Hopefully most of you have already read the news, but in case you haven’t, I am very excited to be a full-time member of the SEOmoz staff! The announcement came out as I was en route from Blueglass X in Tampa to BIA Kelsey’s ILM West show in Los Angeles. In fact, and I’m still trying to catch up on thanking everyone in my Twitter stream and on the original blog post.
Both conferences were excellent, but if you’ve never attended a BIA Kelsey show, it’s a completely different animal from conferences and seminars in the search industry. The conference contains very few “actionable tips that you can implement on Monday morning,” but that’s not the reason you attend. BIA Kelsey recruits executives from the major digital marketing technology and service providers to small businesses for extended 1:1 or 1:2 discussions with their analysts. By and large, these executives are surprisingly open about challenges they face, and although some sessions turn into sales pitches, the best ones give you real insight into the online marketing pain points and opportunities for small businesses across the country.
So, keeping that background in mind, I want to focus my first SEOmoz post on my #1 and #1a takeaways from the BIA Kelsey show. (There will be plenty of posts from me coming up over the next several months, and Rand’s excellent Whiteboard Friday last week will hopefully satiate you guys on local for the time being.)
Small businesses vs. Search marketing
I have lived, breathed, eaten, slept, celebrated, and advocated small business internet marketing for the last eight years. But not even I realized until recently:
1) How large the disconnect between the search marketing industry and the small business community is.
1a) The size of the market opportunity for the consultants and agencies who can bridge this disconnect.
One of BIA Kelsey’s forecasts really crystallized this disconnect for me: their annual survey gauging the marketing mindset of the average small business owner. This survey breaks respondents into two categories: “core SMBs” and “plus spenders.” What is incredibly revealing for most people in our industry is the average annual marketing spend of these two groups: $3,000 and $82,600.
Note: these numbers are TOTAL marketing spend. Annually, not monthly. Even the “plus spenders” would have a hard time finding anyone on this list willing to take them on for less than a $5,000/month budget, assuming they were looking for an end-to-end, search-and-social-media monthly arrangement. The level to which this segment is being served by the broader search industry is substantial, but economics dictate that more established agencies tend to go after bigger fish.
On the other side of the spectrum, BIA Kelsey is one of the few companies out there who even considers the plight of the $250/month small business. And if you think $250 sounds like a small monthly budget, wait 'til you hear that these businesses actually spend closer to $100/month on their website and web presence (see slide 8)! This is the reality of operating a small business, though. Advertising costs for small businesses do not come from a corporate marketing budget; they come from family vacation budgets or college savings funds.
Why do I think the market opportunity is so large, then, for agencies who can serve these average businesses? Surely there is no margin in a stable of $250/month clients?
#1 You have virtually no competition for these clients
Jim Moroney of the Dallas Morning News candidly admitted that his newspaper had effectively “priced out” most small business advertisers years ago. His newspaper has a 600,000 subscriber distribution, and for the mom-and-pop dry cleaner or local restaurant serving one small neighborhood in Dallas-Fort Worth, those types of ads do not pencil out economically.
The analogy holds true today even in the digital era. Most small businesses in this $250/month segment are priced out of online advertising. Most of the major Internet yellow pages companies are thinking either of Adwords, display ads (whether they be CPM or CPC), or a combination of the two. There were very few presentations at the show focused on acquiring new customers via inbound marketing. Yet in many categories, $250 will only buy a handful of clicks per month, especially once you consider the Cost-of-Goods-Sold that third-party vendors need to build into their pricing.
The bottom line is that inbound marketing, i.e. “free” traffic, is the only sustainable marketing technique for this large segment of small businesses. No other option has enough margin to sustain a business on the sales side, so traditional advertising companies are simply not targeting this enormous potential customer base. The CEO of YP.com roughly admitted as much -- that his company was simply too big and too slow-moving to be able to compete effectively with a 2-3 person agency -- and I don’t think he’s alone in this admission.
#2 By default, all of your leads for this business segment are going to be high-quality, inbound leads
At $250/month, only companies at the very largest scale (basically, Google, Facebook, and Apple) can sustain a business with a sales force. There is just not enough margin to support feet-on-the-street at this price point. So, at least among the BIA Kelsey audience, everyone is targeting the “plus spenders.” And even if those companies are able to bring on a business at this price point, they usually end up underserving them. Almost every company that has tried serving this segment at scale bemoans the tremendous “churn” rate when these clients cancel their contracts as a result of poor service.
No one is targeting these businesses from a sales perspective, so they’re literally forced to do their own research. Business owners making the effort to seek you out are going to be more engaged in the marketing process, more responsive, and more likely to implement changes or give you buy-in on your recommended tactics.
#3 The upside for these businesses could be huge
Chances are, you are starting from scratch with this segment. If they have a website, it’s probably completely un-optimized, and a few Title Tag and H1 changes will dramatically increase the amount of business they get from the Internet. Maybe only a few have claimed local search listings, or maybe the business only has one inbound link from a local college or community organization.
Unlike more competitive categories in organic search (like e-commerce or travel), success can still be achieved relatively quickly in most local categories. You're going to see a "wow" factor associated with even moderately effective white-hat tactics. And while small business owners have a reputation for “churn” in this industry, as I mentioned above, most of them are incredibly loyal to companies who actually provide value with their services.
So, what can you do to serve business owners at this lower end of the market?
Here are just a few basic tasks that rookie or junior search professionals can perform without requiring any time investment by a senior employee:
- Improve Title Tags and H1 tags
- Submit citations (whether in-house or outsourced)
- Set up Google Alerts
- Set up a WordPress blog
- Provide editorial advice for weekly blog post topics and Facebook posts
- Control blog commenting on the business owner’s behalf
- Draft review solicitation emails on the business owner’s behalf
- Track the success of review solicitation campaigns via a spreadsheet
- Reach out to business and community organizations for locally-relevant links
-
Create hyper-targeted Facebook ad campaigns under $50/month in total spend*
*In my opinion, Adwords has effectively killed its own small business market opportunity with the increasing number of "not enough search volume" long-tail keywords and ever-higher minimum bid levels.
Let’s assume your agency wants 100% markup on your employees’ or contractors’ time. Let’s also say that a decent hourly rate for a recent liberal arts college graduate is about $17/hour (this works out to a $36,000/year annual salary). This means your agency can afford roughly seven hours per month of marketing on behalf of an average small business owner. Let’s be even more conservative and say that a more senior employee at $100/hour will need to review each account for 30 minutes per month. This still leaves five hours per month, per business for the college grad. Think of the number of tasks in the list above that could be completed in that amount of time!
Helping business owners at the lower end of the marketing spectrum has been a cause for me since I started in the search industry. Beyond the near-moral imperative that I’ve felt personally, I also see incredible economic potential from serving these long-tail customers.
OK, that’s enough out of me for today. I’d love to hear from you guys: how many of you serve clients anywhere near this $250/month price point? What kinds of services do you provide them? What has your experience been like? How many have served them in the past but moved onto clients with bigger budgets? Looking forward to the discussion with you in the comments.
Shhhhh....
You're giving us away.
We start at $225 pm for small business owners but don't include "full integration" (no social media, no blog comment moderation, all that stuff that takes more time than $225 is worth) in that. It's all about on-page, linkbuilding, citations, cleaning up their messes and competition/keyword research. We give them exactly what they need (better rankings, increased traffic, much higher revenue and high ROI) for a price small business owners can afford.
I started out as a small business owner myself. I know that $1000 a month SEO packages would've helped - but they were simply out of my range. If I had to spend $5000-8000 to get started, it didn't matter what the ROI was - I didn't have it. So I did it myself, which is what a lot of small biz owners try to do because they can't afford the $1k, $3k, $8k a month packages. I'm ok with that - I like helping small business clients crush other small businesses. :)
Congrats on joining the Moz team. As we've seen with the integration of Wonk, having these additional tools is fantastic. I'm happy you guys are on board!
Thanks Matt!
I definitely wasn't suggesting that ALL of those bullet points be included in an SMB package--just a menu of things that didn't require senior-level oversight :)
Glad to know that there ARE agencies out there who are thinking about scaling services that provide real value down to this budget level.
We're trying! It's definitely a constant challenge. We are currently building a hyper-local portion since most SMBs care most about that little 7-block, so if it seems like we are stalking you, it's because we are (professionally speaking. lol)
The problem with smaller clients is that they often expect more than is deliverable with their small budgets. They also typically lack resources to make the necessary changes on their end. For example, if you're setting up a PPC campaign for a smaller client you may need to have some adjustments made to the landing pages only to find out that the changes can not be made because the client doesn't have a dedicated web guy or IT person. That's just one example.
