someone help with your online marketing, think again. The reality is that you’re probably already a few years behind your competition, and trying to find some college kid or inexperienced SEO’er on Craigslist who doesn’t have a job for a reason is not going to make up for that.

Finding someone to perform SEO on your website is very similar to finding a lawyer. If you can’t afford it, can you go with a public defender or represent yourself?

Sure!

But what are the realistic chances that you’re going to succeed?

Spend the money and hire a professional!

We’ve heard all of the hype surrounding Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Some sites are announcing that the new search engine is already competing with Yahoo! for second place in the SE battle, and the reviews of Bing (“But it’s not Google”) seem to be pretty good so far. So, the question is: what can you do to optimize your site for Bing and strike while the iron is hot?

(And yes, you will start seeing Bing show up in your Google Analytics reports soon.)

I came across a pretty good blog post this morning which cites a number of other resources who have done case studies on what Bing looks at as opposed to Google and Yahoo! when ranking websites. One of those resources has a detailed chart showing a comparison of on-page factors of the number one websites on Google and Bing for the keyword term “seo services”.

In summary, the resource came to the conclusion that the number one ranking website on Bing was able to keep a leg up on the competition by

1. Having an older domain age, and
2. Having inbound links from websites that included the primary keyword in the referring site’s title tags- in other words, building inbound links from other SEO sites and directories as opposed to being from just anywhere.

Obviously you don’t have much control on domain age, but here is another search engine that is ranking with inbound links as, what seems to be, one of their primary ranking factors.

I don’t know how many times we tell clients and other webmasters this when they ask why they’re not ranking well for their keyword and keyword phrases, but we can take this chance as an opportunity to say it again: If you’re not maintaining some sort of (professional) link building campaign, you’re already ten steps behind the competition.

Quality content is key, obviously, but taking the “if we build it they will come (and link to us)” approach isn’t enough to rank number one for more competitive keywords and beat out competing websites who are taking the time every day (or hiring SEM professionals to do it for them) to acquire links from relevant and authoritative sites in order to increase their rankings and keep you buried in the search engines.

We’ve put together some pretty good do-it-yourself link building techniques which you could take a look at if you have the time to build links to your website on a daily basis. But, if you’re like most of our clients, you simply don’t have the time (or professional knowledge) to do this and, if that’s the case, feel free to reach out to us and we’ll be happy to tell you how we can help.

Whether or not Bing lives up to the hype remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain: now is the time for you to get ahead of the competition and improve your search engine rankings (on Bing, Yahoo!, and Google) with an effective link-building campaign.