How Much Do SEO Consultants & Agencies Charge? A Survey that Needs Your Help

In the past few months, a number of folks have brought up this old blog post of mine on SEO pricing. The now 4-year-old content there is in dire need of refreshing, but I don't think that my personal opinion and experience are of acceptable quality to make for a compelling, useful update. Thus, I've created the following survey.

If you own, manage or work at a consultancy/agency in the SEO or adjoining+overlapping fields, your participation is tremendously appreciated.

The results from this survey will be made available to everyone in a blog post that will replace the old one in the next week. Company names and websites will be removed to help protect the privacy of those who've participated (and we're not asking for any highly sensitive items like revenues or client lists).

It's my hope that this new resource can help agencies and consultants as they compare their prices to the distributions of others as well as helping buyers of SEO and inbound marketing services get a sense for the common cost structures associated with the field.

Thanks for your contribution!

p.s. As you might imagine, changing a survey that's been published and collected results is very hard. However, if you have feedback about the survey format or suggestions to improve it, we'll definitely take those into consideration for our broad industry survey, which we'll be launching again in early 2012.

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How to Launch, the Spotify Way

It's all about the first impression. Whether you're launching a startup, product or feature, the launch can make or break it. It's the shining moment when all eyes are on you. 

Better make the most of it. 

There are stories of how some companies got it right, but one that stands out in particular: Spotify. 

Looking at the success of Spotify, to the tune of over 2.5 million paying subscribers, there's one thing that sticks out in my mind… the launch. The fact is that many similar services existed long before. Folks like Rhapsody, Rdio and MOG had the coveted first to market advantage. They had it won. Spotify wasn't the first to market, at least in the US. Yet, everyone in the US was anxiously awaiting Spotify. Foaming from the mouth anxious.

Spotify are masters of the launch. Artists, aficionados, ninjas -- pick your favorite flavor. So, how'd they do it? How can you achieve the same launch success? Let's take a look at how they did it.

Exclusivity, it's the value that comes from launching in private beta. Spotify executed the private beta beautifully. The concept is simple; grant invites to a select few, those select few have a limited number of invites to grant to their friends, and so on, and so on. It's a process that inherently brings discussion, need and distribution. Just look at the buzz.

There's some subtle detail there, though. Beta invites are like a spigot, if you turn it on full throttle, the well will dry up quickly. If you open it slightly, the water comes out slower, and more controlled. Spotify only granted users a limited number of invites. It created scarcity, and allowed them to control their growth. Now that the service is scalable and distribution became widespread, they turned it on full force.

Faceook famously used geographic segmentation. In one of my favorites, The Social Network, Sean Parker uses the term "little big horn" to describe the strategy of planting Facebook at surrounding campuses of the one they were looking to target. Spotify launched in a similar fashion, however unintentional, just on a larger scale. 

Being in the states, all we ever heard was that Spotify was coming. Again, again, and again. So we waited. Then, we waited some more. Finally, it arrived and everyone had to have their hands on it. I too couldn't wait to use it, even though I was already happily using Rdio. If they would have just opened the doors in the US without any prior buildup, that outcome would've been much different. Instead, it looked like this.

You don't need press to be successful, but it sure helps. Especially at launch. But there's a difference between press, and the "right" press. Most folks think that landing a few articles in TechCrunch is all you need to do to get that first wave of users that you can ride to the bank. Wrong.

Press is strategic, and you need to put your message in the hands of the right market. For some (including Spotify) TechCrunch, LifeHacker, and Mashable were part of the right audience. Their readership had those coveted, tech loving early adopters. That wasn't all they did, though. They got their message in front of music lovers through outlets like Rolling Stone, MTV, Spinner, etc. Press means nothing if your target user isn't reading it. 

It's important to also note how they released their news. Apple infamously uses subtle hints for every single product they release. They give fanboys (like myself) just enough information to stir the pot, without spilling the beans. It causes a frenzied debate over what the latest and greatest announcement will be. Spotify did the same thing for their expansion into the US, and most recently with their announcement of a "new direction." A taste is all that's needed to make someone start salivating.

If the subtle hints and amazing press didn't draw you in, surely the breadth of celebrities boasting about the service did. Tweets from Ashton, Britney Spears, Trent Reznor, Talib Kweli and countless others constantly filled the interwebs. All of the right people in the music space were talking about Spotify. Influencers in a niche can provide the social proof and validity that many early stage companies lack, with the click of the tweet button. Spotify took care of their influencers, and the favor was returned. 

How can you make the most out of a massive influx of beta users? You build viral features that encourage sharing and new user acquisition, of course. Luckily for Spotify, music is inherently viral. People enjoy sharing the music they listen to. So, Spotify built features into thier service that made it easy to share the music you were listening to. They took it a step further to making it completely thoughtless with the new Facebook integration. But they made sure to encourage action from the other end, as well. Every song that gets shared on Facebook has a nice little play icon next to each song. When a user clicks on it, a Spotify registration action appears.

Fuel for the launch fire.