Smaller clients also do not stick around long enough to reap the rewards. Typically with both SEO and PPC you need a few months to start seeing results but a smaller client may need to see results right away to justify their investment.
Those two reasons above are why most agencies don't bother with smaller clients. That being said, I agree that there is a lot of opportunity to grab up these clients you just need to be very good at managing expectations and be ready to go through quite a few short term clients to get those long lasting clients. I personally have one client (for years now) who pays $200/mo and requires little maintenance and is happy with what they get so I know it can work.
theIMroom, have you considered establishing a service category that was entirely independent of making changes to a client's existing website? A) In Local (as opposed to organic or paid), you can provide a lot of value without even touching a client's website; B) all work could be done on a subfolder installation of wordpress on the client's parent domain. All you'd need would be the FTP information for the client's site.
I like the suggestion, thank you.
I agree with your thoughts here. Most small businesses need to see results in a couple months if they have a limited budget. Organic search just doesn't work that way. It can take 3 or 4 months to generate return on work done in month 1, so there is a several week lag in work done vs. return.
Organic SEO changes made now could benefit the small business owner a few Google algorithm changes down the line which can't be accurately shown on a week to week basis. Many small business owners have a day to day or week to week outlook which doesn't work if you're optimizing to help future algorithm changes.
I recommend starting small businesses on paid search (or combo of paid and organic) to see immediate results then shift the conversation to organic when the time is right, once they've seen some positive results. Often they don't care where the sales are coming from, just as long as they see some results.
shecking, interesting idea! Have you figured out a streamlined onboarding strategy for SMB PPC clients? Not being a PPC expert, that part always seemed to take me *hours*, which I could never justify given their paltry monthly spends :)
A 250 pm PPC campaign would need to be ultra-targeted but not sure how realistic it would be to get results in just a few weeks. Depends how competitive the industry and what the CPCs are in their space. My guess would be that you would have to grow the budget over time as the SMB grows their client base/revenue. Just some thoughts.
Shecking – I agree with you for a small business a mix of PPC and Organic SEO is essential. However, both of these can be a black hole for funds if not managed with express goals... and a little help!
Shecking - I'm with you on this one. We just had a "small business" client be unhappy with top 15 rankings across 5 keywords in 2 months!
Go figure. yes, we managed their expectations and told them about the long game but these small businesses cant afford to go 6 months without a return. So what do they do? They want to pull the plug on it all which is even more counter intuitive
I like your idea of PPC first and then over time to ween them off to full SEO.
Funny, I've seen the same happen at big firms too with large budgets. Does no contract or month-to-month really make sense for the agency or SEO consultant? Seems like the agency/consultant is taking on most of the risk.
Shecking,
I also agree with your point but most of small business clients have very low budget i.e. $200 or $300 and I don't think if doing PPC with $200 budget is possible to give returns to such clients and to earn something for ourselves as well.
What would you recommend in such situation?
I think if you did a campaign that was ultra-targeted to a city or small region they could see some benefit. The downside is the time it can take to show results if they can't hang in there for at least 4-6 months.
shecking - I'm with you on the ultra-targeted strategy for PPC accounts. I work with various SMB's and what I've found that works best, since budgets are very small, is to stick a very select audience. Then keep tight reigns on the paid search settings like location, device type, and most importantly have clear conversion goals in place.
You guys all clearly know way more about PPC than I do. I am really glad to hear that there are still SOME small-CPC options available to small businesses...and they clearly need help from agencies like yours to find them!
I do the same thing with my small-budget SMB PPC accounts - tight location targeting and scheduling, keeping broad match terms to a minimum (and having a comprehensive list of negative keywords). The biggest problem I encounter with the really small accounts is not having enough data to optimize effectively.
Very nice inputs from all of you on small budget PPC. I agree that targeting a very small or very close location to business area is the best way to get some business for the clients and earn something for us as well...
Thank you guys!
David, glad to see you are part of the SEOMoz team. I specialize in working with smaller clients because that is my passion so this post was music to my ears.
I totally agree with the ultra targeting method for PPC and slowly integrating long term SEO methods. I can prove this works even in competitive verticals. I recently established a targeted campaign for an independent insurance agency. We literally started with a micro budget of $250 per month (the free $100 Google gave us + my account setup fee). I told them not to expect a lot of traffic - traffic is never the goal, conversions are.
Oct. 12 - Spent $97.10 for 16 clicks that resulted in 4 leads and 2 sales.
Nov. 12 - Spent $404.22 for 63 clicks and 12 leads (sales to be determined)Dec. 12 - Spent $496.23 for 74 clicks and 22 leads (so far)
All leads have been of good quality according to the client.
Working with smaller clients is definitely a challenge but if you are good at what you do, you can help these small clients grow to be larger clients.
We went from a $100 trial to being on pace of $1000/month budget and they also want to create campaigns for some additional services as well as doing a complete redesign for the entire site.
I don't believe an agency should charge based on % of ad spend. It's counter intuitive if you ask me. Even now, the goal is not to increase my client's budget, it's still about increasing conversions. Motivation to run a client's budget higher only benefits Google.
Great article! Thank you for for writing this.
This is actually really great, since I live in a rural area (Jerome, AZ has 400 ppl, actually) that gets nearly 1 million tourists per year and is full -- I mean packed full --- of trendy art galleries, hippie emporiums, jewelry and retail shops...about 80 +/- shops, over a dozen hotels and at least 12 restaurants. About 2% of the population (8ppl that I know) are fighting for these $100 to $500/mo clients. Sort of reminiscent of when minors fought over claims here on the side this mountain town 100 years ago, lol.
My clients are out of state, and are closer to the plus spenders, except one furniture company here, whose site I built 3 years ago. I've actually been thinking about how I could "clean up" around here by just becoming more efficient, and leveraging the plethora of tools that are out there, like SEOmoz (?). What caught my attention was the bit about capitalizing on the fact that most of these SMBs don't even have local listings, a Facebook page or Twitter account...and maybe a website which coiuld benefit greatly from a little SEO love. You are so right in that setting up these tasks are piece of cake, and will provide immediate value in the eyes of the SMB owner who just does not have time, or knowledge, yet is usually enthusiastic about being involved once you show them how to blog, tweet, post, etc.
If anyone else out there lives in a small area, with a market made up of low budget SMBs, try this: round up all the owners/managers up into one big room and give them a free inbound marketing training session/orientation. It works. I did this at a high end gallery owners association gathering in a nearby town and got three clients from it. All one year contracts. @rankingbyseo You would be surprised at how much money a small business owner, or any owner, wastes on stuff like yellow page ads, local magnets, restaurant place-mat ads. Our local " Money in the Mail" coupon book cost $700/mo for one ad. I recently took on a client by convincing him to quit paying for 3 of those every month and put that $2100 into something more sustainable.
Good stuff. Now I just have to figure out how get 10 more of those.
I think the success of the organic results really depend on the vertical and the competition locally in that space. There are a lot of small businesses that don't have much local competition online. The first SMB to put any effort into SEO could reap some huge benefits.
@ Geordieromer - a client who is starting to pay more attention to the SEO of his sites sent me the link to this page. Loved your comment, but I couldn't yet click the thumbs up button since I wasn't a member. So I've joined this site initally just to give your comment a thumbs up - and now I look forward to exploring this site and the comments of its obviously knowledgeable members in more detail.
Thanks Teresa! I'm sure you'll find a bunch of useful info here, I sure do.
What small clients need is an agency which does it all. I avoided small businesses until we had the following staff on board with our SEO team 1) Programmer, 2) Designer 3) Social Media Manager.
With little effort, and for small budgets ($1-5000 p/m) you can easily manage a campaign and make adjustments with very small overheads. So I think one needs to be setup to work with the "little demands" of smaller businesses.
With this we now have 40+ small businesses on our monthly plans. Very fruitful and rewarding.
Brook,
You call budgets of 5000 dollars small?? I think that are huge budgets. Wish clients of mine would like to spend that kind of money each month for the services. I typically see budget varying from 250 - 750/1000 euro's a month with the latter being the very smallest group.
Jarno
Brook,
Great to hear your success story.. Do you niche within the small business umbrella to focus on any in particular industries that you have found to be more lucrative than others? Any tips you could provide to your success would be much appreciated.. Thanks!
I think you make some good points, especially about managing expectations. I've worked with many small businesses over the years that were fantastic clients and others that were less than great. I learned a long time ago that you need to set the expectations from the get-go. Yes, you can be successful on a very small budget but your success is not going to look like the success of a big brand with a huge budget and a big in-house team.
