Starting a "career" as a SEO - marketing expert

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Recently I've been asked from an upcoming Greek web development company, to work as a web marketing advisor for them and their clients.

The concept is not yet clear, but it should propably contain private sessions with each client, with some advices for the developers regarding the technical part of their web site, and maybe some link building - marketing work for each client. Another senario is that I will propably write a small book covering the basic aspects of web marketing (funny huh? )

Anyway as I haven't done this job in the past - as I am mostly a web developer - I am not sure, how or what to charge for this service, plus I am not aware of the issues that this cooperation could have.

Can you please help a little? What is your opinion on these things?

I think your hourly rate should be higher then for writing php scripts (at least for people in the netherlands)

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I usually charge about 50 euro per hour for writing php.

Should I charge more than that for this?

I usually charge about 50 euro per hour for writing php.

Should I charge more than that for this?

yes of course why not?

I learned that people don't understand why a web application takes time to make it.
I terms of marketing you have to explain everything, this way it more like to be an guru/prof

Talking people get more money than working people

check what service / advice you want to offer and calculate how many to time you need. After a while you can safe time because of repeating tasks this is your extra profit

Don't charge by the hour!
think more by the minute though this is extreme we work either an overall upfront price or by the every 6 minutes to work out our overall price  we work out approximate length of time it will take then add 5% to the total time, and then compare it to the 6 minute charge, with a 10% discount, you will loose out maybe 1 in 5.

Don't charge by the hour!
think more by the minute though this is extreme we work either an overall upfront price or by the every 6 minutes to work out our overall price  we work out approximate length of time it will take then add 5% to the total time, and then compare it to the 6 minute charge, with a 10% discount, you will loose out maybe 1 in 5.

this is a good one

(I suggested a work hour based calculation to get an idea about a possible price.)

Marketing yourself as an SEO expert is a tricky thing. I've met some who say "Oh I'm so great at SEO, look at this..." and then they show their odd company name or personal name #1 at Google. Yeah, well, that's not that hard to do - a few directory submissions should take care of that. Then they show their favorite client's site and show some long tail keyword phrase and say "OOOOhhhh, look there they are at #1".

ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I'm impressed that an upcoming firm wants to include SEO as part of their package of services for their clients. The trick will be to explain the service and how you/they will help the client, but not make any concrete promises of #1 ranking for anything other than their company name (and sometimes even that can prove difficult.)

If they are truly serious about professional SEO services for their clients, I hope their plans also include a professional content/marketing writer as well. This isn't a plug - I don't know any Greek  ; but SEO is about the words on the page as well as the offsite work.

I agree with the comments made by others. SEO pros here in the US typically get more than the programmers - at least the ones getting paid a fair wage and the ones that are any good at it. That said, if you are working for another firm, your costs are reduced significantly. They will be essentually handing you clients, so there's no marketing you need to do. They will also probably charge the client more than what you are getting, so your rate might need to be a bit lower than for work you would do directly for clients on your own.

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Yeah my work wont be 100% SEO, but more "marketing advisory".

In any case I am not going to guarantee any result as this is at least unprofessional

My target is to make the client understand some basic marketing stuff of the internet (eg. speed, that you need a niche, you have to be globalized, etc.) and make some SEO modifications to their sites.

In other words I will help them to make a marketing plan for the internet, something that sounds easy to us, but it is very tricky for someone who works with traditional ways.

Yeah my work wont be 100% SEO, but more "marketing advisory".

In any case I am not going to guarantee any result as this is at least unprofessional

My target is to make the client understand some basic marketing stuff of the internet (eg. speed, that you need a niche, you have to be globalized, etc.) and make some SEO modifications to their sites.

In other words I will help them to make a marketing plan for the internet, something that sounds easy to us, but it is very tricky for someone who works with traditional ways.

good business idea!

My target is to make the client understand some basic marketing stuff of the internet (eg. speed, that you need a niche, you have to be globalized, etc.) and make some SEO modifications to their sites.

In other words I will help them to make a marketing plan for the internet, something that sounds easy to us, but it is very tricky for someone who works with traditional ways.