Not only did Spotify build new user acquisition into their DNA, but they made the platform sticky by continuing to innovate. The launch is only a means to an end. What you do after you get users in the door is a whole 'nother discussion. 

Spotify won the launch game. They were strategic, precise and had all of the necessary pieces to the puzzle. They realized that a launch isn't just throwing up a blog post and callin' it good. There are deep, powerful implications that result from launching properly. 

It made Spotify, will it make you?

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Social Media Metrics: Not as Difficult as You Thought

When was the last time you were asked, “So what’s our average growth rate on Facebook?” Err... Whether it’s a client, a boss, or the CEO of the company, you get questions like this. Ok so perhaps you’ve never heard this exact question, but I can pretty much bet that you’ve heard something similar. They want to know how your social media efforts are doing; they want to know that you’re tracking key performance indicators. But social media isn’t as simple as “track these numbers and *poof* you’ve got it all figured out.”

Every social media marketer struggles with which KPIs are the best to track. We know as marketers that having metrics to guide you and measure progress against is super important, yet here we still stand somewhat weary of what to keep an eye on.

While there are many posts out there telling you the absolute best metrics to track in social media marketing, I’d like to take a different approach. Saying there is a top list of metrics we should all blindly collect for collection sake is a dangerous way to approach social media tracking. In fact, I feel strongly that every organization will likely want to keep a close eye on slightly different metrics throughout the lifetime of their social efforts.

I know that throughout my time at Moz, I have paid attention to a number of different social KPIs; some of them are always there, and some of them are project-based. My tracking process has evolved with our social media marketing, so I don’t feel comfortable telling you there is a one-size fits all formula for social media marketing KPIs.

However, what I can get behind is the idea there are pieces to social that need to be measured in an ongoing way to help us better understand the health of our social media efforts. Here at Moz, we wanted to integrate social analytics into our PRO software for this exact reason -- to help inbound marketers better know the health of their social media marketing efforts.

When I manage social here at Moz, I am always pushing for four things - growth, engagement, momentum, and results. What those four words mean to your social efforts versus mine might be completely different. However, the new social dashboard we’ve launched is there to help every marketer measure those four pillars more effectively. Let me run through each and give them a little more shape. But when it comes right down to it I truly believe, if you can check in on these four pieces and see progress, your social media marketing efforts are going well.

I know, I know... everyone always tells you that it’s not the number of followers that count, and for the most part, I agree with this sentiment. However, while it’s not the size that matters most, it’s a great starting point and base to measure your growth. Often times, this is the number that your boss or client (or whoever) cares about.

In about five seconds, I can track the growth of both my Twitter and Facebook accounts, download the data into a csv to track, or show an exact screenshot in my weekly/monthly report. BOOM.

“Social media is about engagement.” How many times do you hear that one? Well, it’s true. If you’re not out there engaging with your audience (and vice versa), then what in the heck are you doing? This isn’t the place to go into all the details around how to do that, but I want to show you how easily you can track retweets, mentions, and replies over a given time period.

Do you follow the SEOmoz twitter account? If so, you probably see that we engage with the community quite a bit. To us, monitoring the level of engagement is much more meaningful than how many followers we have. We want to see that our efforts are engaging the community and that our community feels they’re heard and are a part of the greater conversation.

Social analytics in Moz will continue to grow with this in mind. We want to show you not simply that there is activity, but whether it’s valuable activity. What you see right now is simply the starting point. :)

Whee! To me this is the fun one. Sure, sure, sure the numbers may increase, but showing that the increase each week is gaining momentum is far more important. This is why we track KPIs: to show momentum. You want to see that percentage increase go up!

As social media marketers, we’ve had to defend our efforts and worth since the beginning. What does a tweet do for us? What does an engaged conversation on Facebook do for the company’s bottom line? What is the lifetime value of a new set of engaged eyes? Whew... these are hard things to figure out. There are lots of tools out there trying to nail this down.

This is where Moz social analytics comes in... we track your traffic from social media sources. All you have to do is hook your campaign up to GA (which if you have a campaign already you’ve probably already hooked up GA).

Social analytics is our first step in this direction. We aren’t hoping to be your social management platform; we realize that is not where our strength as a company lies. Instead, we have data. We have a slew of data, and we get inbound marketing. We hope to show you how all of your time spent on social actually has worth. We’ve started with traffic. We wanted to show which of your social efforts are resulting in more traffic. This is a great place to start.

We have a goal here to show marketers important data to help them better prioritize their time. Time is a precious thing. We hope that our first stab at social analytics gets you closer to knowing how well your social media management is doing right now and help you better allocate your efforts in the future. We realize the limitations of our first launch, and we would love any requests/feedback/freak outs you have. Once you get a chance to check out the social analytics, please take a second to fill out this quick survey as this will help us build exactly what you want.

In the meantime, get on in there and check it out. No better time to start collecting this data than now.

About jennita — Jen Lopez is the Community Manager at SEOmoz and a devotee of the fine arts of Twitter, Facebook and all things social media. She has a background in web development and will always be an SEO at heart. Follow her on Twitter @jennita.

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