Totally agree. Most smb clients are not in a position to wait for effective seo and will quickly look for different answers. Most of the time I experience that a client needs to understand what seo is instead of using the time to optimize for search.
Many do not know what seo is and why they need it.
Yes you are right. Most small clients wants more growth in small interval . so their
expiation is more.
In working with a lot of small businesses over the last several years, I definitely see a market for someone providing quality services in the $250-$1000 range.
However, I think the biggest hurdle a quality service provider has to overcome is that small business owners are getting hit up over 30 times per month (as mentioned at the BIA Kelsey SMB Digital Marketing conference) from various online marketing services. I'd argue that most of them aren't quality but are edging towards complete scams.
SEO providers who give realistic expectations and don't sell XX number of keywords or XX number of submissions are at a disadvantage when the potential client doesn't have the knowledge to know what's crap and what isn't.
Bryan,+1 to the comment about the overselling of SMB's...which is definitely polluting the customer base for reputable SEO companies. The silver lining is, though, that in talking to a lot of our Local U attendees, they're sold SO MUCH that a lot of them are doing some basic level of research to understand these sales pitches better. Hopefully more businesses fall into this camp than the ones who sign up blindly.
Bryan,
I completely agree. We have had clients forward us emails that are OBVIOUS template SPAM emails sent to hundreds of other small businesses with lines like "I noticed you aren't ranking like you should be. I can help you do that." The client wonders why they aren't ranking like they should and why [email protected]'s willing to write him blogs and do SEO for only $75/month and we aren't.
We try to combat this issue before it happens with transparency through our Basecamp progress reports, to-do's, etc but it will always be an issue... and a growing one... as anyone who has a Twitter and an email can claim to be @greatestSEOevuh.
It's definitely a battle, but with a little education, transparency, and genuine quality of service, your sales pitch will outweigh 30 spammer's sales pitches any day.
Bryan,
great comment and completely agree on the polluting part. Another hurdle you could face (in my personal experience) is that the business owner doesn't want their website to improve. Here in my surroundings I constantly hear people say: "I don't want my website to improve, because if I get even more responses and more requests I would have to turn clients away or start hiring people and I don't want that..". or I hear "I already work for 50 hours a week, with a better website I get even more requests and I have to work even more. My wife/husband wouldn't like that. "
How would you respond to a client that responds like that?
Regards
Jarno
Great post, David. The small business market is definitely overlooked by high quality marketers for many reasons, including those already mentioned in the comments above.
However, we've found that the rewards, including those that you covered, are often far greater if you can commit to serving smb's. A few more reasons our agency serves mostly small to medium-sized businesses that you didn't touch on:
We serve quite a few customers around the $250/month level and, depending on the industry, our services include much of what you discussed & usually some kind of social impact. Let's use one of the few restaurants we service, for example. Without going into too much detail, they're paying just under $300/month for the following services:
The time we put in to each campaign (about 4-6 hours/month) gives us a great margin and the client loves it because we are constantly interacting with them and working with them from month to month (and sometimes even campaign to campaign) to increase the number of orders. And soon, this business will be opening new locations and we will be multiply the budget over each store. Obviously, it's not all roses serving small business owners and the "fire a client" button is probably a lot closer than it is normally (otherwise, all your time can be spent servicing one pushy client), but I think there's a lot of merit to serving small businesses. I also think that if you are going to service small businesses, you have to focus all your effort in that direction and have a passion for it (as you can probably tell, I have).
Reading through the comments it is surprising that nobody else mentioned how rewarding it can be! I absolutely love helping small businesses grow and keeping them out of trouble.
No doubt :)
Definitely! Like I mentioned in my comment, I do think being passionate about serving the industry is a pre-requisite for success (well, at least long-term success).
Great respons John and great point of view on your part.
I feel your right on the money with your approach.
Regards
Jarno
Jarno,
Thanks!
I think your out of the box thinking as part of their marketing campaign is important John. It's probably not technically difficult or time consuming for you guys to set up their text messaging campaigns or call tracking, but the client would be completely lost on doing it on their own, so that's where your value comes in!
Joe,
Thanks... that's exactly our thinking. It may take only a few minutes for us to send out a campaign, but the correspondence and guidance we give our customer on what to send & when to send is what they're really paying for. And a cool add-on like call tracking help us not only track how our SEO is doing, but also allows our customers to measure the impact of our services... giving them something tangible is huge for retention.
Great post David. I love the Mihmorandum and am looking forward to seeing your posts regularly on Moz. The timing for this post is great. I am located in Salt Lake City which is practically the capital of scam artists (Multi Level Marketing capital of the World) and SEO's that are really SOS' (Snake Oil Salesman).
One of the driving factors of why I got into this industry was due to me being taken advantage of by a "World Class" agency. After I had hired the said agency on for retention for 4 months. I asked for them to show me the links they had built. They hadn't even claimed my listings on Google, Yahoo or Bing! Needless to say I was torked. This then led me to learn everything I could about SEO and then to begin consulting for other SMB's.
One of the key things I kept noticing as I was breaking into this industry was the huge variance in monthly retainers. Especially when it came to Local SEO. I once had a close friend do some research and received and Local SEO varied from $150.00 - $3700.00!
Your post I believe has come at a pivotal time for all SEO's. The truth is SEO is getting harder and more competitive. Many people think this is an industry that anyone can get into and they can make an "Easy Buck". IT'S NOT! If you want to excel in SEO pick a niche and price it competitively and profitably.
You can find 10 local medical professionals (Chiropractors, Dentists, Pediatrician, ENT, etc.) In your region. Charge them all $350 a month; your business brings in $3,500.00 in revenue. To me this beats trying to optimize a 2,000+ eCommerce property. I would rather work on 10 different businesses that have a maximum of 30+ pages.
I totally agree with you on this model. If you are a consultant or have an agency with fewer than 8 employees you can TOTALLY capitalize on the local niche arena and really have an effect on your community and have a healthy bottom line.
You can find 10 local medical professionals (Chiropractors, Dentists, Pediatrician, ENT, etc.) In your region. Charge them all $350 a month; your business brings in $3,500.00 in revenue. To me this beats trying to optimize a 2,000+ eCommerce property. I would rather work on 10 different businesses that have a maximum of 30+ pages.
LOVE THIS PARAGRAPH!!
I am a small business owner and I can tell you this is a majorly undeserved area of the market. We went looking for it an could not find a trusted company that did it. We even spent money ~$8,000 and then went and checked the work, it was all really shoddy / black hat. So that is why I am here learning. For now I will just do it myself until I can find a trusted source. My marketing budget is about 10K a month to give you and idea of our biz. We operate in real estate which is ultra competitive. Also, I know tons of other people in the 250-1000 monthly bracket who would pay in there were trusted companies with a track record. Small business need results. So they would actually pay more for services if you had a track record of results or some type of guarantee.
I would prefer starting with PPC & CRO instead of SEO when taking on SMB clients who are on a shoestring budget.
By starting with PPC & CRO it's easy to show value to them even within a few weeks. When they're convinced that these online marketing activities help them increase revenues & profitability it should be more than easy to upsell SEO to them.
PPC:
If the market is competitive, maybe even start PPC on the GDN. Even better: start with AdWords remarketing. I think this tactic is extremely powerful because it will remind the client on advertising in the local newspaper. Which is too expensive for them.
CRO:
Show the client how people behave on the site and errors they run into. Make small improvements to his website by using Visual Website Optimize or Optimizely and show the client how it improves his bottom line.
After a few weeks or months you've proved to increase traffic and the business owner's bottom line it's time to upsell SEO services. That would be the best approach I can think of.
Adriaanb, As I said above in response to theIMroom, I think this is a *great* strategy if you can get the campaigns set up efficiently.
This is a very interesting discussion, pertinent to what I am trying to do. I'm a longtime journalist who creates very basic websites. I've had a lot of SEO success with a small business that I manage (I made the website) and (after reading a ton of blog posts and educating myself) decided to offer similar writing/SEO services to other small businesses. Now, I make weekly presentations to other biz owners and have been educating them about the value of simple SEO. They seem to be getting it, and I now have one realtor client, and others interested in talking about new sites. I tell them that I approach website design from a communications perspective, radically different from a "design" perspective.
However, so many questions remain, among them, price! I see this as a valuable niche but some of the above comments make me wonder if I am taking on too much. Somehow, I think there is a way for me to offer this and definitely a need for it.