I think that is a much more valuable service than the SEO "pros" provide; that's also why I don't call myself an SEO pro like so many other content writers do. SEO without marketing is a waste of time.

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In my opinion SEO the way we know it, is about to die. A search engine's objective is to find relevant information on what the user search. As search engines are still in a first stage, this information is searched by an algorithm that is predictable, and that created the SEO market, but in the future that will vanish as search engines will be "smart" enough to get over this. Of course there are many adjustments that a site must have to get better results in search engines, but that is just a small part of my job.

Marketing on the web is much more important, as the objective of a corporate - ecommerce web site is to create sales, not traffic, and the web site itself must be more optimized for conversions than SEO. This is a really hard task for the traditional marketer, and every single company that is able to sell over the internet needs assistance and help from someone who understand things better.

In the last few years SEO and search engine marketing have gone very different routes but I think they will collide with a bang, at least I hope they do. At Venture Skills we have gone down the route of reputation management which is a combination of SEO, SEM, mixed in with traditional PR and good monitoring. So not only do we promote our clients we also manage how there sites appear and to a certain extent how customers reactions appear.

The biggest problem is getting the balance between promoting good reviews and the clients sites and stifling negative reviews. One of our best jobs was promoting negative reviews of our clients product, people saw a balance in reporting without realising that it had been manipulated. This helped provide suitable amount of good/bad publicity and meant that we could stifle the very negative comments or at least make them harder to find.
A good suggestion for keyword marketing is to try to get the number one spot for "clients company sucks" its even better if this can be an independent site with a balanced but slightly negative view (users will think oh if that's the worse thing the company has done it most be good)

I seem to recall a site somewhere for "this company sucks" and in the disclaimer area it said something like "All views expressed here are not neccessarily those of this company and it's management, but all content appearing on thiscompanysucks is copywrited by "this company".

I applauded their honesty at admitting it was their own site. But, to me that also implied that they were controlling how irate and negative the comments were. I had felt manipulated and trusted the company even less.

Maybe if the negative complaints were followed up with some sort of 'and this is how customer support helped that customer' testimonials I would see more value. But a company posting sanitized complaints/comments doesn't really cut it with me. To use a purely American phrase - it is the stuff of spin.

true it is very easy to see when its company based web site, but promoting a site that gives a negative but correct (factually) review as the number 1 will do no long term harm if your product service does what you say it does. However companies reputations are important and with the online world its doubly so. How many company X sucks posts have you read by an irate person who half way through you start to think needs to go to a nut house?

[What's the biggest mistake you make?]

Oh certainly it's true many of the complaints are total garbage. I would suspect that even a total web newbie would be able to critically review complaints. I think most people know that not all complaints about a product or company are valid.

Just yesterday I was looking at reviews for yarn. A particular yarn that I had worked with and found to have some issues (related to knotting specifically) were given a wide variety of reviews. Amongst the reviews someone mentioned what I had been already thinking - how good was the workmanship of the person saying the finished good fell apart? Yes, the yarn was hard to knot, but testing knotting etc. should always be done prior to spending the time to make something.

That said, I have looked at quite a few sucks sites. And while many are obviously set up by crackpots, many were not.

A company having their own sucks site reminds me of those courses one takes on turning job interview questions to one's own benefit.

What's the biggest mistake you make? I care about my customers too much and don't take enough time for myself.

Did you ever lose your cool with a customer? I did, but it was because I wanted their project to be such a success...

What's something you would change about yourself? I work too hard.

lol, love the examples I think the key is not in having control of a company x sucks page, but you can help to mitigate some of the worse, its a grey area, we were asked by a client once if we could help a company b sucks page, the company in question was one of their competitors we turned the job down. But reputation management is by its very nature questionable in the same way many SEO techniques are designed to get the best for "you" its just a case of how far do you go I find it helps to know where your companies line is, we were lucky and found ours early on.

I would add that I see absolutely nothing wrong with a company registering a myriad of domains with their name and sucks to protect their name. If it were my client I would recommend registering and never putting any type of site up.

Wow, what cheek asking you to make their competitor's suck site. Must have made for an interesting meeting.

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