A few weeks ago, I took part in an SEM seminar in which the speaker aimed to prove that paying for an SEO consulting service would result in escalating profitability. He meant that over a period the divergence between the price of his services and your sales would widen so that SEO started to become increasingly scalable.

Of course, his sales pitch was that it would thus be a sound investment for you to hire his services. Although, with small business training you might learn how to do it yourself.

Perpetuating the Mythology

The presenter showed us an especially convincing graph. His example was a business just starting out with search engine optimisation and hiring an SEO agency. He set out the agency cost to the prospect at $1000 per month for 12 months. On his graph, this showed up as a straight line.

Now he graphed out the sales that would arisefrom this SEO input, i.e., getting the prospect’s website ranked on Google’s page one. At the outset, sales revenue was 0. After a few the two lines on the graph had met up. Then, sales value commenced and kept on rising well above the static cost line. Ergo: great SEO scalability and escalating profits.

But he didn’t end there. He argued that once his SEO consultancy service had established the website in the top rankings, the client could start cutting her expenditure on SEO. So , the straight cost line would fall while sales continued to rise or at a minimum remained stable. Thus, a professionally run SEO strategy could turn out to be significantly more scalable.

Facing the Realities

All that is possible if you have serious cash and/or a huge brand. But it’s not realistic for the average business. That is particularly true where budgets are limited and where markets are very competitive. Getting good rankings for good keywords is never straightforward. And even though you might spend the big bucks there’s still no certainty that with SEO you would ever make first page rankings, not to mention stay there.

In fact , the possibility is that hisselected client could have spent her $12,000 and got little or nothing in results.

What’s more, the first page itself is not enough. You definitely need to rank in the top 3. In general practice, these grab around 666% of clicks, with #1 getting above 40%.

The true situation for most businesses just starting SEO, even if they are employing an agency, is if they do get first page rankings it’s sure to be for the low volume, less competitive keywords. And to reach that valuable top three could be a long and costly slog.

Therefore, getting high volume sales from an SEO consulting service may be a limited and definitely far out prospect. Before starting SEO consuting services. bear all this in mind.

Tom Wilson is an SEO Glasgow expert. For more than a decade, he’s been providing online marketing and PAY-PER-CLICK to a wide range of firms. Visit his website for more information on his PPC management services.