At this point,most businesses come to me and say, "I want you to make me a new site," which could include ALL design, ALL writing, ALL updates.... probably way too much! However, I'm afraid if I back away from the actual crafting of the site, they'll say forget it because they want a one stop shop and they don't appreciate how important the writing/SEO is.
Your thoughts appreciated!
Hey MusicMom,I was basically in your exact shoes in 2005! Although there are a lot of things you can do around customizing off-the-shelf Wordpress themes, my own .02 is that it's NOT realistic for a client to expect design and content, ALONG with SEO, for a $250/mo. price point.
Our community (the search community) simply needs to do a better job of getting the word out to business owners on the importance of MARKETING your website -- beyond just paid ads. I completely agree with you that many business owners think that SEO comes automatically with a new website, which we all know is not the case :).
Great article David. I think the greatest struggle for small businesses is sifting through the noise on the internet and not being overwhelmed.
I like your list above but it might be even more helpful to break this down into impact vs. time or segment out the tasks into a chronological order. Our industry fails at providing basic, simple information for the small business owner at risk of sounding too novice to our peers. The small business owner needs step by step guides that are broken into actionable items.
You mentioned Google Alerts but I would say the single most important inbound marketing technique for a small business owner is to establish a Reputation Management process for generating, reviewing and responding to reviews.
Thanks again for sharing your knowledge. Excited about the future of Local SEO on this blog.
Thanks Allstar. Totally agree that prioritizing based on impact vs time makes a ton of sense...the most difficult thing in helping business owners in this segment, I think, is quickly assessing what IS going to make the most impact for them--and then getting them to trust you, the consultant, on the order of operations.
I have had this tab open since you wrote it David - only just managed to take the time to read it. I should have gotten to it sooner - it's an exceptional post.
Having grown up in a small business household and having run a small business myself, I also wish there were more options. It's not the route Distilled has gone with our agency services (for a variety of boring reasons) but I hope some of our education services (DistilledU and Searchlove plus all our free resources) help some small businesses have more success. At the very least I hope we can help them make the right decisions about where to put their hard-earned money.
As the owner of a small, 2-person business, I found your blog post interesting and I think you hit on some salient, valid points regarding how online advertising and SEO have pretty much written off small businesses who can't afford the high costs of buying ad clicks and ongoing website optimization costs.
There is definitely a massive market of small businesses out there that are untapped who could use some basic assistance to improve search engine rankings and site optimization. As a small businessman, I simply can't spend hours and hours every week on SEO when I have a business to run and customers who need attention.
Even automated sites like SEOmoz are out of reach for most small business people like myself. The jargon, graphs and "score cards" are difficult to understand and take too much time to manage and learn, and seem geared more to SEO pros than the average business person, which makes the hefty $99/month pricetag hard to justify. After spending months delving into Google webmaster and SEO guidelines, it's clear that search engines have become way too complicated and ridiculous for anyone but the larger companies who can afford to hire expensive SEO consultants or full-time employees to make their sites conform to the many restrictions put into place over the past number of years.
It used to be easy to get search engine traffic in the "old days" of the Internet with some well-worded meta tags. Now your site is penalized by Google if you don't have all of your small graphics in a single sprite or have too many H1 tags on your page. Small businesses just can't compete in this environment anymore, the Internet and the search engines have written us off and left us behind.
As a small business owner I enjoy hearing some enthusiasm for helping the smaller clients. I can tell you from my experience that it has been tough finding a service that is a good fit for our needs. We have used multiple internet marketing firms only to leave feeling disappointed and less likely to try it again in the future. There are so many self proclaimed experts out there and it is easy for a small business to fall into a trap and never try it again. I would love to see more small business seo and social media managers that small businesses like mine can trust.
Hanson - good comment, we hear similar things all the time. Follow up question related to my comment above - what vertical are you in? Are you a small business targeting a light competition niche vertical or a small business trying to operate in a higher competition space?
We are building kit providers. I wouldn't consider our space high competition but it is not a niche either. We target a lot of building and construction related terms. We focus on do it yourself oriented people mainly and I fall into that category for much of our SEO and social media efforts as you can expect it doesn't always get the time and attention that it should when business is calling. I would love to find a business that we can keep a long lasting relationship where we do most of the heavy lifting based of the advice of a trusted and educated adviser.
I have only ever worked with SMB's. I had been doing my own thing as a SMB myself, and began leanring what friends of mine were paying for websites and other online marketing services. I had a friend pay $800.00 for someone to build him a "website". The "web designer" copied my friends flyer, so my friend ended up with a "website" that consisted of one image and no text for $800.00.
I have yet to meet a SMB person, who's eyes don't roll up as I explain what it is I can do for them. You can try to differentiate your self from the snake oil salesmen (can you make fries with snake oil?). But, TRUST is hard to come by when these SMB's are inundated everyday by these guys. So the pitch goes something like this: I cant guarantee results, it will probably take a few months to see results, but trust me it will pay off in the long run, give me $300.00. And I would add that there are some I refuse to work with as the sector is not viable at low prices. aka. Locksmiths etc... I wont take money for industries that are polluted (Less than a thousand a month). it's just ridiculous.
If I do an audit and advice a client, and then leave execution of a plan up to them, nothing gets done. (and i suck)
I coined this term for others: "Good advertising exposes bad businesses". I have call tracking set up, and these people don't answer the phone EVA (that's Boston speak for ever). Michael Gerber coined the phase "technician suffering from an Entrepreneurial Seizure" because they can do the job they think they can run a business.
This is a frustrating segment to do business with. But if you pick your spots, and seek out viable candidates it can pay off. I like working with people in the local chamber of commerce. They are already spending money as a member of the chamber. Also, believe it or not people are still paying good money to be listed in the yellow pages, here is a segment that is spending money, and if you pick just the industries with little competition in their area, you can have good results.
I offer free web hosting and domain name to sweeten the deal. It cost me only 10.00 bucks a year to offer it, which would cost them a hundo or so if they went on their own.
Great post and i have enjoyed reading all the comments
Thanks, informlocal. Completely agree that some industries (locksmiths, bailbonds, limo services, etc) are just not worth the headache at this price point.
Your math when it comes to billing hours seems pretty far off. In our office we cannot handle projects for anything short of 5x actual labor. We usually bill at closer to 8x labor. This is for several reasons. First, we aren't able to consistently get more than 5 billable hours out of each day. There is inevitably a lot of time spent on transitional tasks and inter-office responsibilities. Additionally, the costs of client acquisition and overhead needs to be factored in as well. 2x actual employee labor would bankrupt any business unless they were run like sweatshops.
There are plenty of businesses who offer solutions at that price point. The businesses who do, unfortunately, usually construct a gimmick product with a high perceived value rather than one that offers any actual value... We are underbid all of the time by companies in the 200.00 range. These companies are almost all scam artists, but trust me when I tell you that there are plenty of them to go around. I bet if you check your email right now you'll have a message from one of them waiting for you.
I take your overall point that the lower price range is something that more businesses can afford... but it would literally be impossible to offer services at that level that are very effective at all.
For local businesses we usually offer small alacarte services like facebook ad management, citation building or real simple adwords setup for a couple hundred per month. Then we try to upgrade them to a bundle package starting at 500.00 so we can start to actually help them out.
Trying to offer a robust solution (or even an effective one) at less than 500.00 per month seems like a fools errand to me. The frustration of trying to convince a SMB owner to write a blog post is in and of itself worth more than 250.00 (just kidding... but not really).
The last thing that you seem to be forgetting is that for many small businesses, increasing their rank in the local pack won't have a huge impact on their bottom line. In most american mid-size cities the search volumes for local services is in the hundreds. Even if you double their traffic to 50 from 20 visitors per month, unless your also really working on conversion optimization, the business owner won''t likely even notice. Trust me when I tell you that traffic graphs don't mean spit when sales are stagnant.
Hi Subtle Network,It does sound like our math #'s diverge a little on the employee/contractor side, but I don't think conceptually that we are that far apart. I am *absolutely* recommending offering small a la carte services that deliver value for a couple hundred per month. This is the way to get these SMB's on board to a larger, more holistic package. As Allstar said above, the key is to figure out how to prioritize those services so that you show that value as quickly as you can.
The area that I'd disagree more strongly with is the value, and perceived value, of doubling an average SMB's web traffic. Depends on the vertical. This may be true for retail, food, or other small-margin businesses. But most professional service businesses (real estate, legal, dental, insurance, etc.) feel a HUGE boost to their bottom line even with an additional 1-2 clients per month.
