A question that I’ve been often asked by my clients. And to find out, I stopped all activities on my website including not blogging for 3 months (Apologies to my competitors if I gave you the impression that I’ve gone out of business)! Anyway, here’s what I found out… It’s usually a company policy to obtain 3 competitive quotes for comparison before they engage a vendor - same goes for SEO consultants. More often than not, they are quoted for an initial SEO work and followed by a monthly SEO maintenance contract, i.e. continuous link-building to “defend” their rankings. The idea is so deeply entrenched in their minds that clients would sometimes ask for it. SPH asked too for ST701.com. The matter of the fact is most people don’t need SEO maintenance if you did a good job with the initial SEO work, especially if you’re just competing in the Singapore space. It depends on how competitive your industry is, i.e. whether your competitors are aggresively pursuing SEO, etc. Most SEO providers are only recommending a maintenance plan to make more money off you. In addition to the lump sum for the initial SEO work, they could now charge you a recurring income so why not, right? To prove my point, I used larrylim.net as a test case since it’s about SEO - a relatively competitive industry. SEO consultants are constantly trying to improve their own website rankings so that they can publish them on their website and convince customers to engage them. After 3 months of inactivity, how has it affected my rankings for “seo” on google.com.sg? As expected, there was no significant impact. Infact, I’m still ranked #3 out of 254,000,000 results just below Wikipedia. So do you think your website needs an SEO maintenance plan?
Click image to enlarge
Nice! I particularly like your apology to your competitors. Ha! So I’ll see you back in action in the blogging scene.
Comment by Jasmine Lim — November 24, 2008 @ 10:42 pm
Hi Larry, great to see you back in action. A matter of fact, rankings cannot be measured by viewing it off the serps. New search concepts are already in place and now we are seeing different results displayed for the same search terms at different IP addresses or computers. Secondly, SEO maintenance does not necessary mean maintaining clients’ rankings on serps. Constant analysis and monitoring of the site’s bounce rates, traffic and conversions are also part of a campaign which should be done at a monthly basis. Isn’t that true?
Rif Chia
Comment by Rif Chia — November 27, 2008 @ 1:49 am
J: Yes, Larry’s back!
R: I believe different results if you’re viewing google.com but not google.com.sg unless you’re logged in. But Google is moving in that direction and will probably be successful in implementing it next year …that plus moving from keyword search to LSI. That’s why I’ve shared with you that providing SEO is not going to be worthwhile in the future.
Actually, SEO IS about performance - not just maintenance. But in the clients context, when they ask for “maintenance”, they mean maintaining or improving their rankings.
Comment by Larry — November 27, 2008 @ 6:34 pm