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.

Promoting the Myths

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 did not stop there. He suggested that once his SEO consultancy service had established the website in the top rankings, the customer could start reducing her spending on SEO. Hence, the straight cost line would fall while sales kept on rising or at the very least stayed level. So, an expertly run SEO strategy could turn out to be far more profitable.

Facing the Realities

Of course, this is possible if you have big bucks and/or a major brand. But it is unrealistic for the average business. That’s especially true where budgets are tight and where markets are highly competitive. Getting top rankings for good keywords is rarely simple. And even if you could spend the serious cash there’s still no certainty that with SEO you would ever make first page rankings, let alone stay there.

In reality the truth is that his example customer might have spent her $12,000 and got nothing or little in exchange.

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 firms just launching SEO, even though they are paying an agency, is should they do get first page rankings it’s likely to be for the low volume, less competitive keywords. And to acquire that essential high end could be a long and 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.