Nowhere in this discussion do I see any mention of copywriting. Doesn't SEO start with that? Good copy plus other basic SEO has been a win-win for our small business. People love the site (once they get there) because it's informative and fun, and when they get there through search partially b/c I've added relevant copy and headlines. As I mentioned earlier, I now am starting to do copywriting and SEO for other (very) small bizzes, making presentations every week to inform them that a good website starts from a communications perspective, with good writing and basic SEO, not from a design/image perspective. They don't know the difference until I tell them....Some of you have mentioned packages that you offer SMBs. I'm interested to know more about this. At this point, I offer to make a new site (I use HTML templates) if needed, plus simple copywriting with attention paid to simple SEO. I wouldn't mind teaming up with a Wordpress expert and just doing the writing and SEO. I have not yet offered monthly packages but I know I should consider offering basic copy updates, story ideas, not sure what else.....
No, to be honest, SEO doesn't start with copywriting. In my opinion SEO starts with a good accessible website for users & search engines.
I second that, and do want to go farther and say, that even without an accessible website, many great citations can go long way for local rankings.
@MusicMom1960,
You know, I believe that SEO started as a somewhat technical process: optimize this page here, build some links over here, leave some comments there, etc. This is still a requirement for solid, holistic SEO because on-page, links, etc. are all very important.
One issue I see (and have always seen) is that there are people that are specialized, or that focus on one (or a few) specific things. Some people only do on-page, technical stuff. Others only do link building. To your point, others focus strictly on content and / or social distribution. And to those people, it's the most important thing and the thing that should be focused on first / most.
IMHO, all are important facets of SEO and do not stand up by themselves alone. So, while on-page is very important, and foundational to the success of the rankability of a website (to @Adriaanb's point), so is content, social media, CRO, local (if applicable), etc.
I think the most important thing as a consultant / firm / agency is that you need to review and fully understand the needs and capabilities of the client. If the business is local and it seems like a good strategy to focus on local, then content may not be the most important application of time and resource; citations, ratings, reviews, etc. may be. If organic is the way to go, then you'll probably want to focus more on the on-page, content, and distribution channels.
Just my thoughts :)
Cheers
Kyle
David,
As the Director of Marketing for a small business I can tell you 100% without a doubt, no question you are right on the money.
Small business owners know NOTHING about internet marketing. Those that claim to MIGHT have a Facebook page... But blogging, SEO, content marketing strategies... No way.
Good stuff.
Hanley
My largest concern would be scale. I'm sure someone else brought this up in one of the other 69 comments, but that's where I see the downside.
Sure, you can pick up these low hanging fruit clients easily because most other legitimate firms don't want them, but how do you make that scale. I totally agree with your list of items that can be supplied at that budget, but it takes 10 of those clients to equal 1 regular client. I think I'd still rather have my team working on 10 accounts at 2500/month.
At the 250/month price point, you'd have to systematize everything and spend very little time on every account which limits what you can really do. I guess if the systems are in place and a track record for success is proven, it could work. Of course, assuming it is successful, you have a large pool of clients to upsell into other services later. Hmmm...
Excellent blog post, I am a small business myself so pride myself in catering for predominantly small businesses, I am based in the UK, however at the current exchange rate - offer services from $80 - $3225 a month.
Some clients have been with us for approaching 3 years and increase the budget as the project starts to send new enquiries / conversions, however as we offer a starting price they can afford, it gives them a chance to give online marketing a try :)
You would need a lot of clients at $250 a month to make a living.
I guess you just have to be very specific about what services you'll include and what service you won't for that price range. And also, have them understand from the beginning that you don't work at Google, so you can't guarantee results in a specific time, but doing the best SEO practices will help rankings, and maybe provide some examples.
I completely agree with the disconnect between the industries and the untapped opportunity that exists with small local businesses. I've worked as a web / software developer for 15+ years and the bulk of my clients have been small companies (1-50 employees).
Most of my clients had never heard of "SEO" and hadn't given much thought to how Google rankings work. They just knew that they didn't rank well. It takes a bit of educating, but if we can sell the long-term value of SEO then there is a shot of them breaking out of their budget to make an investment in their future.
Great article. I couldn't agree with you more. The small business clients are willing to get their hands dirty and help you with whatever you need. When you pay a little bit of attention to a small client it goes an extremely long way. Not to mention if you show your worth it can ultimately lead to bigger projects.
Great post David and the conversation it has provoked is equally interesting.
I regularly provide a broad portfolio of internet marketing services to SMB, tailoring the mix to their budget and what will have most impact on their business. And for most SMBs, the low hanging fruit is email marketing to their existing network.
Working with SMBs is a partnership, so it is important that they understand what is being done, why and how success is being measured. Unless they commit and buy-in to the process, then they will churn after a few months.
If a prospect is not interested in engaging, I know they will not be a long-term client and often may decide not to work with them.
But once a SMB client sees that his investment in marketing has positively affected his bottom line, then he will often want to invest more.
Working with SMBs brings different challenges to working on major accounts - they each require a significantly different business models to support them. Decide which one you want to work with :)
David,
great stuff. Really ... and a completely true fact. Here in the Netherlands it seems that budgets ran out completely for internet marketing. No one would pay 5000 a month for Internet Marketing at all. My strategy for 2013 (if we should make it despite 21-12-2012) is to go for a lot of smaller contracts in the range of 250 to maybe 500 per month. I would rather have 10 to 15 clients that spend that amount of money than another client that does 28000 a year and then decides to stop with you. Contract like that could actually kill you.
So very nice article at a very nice moment. I have multiple appointments schedules in the near future for some smaller Internet Marketing contracts. Let's see how that turns out.
kind regards
Jarno
p.s. keep up the great writing. Looking forward for your next article.
Thanks Jarno! Yep, the danger of having that 'one big client' cancel on you is pretty significant. Diversity is definitely safer (as Dr. Pete just wrote this morning!) :D
Out of curiosity, is your sense that budgets are higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands? Is NL unique to other European countries or is that true across most of Europe?
David,
thanks for the reply. I do believe budgets are a lot tighter in the Netherlands then they are in the US. When you look at Europe as a hole it's an Entire other picture. Most countries are not even as far evolved in Internet Marketing as we are in the Netherlands. I have some clients in Germany (for some strange reason they are not as aware as we are). Budgets in other countries I really can't judge but since Internet Marketing is not as well known over their I do believe it's going to be even harder to convince a client to invest even as little as 250 euro's a month on a contract.
That big client almost made me go bankrupt. Luckily I have a large Google Adsense account that kept my head above water. Otherwise I wouldn't be here any more since this is also costing some money...
Hope to be able to continue to be here.
regards
Jarno
Thank you for this article and the inspiration. We have been serving small to midsized businesses for quite some time at a price point of about $400 a month and up. We enjoy our small businesses and they seem to appreciate the work. We educate everybody we work with so that if interested, they can take over at any point, which I think most people also appreciate so they don't feel trapped by our services. We work from home which cuts a lot of our costs down and hire people who can also work from home. For us, small businesses work.
Hi seoessentials,
Can you tell me exactly what you do for small businesses? I'm in the exploratory phase....thanks!
Hi, yes, thanks for asking. We tailor Internet Marketing packages to each type of business based on their goals and budget. Standard is usually all the things David mentioned - keyword research, title and description tags, social media profiles, blog content, online press releases that are optimized, etc. I wrote an Ebook that we give to clients that explains SEO in basic terms as well as what one can do on their own, which we give to clients. And last of course we build monthly reports to show progress.
Another question. What if you take a look at their website and it is part of the problem? Do they start over, do you try to fix it, do you just give a website analysis.....Thanks...
Let me know what you can do for me.
Hi Rafal - I will have somebody in my office contact you and we can talk:)
Hello David,
First of all congratulations that you grab the opportunity to join SEOMOZ one of the famous brand in Digital Marketing.
Second thing is small website owners can't afford four figure budget per month for marketing but they are always asking for everything and most of websites owners are getting great services in small budget through outsourcing their projects.
Even for Outsourcing agency, 250/month budget is not an affordable but before Google updates they are just ready to provide the basic SEO services like Meta Tags Creation, H1 tags, Link Building and some kind of social media depend upon people. And by this way they just serve some good result for client website and client will continue with them for a long time.
But things have now changed after Google multi updates, getting good results are not easy way by just doing link building activities and that's outsourcing agency even not ready to serve SEO Service to clients in such a small budget if they believe in their commitments and ethics.
As you said that establishing a service category is the only way to provide basic SEO services to small business websites owners.
Couldn't agree more with your article. This is the exact market I'm targeting.
My entry level product is a $200-$300 per year offer.
