Quick & Dirty SEO or Quality Optimization?
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One day I went to the barber. Actually she’s a female barber so should I say hairdresser then? I paid 25 Euro for approx. 45 minutes.
That’s quite but not very expensive. A haircut for a man costs 10 to 40 Euro here and takes 10 minutes to an hour usually unless you like the really fancy stuff.
I not only paid 25 instead of 8 Euro I also waited three weeks to get an appointment with my hairdresser.
Usually you can just “cut and go” with many cheap barber shops
but I chose to look like a hobo for three weeks as I needed a haircut badly already three weeks earlier.
My wife is always short of filing for divorce and people on the street almost give me money for looking that desperate. It seems I’m always late when it comes to cutting hear.
Why wait for quality services?
Now why the hell do I wait so long or pay more than elsewhere? Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite a frugal person.
I’ve even tried several of the “cut and go” 10+ Euro barber shops. I’m not a snob either. I went once or twice to the 40 Euro barber but wasn’t satisfied with the results.
I always go the the same hairdresser whenever I can. She’s my favorite for several years now. I remember when she worked for someone else 5 or 6 years ago.
She then moved on to open her own barber shop, she did open it with another hairdresser. I followed her to the new location.
By now they are a team of five I think. I still stick with her even if the others can a more timely appointment.
The meaning of the analogy
Why do I tell you all this boring crap about hairdressers in an SEO blog? Well, last week I got an email from someone representing a British language school wanting me to work for them.
For a while I got a few offers like that per week and I basically couldn’t even respond to them. I didn’t have the time.
Client work and my own projects plus family life are enough for an eight days week.
From time to time a project or client sounds interesting so that I reply anyway. I did last week. It took me one hour to send the guy a more or less sound offer.
I shouldn’t have bothered though. He wanted German and Polish SEO and just sent me the English keywords to be “translated”.
Of course you can’t simply translate keywords. Also I always perform my own keyword research, even if a client sends me a list of keywords.
Clients almost always err when it comes to the best keyword combinations.
When it comes to search engine optimization clients can optimize as much as they can do design websites themselves.
It’s perfectly fine for the basics when they abide the commonly used best practices but for the work that matters where “the angel is in the details” you need a professional.
In the case of web design clients want a bigger logo, when it comes to SEO they want bigger keywords. Yet Google and the Web does not work like that.
Too broad keywords are not really lucrative and they are very competitive at the same time. Smaller that is more specific keyphrases are easier to optimize for and convert better.
Real life example
Now this guy was too stingy to pay me 4h keyword research (which is the absolute minimum) per language.
Also he stated that the other SEOs already send him the translated keywords in their offer. He was willing to invest in just one hour per language in keyword research.
The older I get the more moderate I get. I didn’t even get angry. I didn’t cry. I almost laughed. I didn’t write him to go to hell and stop wasting my time.
I was very polite. I only wrote him that I don’t offer “quick & dirty” SEO. I offer quality optimization. I can’t help you with “quick and dirty”.
How do you want to build a stable house if you are not willing to pay for a decent foundation?
Without proper market and keyword research your project is doomed from day one. When you optimize for the wrong keywords all your investment might get wasted.
Now I will explain the barber story above. I’ve been to the “quick & dirty” barber shops a few times. It never really worked well.
Either I looked bad from the start, or a few days or weeks later. Once a cheap hairdresser did quite good work but next time I went there she wasn’t working there anymore.
Crafting high-quality websites
In the past I wrote that SEO is a craft. It is similar to cutting hair in a way. A good hairdresser isn’t necessarily quick and dirty.
Effective search engine optimization takes
- time
- effort
- money
You have to wait longer and pay more to be satisfied with the results. The less you invest the less impressive the results will be.
When you pay for quick and dirty you get quick and dirty.
Whether it’s a haircut or SEO. Even if you’re very lucky and you pay for quick and dirty and you get quality you won’t be as lucky the next time.
I only serve a few clients and I work for years with most of them.
What you certainly shouldn’t do is approach a quality SEO practitioner and ask for quick and dirty SEO.
I don’t like huge corporations so I don’t charge 500$ an hour like some of the top SEO experts do. My services are affordable. Still: you wouldn’t ask a barber for a “bad haircut” either, would you?
* Creative Commons image by a4gpa
Last updated: November 6th, 2017.
I think there are a lot of people who can empathise with this story.
Mostly I find this on web builds climbing down on price only devalues your work
I agree with you, if you want cheap prices you can only expect a low quality service. There are many indians and other foreigners offering extra cheap seo services online, and you can imagine the results you can get.
i really like when you said “When you pay for quick and dirty you get quick and dirty” obviously when you are not sincere with work and you are not putting enough efforts then you dont deserve good response in return and you fails always.
Very much valid comparison, Starting and running an SEO campaign involves a lot of tasks, Search engine optimization must happen gradually and look natural, and the fact is that new sites don’t show up right away in the SERPs
There are many other factors as well in SEO which shows that quality SEO takes time as well as it costs you more.
I could not agree more. We have not been going that long and our rates are very reasonable, we put a lot of work into each project and in most cases more than we get paid for. I hate it when we quote for work giving a fair price then the client tries’ to get us to reduce our rate because the found someone cheaper. We dropped the price the first couple of times, it was a mistake, and it only made the client more difficult and demanding, it was as if they did us a favour by coming to us. Now we stick to our price and if they are not happy they are more than welcome to go elsewhere. If they pay peanuts they will get monkeys.
This is a very helpful post, and the term “quick and dirty” does describe the instant optimsation which clients request, and they want you to produce the results yesterday! Also the advice about clients choosing keywords, and there knowledge about SEO is as in depth as there knowledge of how to design. I think the way you dealt with this client is very inspiring and i will find myself using this terminology.
Yeah, in the past I’ve tried to satisfy each and every client but soon I realized that some poeple out there just want to rip you off.
You don’t earn any money working for them, you only lose money by not working for other more legit clients or your own projects.
Totally agree. When it comes to SEO, it’s always the ‘Slow and steady’ that wins. Not the fast and the furious. It’s a pity that many businesses are unaware of this and buy services from companies that resort to black hat link building. They could win the short run, but in the long run, the story would be different.
Yeah, cheap is never the best route for long term quality, but sometimes especially newbies starting out some don’t know any better. I always opt for quality “haircuts” but some cannot afford to do so. I think educating by the way of great articles like this is a start.