As I build this (full disclosure - Just Starting!) I will eventually have a customer list of 1,000 or more small businesses that will continue to pay annually me for my minimal viable offer that is easy for me to manage and execute.
But, then I have trusted access to this buying customer base to share a lot of free information on the things they can do themselves to help their online marketing efforts. Like, for instance...share helpful SEOMOZ blog posts that these people would never, ever, ever find.
I believe that the vast majority of people in this broad SMB category really kind of want to do their marketing stuff themselves. Or, at least feel like they are in control of it somehow. So, over the course of any given time frame, I provide useful info to help them figure stuff out, I also occasionally offer a product to help them learn something or do something a little better, and, I'm constantly in front of them letting them know that I (we) can help with whatever they want to get done online.
Huge market. Bigger than Big.
Hi David,
Loving this post and so nice to see some attention being paid to this part of the market. I am sure there are more of us working with clients in this price range than most imagine.
It definitely is not an easy road, but rewarding if you are prepared to trade a little annoyance for some deep satisfaction. To be honest, finding ways to do more with less has become part of the challenge for me, so every little success feels well earned when it comes :)
Perhaps the most difficult issue for me is that most very small business clients that come to us are already in a bad place, SEO wise. Often they have found someone who would do work at a price point they could afford, but actually created issues that need to be fixed. This generally means that initial work needs to focus on getting things back on track before the focus can turn to moving forward. It is important to make this clear at the outset and manage those expectations!
The biggest plus is that most of our small business clients become more than just clients and it is nice to have the luxury of working every day with people you can genuinely count as friends :)
Great post!
Sha
Great Article David! I am so thrilled to see you here.
I ran the small business sales group for MCI Telecommunications with over 600 sales reps on the street selling to the small business community face to face in the 1990s.. (MCI acquired my company which specialized in small business sales because they couldn't make the numbers work in this segment.) The average monthly bill was $112.00 and our reps average over $38,000. a year in earnings. ( Remember this was 1990's). It can be done.... kind of.
Fast forward... building your Internet Marketing firm selling to small businesses is hard. One solution for us has been to do a financed program. With our model, there isn't much we can do and feel good about with out $2500.00 So we finance that over 6, 9, or 12 months on a Credit Card, with a signed agreement (no interest of course).
Most of our work is done in the first 3 or 4 months, and then we have monthly reporting and suggestions the client receives. A fair number become larger clients over that time.
1mike, I think that's a great idea (the amortization/financing model). It's a *bit* of a risk, I realize, but that's how I worked as a consultant when I had a good vibe for the client. I realize that as an agency you probably can't be as selective about choosing "good vibe" clients but sounds like you are having success with it!
David, No question there is some risk, but of the 25 or so clients we had on this program over the last 12 months all but one fulfilled the agreement. And actually many were on an invoice system, not a credit card.
As a tip, I would suggest to anyone using this tactic to build flexibility into the expected pay back schedule. You can build huge loyalty when you give them an extra two weeks or even 6 to pay, and push the schedule out to accommodate their cash flow when needed. ( With small business Owners we really do believe in doing unto others...)
Big difference in servicing small businesses is they have a very different cash flow situation than larger firms. Understanding that, and working with it, are a key strategy.
Excellent article. I am just starting out in seo, but am targeting SMBs as in the uk less than 30% have any online e presence. This makes it easier for me to build my skills as I work with growing companies.
With particular reference to Rand's video on Local listings and citations - I have to say the biggest issue by far is the dominance of those businesses that have offices geographically in the centre of any town. They seem to swamp those other businesses such that more citations seem almost irrelevant.
This is a great article and discussion, and ties in very closely to a lot of my thinking at the moment. Although I really love the principle, there is one big question mark for me and that is the true/realistic potential for gains/outcomes/returns for clients at lower budget levels.
A big assumption that many people have made in this discussion is that just because they're smaller clients by default they are operating in a lower competition space and therefore it only takes a little work to make modest but important gains.
But what about all the smaller companies out there who aren't operating in low competition verticals? For every small business targeting keywords like "banjo string supplies in Massachusetts" there are 10 others who are targeting serious head term keywords. What can you do for them at their budget level? Is SEO even a realistic prospect for small businesses in high or even medium competition verticals these days?
We work with medical practices, and those who don't face a lot of competition can get huge value from a few hundred bucks a month on SEM. Others have intense local competition (such as urgent care practices with 5 competitors within a few miles and/or 1 right across the street). These are the ones that spend 3-5k or even more per month - at that point, it is usually because they can track conversions, or at least see measurable increases in patient volume based on PPC spending.
This article is spot on. These types of companies have always been sexy to me for these reasons. I've always like small business search engine marketing because they can compete with large corporations within their geographical location.
David,
Great article. It's refreshing to see someone nail this huge industry problem right on the head. I have some data that directly supports this point that you made in your article:
"Chances are, you are starting from scratch with this segment. If they have a website, it’s probably completely un-optimized, and a few Title Tag and H1 changes will dramatically increase the amount of business they get from the Internet."
First a little background on how/why I have this data :)
After selling my last company, iContact, earlier this year, I started building an SMB Web Marketing product called BoostSuite. The BoostSuite tool automates many common SEO tasks and breaks them down into super simple suggestions that anyone can complete on their own. It removes the training cost/delay you mentioned in your article, and since it's automated, it also solves the price problem too (starts free then is $19/month).
We conducted a study of our early BoostSuite users, who were at that time using the tool to fix page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and body content only. No off-site SEO factors were involved.
BoostSuite provides any website on the Internet with a simple optimization score/grade from F to A+ based on the number of optimization issues we find on the site. A+ means no issues, F means lots of issues.
Based on our study, we found that small business owners who used BoostSuite to improve their optimization score JUST ONE LETTER GRADE, on average received 375% more website traffic over 90 days. All of the users in the study were from businesses with 25 or fewer full time employees.
So yes, these small businesses need all the help they can get. Simple on-site SEO changes can deliver big results for them. Although I don't have specifically measured averages for this case, I remember seeing some sites that increased to A+ optimization levels that saw traffic uplifts of 2,500% and some even higher.
Hope you don't mind, your article inspired a blog post on our side too :)
https://www.boostsuite.com/2012/12/19/seomoz-author-david-mihm-makes-a-case-for-boostsuite/
Launch by Local recently released a new service for SMB at $250/mo that includes:
There is a 12 month contract required. They say that after 12 months the business then takes ownership of the URL, but I have not seen that in writing. While dealing with a company like this seems automated and impersonal I'll bet they lure some businesses in.
What do you see as the other downsides to this?
SEO companies are providing their customers in the relevant traffic to their website as well as provided them services to adjust their website. David you have the very nice article and good illustrate the difference of small business and search marketing. That will knowledgeable.
I have read many articles on the subject and this has seemed to me one of the most complete and more understandable than the rest.
I am in the process of building a small clientele for a boutique search agency and am in the process of targeting clients with an $800-$2500 per month budget with the hope of growing to larger clientele as the company matures.
The several hundred dollars per month client is not realistic for us to go after in order to build a sustainable business model. However, for clients with a really small budget we have offered one-time on-page SEO and local profiles set-up. So, the fee may be $1000, but it is obtainable for a SMB client and we can show them exactly the value and services that will be provided. We position this as a "foundational SEO" package that they can always be built upon later if they would like to, but a set-up package will position them for future success and will hopefully provide some minor wins in the short-term.
This "foundational seo" package can be utilized as a test run for us and the SMB. Most SMBs have never dealt with search or have only had bad experiences. So, by taking a baby step they are able to see what is possible, then their next marketing investment will be better informed and hopefully with us. However, if they decide they do not want to invest any further or if they have "checked the SEO box" on their marketing plan then it is a painless separation and both parties feel good about the transaction.
For most really-small SMBs a highly targeted, niche organic and local one-time set-up can provide tangible results that will at least help them gain 1-2 new clients, which will pay for the service anyway.
This was a very important article for SEOMoz as I've noticed that the topic of small businesses doesen't get a lot of coverage. Scalability will always be difficult when dealing with SMBs as they don't like to spend much money, still demand a portion of time and tend to churn out at a faster rate. However, as others have said, becoming an authority in a location and assisting small businesses can win their loyalty and this can pass through word of mouth refferals which is powerful within a local market.
I believe that "starting small" in the world of SEO is the best approach, and I'd recommend reading SEOBook's great article on the matter:
https://www.seobook.com/local-seo-gateway-service
Thanks for suggesting a good salary range - I was completely clueless. I'm about to start freelancing with a few small clients as I apply for agency SEO/PPC jobs.
Great post, definitely reflects a lot of what I have learned in the last few years - and gives me some encouragement that I'm on the right track.
We provide SEM services to medical practices, starting at around $300/month if they have a single location. That includes some combination of managing directories/citations/reviews, content writing/editing/advice, PPC management, and social media or website management (clients who have us do "everything" are closer to $1000/month for a single location). Clients get monthly reports that tell them what we are doing, and include info from GA, AdWords, Webmaster tools, SEOMoz and/or other charts/graphs/lists. We offer a phone call to review the reports and plan the next month or activities (some clients never miss a call, others make time every 2 or 3 months). If the client has staff resources to contribute to content development or other activities, we help plan and manage those activities on our calls and via email.
We are starting to work with larger businesses, with more than a few locations (which brings a new set of challenges), but the model we've found for the single location business will remain a huge part of what we do.
(We even work with some other very small businesses for as little as $120/month, although in those cases we break things up into quarterly chunks instead of monthly - they still hear from us at least once per month, but we only have a call or meeting once a quarter.)
Hi David,
Thanks for sharing your ideas on SMB's and their inbound markerting strategies. I guess almost all SEO agencies strugels to manage Seo for these SMB's. While most part of your article is a pleasure to read, but, when you say "The bottom line is that inbound marketing, i.e. “free” traffic, is the only sustainable marketing technique for this large segment of small businesses.", I am inclined towards a different openion. Let me explain: Small Businesses can not afford PPC or other paid sort of marketing, but "free traffic" isn't easy to get. Organic SERP is ruled my "Big Brands", lots of people are talking about these brands, linking them, promoting them on social channels. So that "free traffic" may sound easy, but ground reality is bit different. Yes, Social media can help small businesses to grow their customer audience, but that's limited as well. Will you ever like a Facebook fan page of a "Roofing Company" which is a family run business and their market is limited to some cities and counties.
I guess small businesses will face this issue, no money to invest in paid advertisement. Of Course, these local citation directories like yelp do help them a lot.
Thanks
Salik
I have experience with one small client and what I can say is that is a pain in the arse.
Basically in 4 months I did improve the client website in visits by 120% - I close some services that the client was using and since then he saved 1800€ a month. Hes page in Facebook fans increase in 30%.
He is happy? No, he wants more.
Does he pays good? No. The payment is almost irrelevant for me.
His demanding? Yes and think he can push for more.
My conclusion is, for me this types of clients don't worth my efforts and time. This days is very important to find good partners to work with, good clients, with good products, with open mind and with a minimal of money to invest.
Dito
Hi David,
Congrats on joining the SEOmoz team - it's excellent news and I've always been a big fan of your insights.
As a small business owner (how many of us really aren't small business owners, right?), I completely understand the financial restrictions that you must look at; your point about the money coming from college funds and / or family vacations being so true.
I also understand (as I'm sure you do fully as well) that the hardest part about a $250.00 budget is education and expectation. Most people have mentioned expectations, but I find the education bit being just as important, if not more; obviously, education begets expectation.
When we first started our firm we entered the market with small packages, but found it brought about "cheap" clients that didn't respect our work, time, or purpose. The expectations were inappropriate; which I attribute to our lack of education.
Since then, we have made leaps and bounds in educating clients; however, not without loss. Education and the attempt to establish proper expectation can also lead to let down (in their eyes) because you're telling them you can't give them what they "want".
What is hard for a lot of small businesses to realize is that, if you want a brand new BMW, but can only afford a 10 year old Corolla, it's inconceivable to think you're going to get the BMW, no matter what anyone tells you. What's even harder for them to understand, is that a 10 year old Corolla can still get them a lot of value and great milage; but they're blinded with the glitter of gold (gold being #1 ranking organically for whatever their head term is in the industry).
So, while we abandoned our small packages shortly after we started (we learned fast about the "cheapness" of some people), I like your thought process and find it interesting in terms of reapplying that strategy towards a hyper-local / hyper-social package. So, this will be a topic in our weekly board meeting for next week :)
Great post, David, and congrats again!
Cheers
Kyle
Informative write up but are these tips and conclusions sufficient for long tail clients???
Hi David!
First off, let me appreciate you for this incredible write up from your end!
I would like add some viewpoint from my end because I believe that still we need to light up on small business website's client. I would like additionally say that if a small business owner wish that his website rankings in small budget, then to be clear it’s really not possible in the era of updates from Google. Personally, I have gone through some of agency after the major updates of Google like penguin and panda, they are just concentrating on large budget clients, because in the of updated algorithm link building and basic SEO techniques won’t work. As result of this, internet marketing agency must go through large scale website with large budget.
Could you please tell us that if small budget website owner wish high ranking then what should be the right way to manage that clients?
Thanks!
Great post David! We have built a company around serving this core SMB market. We don't provide a full SEO package but we do provide lots of other manual processes. We do customer review generation, management and syndication to other review sites - not with sock puppet accounts but with real syndication (@Allstar - we agree!).
We deliver our product for $99/mo and provide lots of help and advice for SMBs. We know there is a huge market and that this can be done profitably but customer retention and staffing models/metrics are key.
Hi david,
I too am wrestling with staffing models. I use two full timers, a staff of contractors that I call upon when work loads increase and use interns to mitigate chore tasks.
i was hopingyou could share some ideas you use
Thanks
Shadi
Shadi, I am not sure if you are asking me to reply or David (your message was addressed to David but the subject matter and note seem to be addressed to me).
A few thoughts:
Hope this helps!
Our company is a Small Business, a local car dealership, and we have been looking for a full-time SEO for a while now. It seems that mostly we get ads to our job positings in the form of consulting/contractor offers, but no one wants the full-time SEO position. I am guessing, in light of your article, this is typical. Any advice?
Hey David,This is a great article!, before I worked at the agency. I was freelancing, doing lots of local SEO. Tell u the truth at the time I didn't know I was in that "small business core". Funny, I just of stumbled into it, and got most of my jobs doing Local SEO.
But I know I was doing lots more than just local citation for my clients, cause I was implementing video SEO almost the whole package. I did it because I was passionate about SEO, and wanted to make a difference. If I had to do it all over, I would do the same thing but have a better approach (sales pitch, yeh I think that was my downfall at the beginning). Anyways, its interesting to see Google recognizes the importances of local markets and the search intent.Look forward to seeing more of your articles!
Again, Cheers!
Great Article David and congrats on joining Seomoz.
This article states clearly why I started my firm. To provide quality service to the underserved sector of our industry. Thank you for the well written article and best of luck to you
Kind regards
Shadi
I feel like I am missing something here. Let's say I am a solo SEO practitioner and I decide to take on clients at $250 per month. To do any kind of SEO I've got to spend a good amount of time doing on page optimization and then I need to be doing some ongoing link building. I'm also going to do some reporting to the client. So, let's say that I have 5 hours a day I can dedicate to this work. That equates to 25 hours in a regular work week.
Using the example, above, I could take on 10 clients (chiropractors, dentists, etc.) That means I can spend 2.5 hours a week on each site. That's not a lot of time - At this rate it would take me a few weeks to get the on site SEO right and I can't build a lot of links in the time I have left. Granted, for many small businesses it doesn't take a whole lot to get them to rank. But still, even though it's only $250 per month the clients are not going to be happy unless they are getting good rankings.
So, let's say that I manage to get 10 clients and do this, then I'm making $2500 per month or $30,000 per year for my efforts. That's not very much.
What am I missing?
Hi Marie,The idea is that as a solo practitioner, you would hire a contractor or junior employee to perform this work at a much lower hourly rate than you would charge on your own. SMB's don't actually need the same level of linkbuilding, content marketing, or other expertise-intensive SEO services that larger clients do. The idea is that 20 SMB clients can be serviced by 1 junior contractor at 100 hours a month. Rather than a 2 large clients that might need 50 hours a month of senior-level (i.e. your) time.
Focusing on smaller clients allows you to expand your client base without having to compete at the same level as you do when sending RFP's to larger clients. That is an extra $60,000/year in revenue, $30,000 of which would go directly to you (if you used a remote junior contractor).
I may be way off base with this at an agency level, but starting small with low-hanging, easy-to-execute tasks is *exactly* how I started my own consulting business, and were I not working at SEOmoz now, where I would start if I were building an agency :D
Thank you David. I have one more question if you have time.
How well do you think agencies that do this end up keeping these small budget clients on long term? If the competition is low and the amount of SEO necessary to obtain rankings is small, then once you've got them ranking #1 for their main keywords what's to stop them from leaving? Do you keep building links? Or just charge them for consulting and reporting each month? Or do you go after new keywords?
All of the above--if the above make sense for their $$ budget and your time budget.
My experience with SMBs is that IF you do a good job for them, they are incredibly loyal...unlike larger clients who may or may not try to squeeze a few extra nickels out of you at contract renewal time...
Forgive me here, but exactly how do you "build links" for a small business? At this point, all I've done is discuss with my real estate client about cross-linking to the title company, to the mortgage broker, to the moving company, etc. I suspect I'm missing something......
Basic link building principals apply for SMBs. The local chamber of commerce is usually a good link and sponsoring some local events or organizations is good too. Your client can also offer to provide content for some of those other sites in return for a link. (Guest posting.) In real estate both Zillow and Active Rain provide some nice opportunities for links too.
This is awesome. I am as nontechnical as you get, and even I understood this. This is a great "plain English" guide for Small Business Owners, This is a great article ... :)
We charge a minimum of £250 per month for comprehensive Local SEO services, typically these clients then end up using us for web design/development and social media services.
Having a few big clients and not enough smaller ones is a risky strategy, contracts can be pulled at anytime leaving you in the mire!
I am one of the "Core SMB's". I have spent so much time educating myself, and then implementing it. If there had been a trusted source to contract this to- I would have done it. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people targeting my market are snake oil salesmen. I have learned soooo much, and seen great results. I actually enjoy it now. Maybe I am in the wrong biz...
Great article. As a small business owner www.legacyhouserenovations.com and my old business www.gwidon.com I had my site built and rebuilt and SEO'ed as well as spent money on AdWords and Yellowpages and other advertising to get ahead. I am in a new market "Home Renovation Vancouver" Canada now and NEED to place higher to get business. Looking to have someone who can show results for a reasonable price, even if one has an understanding of SEO a small business owner has no time to properly get it done himself. Results in SEO take time, to most small business owners it sounds "untrue BS" and this is why they cancel services. I will give you six months, and then a year, I understand this is a continues game. Show me how its done.
David,
LocalLaunch (was part of RH Donelley) was built on doing this concept of cheap service on volume on a grand scale (back in 2006). Served a similar customer base with small margins for basic "optimized" page and PPC. They were shutdown because the backend operational costs could not create a profit line. There was an infographic that came out a short while ago about the local SERP results for real estate market https://www.realgeeks.com/blog/state-real-estate-serps/ . It spoke volumes to the local long tails also being squeezed out of long tail SEO either through very well built enterprise level sites with awesome dynamic database driven site structures. Ironically these are the same sites that encourage small businesses "inbound marketing" on their sites to create user generated content that eventually kills the traffic to small businesses. Real Estate is just one example. These dynamic sites are killing the Google serps in many different local SERP verticals. With Google Plus "authentic" review absurdity killing rankings for legitimate local sites, even this long tail is not that long tail anymore. $250 will not and cannot bring the change needed especially given the fact that expectation management/education of a small business owner takes twice the time than the actual campaign itself. It is a noble idea but at the end it is probably a pipe dream.
Amazing blog post!
The opportunity isnt really there at all unless you offer them an automated or do it themselves service. Your average decent agency charges $250 an HOUR. No company is going to benefit from one hour of my time in a substantial way. Also consider this. Given that they will eat up their entire monthly budget just on on the initial phone call, where is there room to do any actual work for them? Every client I've worked with, whether they spend $2.5K a month or $25K a month wants to talk pretty much constantly. In their mind all that communication time doesnt count against thier bill. And for larger accounts we basically allow that to happen (its one of the reasons we charge $250 per hour instead of $125, the extra covers all the "unpaid communication & reporting hours"). So the problem with taking on clients with essentially no budget is even though they aren't really putting any money into thier own success, they are still going to want to get on the phone with you or skype whenever they feel like it. In fact those with the smallest budget typically want the MOST for their money. There are a lot of good reasons why agencies don't take on small budget clients (like for example most of the link worthy things on the internet cost more than $100 to produce, infographic, video, well thought out content of any kind) but mostly it boils down to this. Small clients are a pain in the ass and the low money makes it just not worth while.
Kris, I think this comment is illustrative: "Your average decent agency charges $250 an HOUR." I certainly think that's true for experienced consultants like yourself, and larger, well-known agencies. As I said, the economics do not make sense for these types of folks to work with SMB's. My thesis is that there are plenty of up-and-coming agencies who could increase revenues by adding a small-business wing to their shop. These wings would not need "content marketing" practitioners for the reasons I laid out above: that's overkill (and not within the price point) of the small businesses in the $250/segment.
Your point about managing communication expectations is EXTREMELY well-taken! Laying out what avenues of contact are open to the client in the proposal/contract phase is critical.
there are tons of other concerns. How about just handling billing. Remember most clients don't just pay thier bill on time without a little badgering. That means someone is spending thier time trying to chase down a million micropayments every month. Also keep in mind agencies charge what they charge per hour for a reason. There is overhead. Office space, internet connection, taxes on employees wages. A $17 an hour employee doesn't cost $17 an hour. On top of that you have payroll taxes, Social security, medicare, unemployment insurance, medical and dental if you offer it. And thats before you get into things like paid vacation, sick leave, any perks you might offer like conference tickets or free beverages. Hours spent training instead of working on client stuff. Short of an automated solution I just really don't see any money to be had in serving clients for 100-250 a month.
Kris,
chasing the payments should not be necessary if you apply the following:
Invoice for January is send in the second week of December and they have until the first of January to pay the bill. This gives them 3 weeks to pay. I normally maintain 14 days for payment, remind them at 17 and if needed on the 21 day but I will have my money by then. If they still don't pay then, you don't do the work and the bill stays active. If they want work done (and they do otherwise there wouldn't be a contract) they have to pay first.
I currently charge € 65,00 per hour. Why not more? I work from home, have no employees and yes overhead is also covered in this amount. The way I figured (together with my accountant) is that you are capable of working 1600 hours a year. If you charge € 65,00 per hour that results in € 104,000 euro's excluding taxes of course per year.
Can i earn more money by increasing my hourly rate? I think not. Other companies over here charge almost the same amount for similar work.
If i would start charging € 250,00 per hour, I feel i'm going to be sitting behind my computer doing nothing all day...
just my 2 cents
Jarno
I admire your honesty Kris in pointing out all the true things that unfortunately do happen more often than not.
Do you think if you got the perfect system down and found some really quality outsourced workers on oDesk, then it could possibly work and you would just be the project manager and oversee the higher level activities and communications with the client?
I don't know the right answer, and you have the experience, so just throwing that out there!
Automated billing, frugal accounting, and internal procedures and processes can trump all these issues. Often times, our industry looks at companies that skyrocket to success because of huge contracts with huge companies, but a steady, consistent, and *gasp* slower growing agency is much more lean, flexible, and able to service small businesses at these levels.
You seem to be having a very different conversation about a very different model Kris.
This ceased to be a hypothetical years ago: there's plenty of agencies out there doing it and making very real amounts of money.
The opportunity is there provided you build your offering around it and take the time to understand the space.
Martin,I'm glad to hear that you know of reputable agencies serving this space. I rarely come across folks at SMX / SES - type conferences who are serving this market (part of the reason could be that the session content rarely serves them), and there certainly weren't any at BIA Kelsey!
What I would say is that, in my experience, it's often non-specialist agencies that do particularly well in this area i.e. design & development agencies with 'bolt on' SEO services.
In this way - largely through effective cross selling - they're often able to bill clients for SEO as part of a wider package without the client's focus necessarily being fixated on results.
It's not necessarily a good thing for SEO, as the quality (and results) can suffer, contributing to the negative perception of the industry.
Whatever your perspective, though, they're quietly taking vast revenues - often with higher margins than D&D work - while the big SEO players focus on a lower volume strategy.
Is it sustainable in a post-panda/penguin world? I think the answer to that's probably a blog post in its own right!
Well put. Cross selling - sort of, but we do SEO/PPC campaigns just like the 'big players.' We make our clients focus on the results so they understand the value we're providing. The SEO/PPC work we do grows their business, which in turn grows ours.
Respectfully, I completely disagree. Not only is this proven wrong by our company, but I've found your experiences with customers who want to talk all the time to be more rare than the norm. Perhaps this is because of our procedures & policies of managing our customer's expectations of service & support before we even start their campaign... and that's probably much more needed for us since we do service at such a lower cost... but it is possible to service customers on a local level with high-quality services at the $250/month level. Granted, it takes some out of the box thinking, but it is possible (please see my original comment below).