No hourly fees

Your goal in most transactions is probably to pay for a desired result that has a certain economic value to you. On the other hand, if you are like us, you are uncomfortable with the notion of open-ended hourly billing arrangements.

When a consultant or any other professional services provider asks you to pay by the hour, based upon the idea that the engagement is “too complex or has too many variables and uncertainties,” you are forced to assume all of the risk.

We have found over the years that the vast majority of our clients prefer to know what they can expect to pay for a certain project or task in advance, so we quote fixed prices for a defined scope of work. Unexpected issues and expanded scopes of work can be handled later, if necessary, through Change Orders.

From time to time, a fixed project fee approach may result in us earning a premium over what you might have paid elsewhere by the hour; however, you shift the risk of cost overruns for the defined scope of work from you to us. On occasion, we may lose a bit. But that’s OK; we’ve been doing this for a long time.

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Services and Rates

Search marketing campaign setup

This is our basic services package, designed for clients who lack the revenue necessary to justify our monthly campaign management service. We believe an effective search engine marketing campaign involves three elements that are often sold as standalone services by many of our competitors. Clients receive a robust and comprehensive solution that prepares them to compete successfully online:

Pay per click campaign setup and research. It is important to learn which keywords and keyphrases are most important to your target audience. Pay per click advertising like Google AdWords allows search engine users to vote with their clicks, showing us which keywords and copywriting text are best aligned with the way your target audience thinks about your products and services.

Naturally, this knowledge can lead to more effective copywriting on your website. Many of our clients also find the results of this research very useful in their offline marketing and advertising efforts. And of course, you will have a turn-key search engine advertising campaign, should you elect to continue with pay per click advertising.

We set up pay per click advertising campaigns for you on the five major search advertising networks: Google AdWords, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL (America Online) and Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves).
Basic search engine optimization. This means making your website search engine-friendly by focusing page titles, section headings, image captions and descriptions, emphasized text, and general page copywriting so that search engines can accurately index your website pages. Ultimately, a website with useful and optimized information content should place higher in search engine results rankings for keywords related to your products and services.
Traffic reporting software. Robust traffic and conversion statistics must be developed to learn how well your search marketing campaign efforts are working. It is pointless to make changes to your website without having the ability to measure the results of such changes. We install and configure custom Google Analytics reporting for every client.

How much does it cost? Our standard search marketing campaign setup fee is $7,450. This fee is based upon a single website domain with up to three major product and service categories and up to 12 different products and services. The fee is increased by $1,250 for each additional category and $250 for each additional product or service.

How long does it take? We install analytics software on your website and begin capturing traffic data within 10 days. After capturing about 30 days worth of “before” traffic data for your website, we make basic optimization changes and create a Google AdWords testing campaign. About three months of traffic and pay per click data are usually required to produce meaningful results. The project is typically completed within four to five months.

Search marketing campaign management

Our campaign management service includes all of the search marketing campaign setup services described above, plus:

Daily monitoring of your pay per click advertising. Per click advertising is a fluid, constantly changing environment based upon competitive bidding for keywords. We are constantly watching for developments that can impact your advertising campaign performance.
Benchmarking and analysis of your search rankings. We continuously analyze the search engine rankings of your site and the top 10 competitor sites for each of your major product and service categories.
Continuing website optimization efforts. Website optimization is a repetitive process: Make changes… wait a month… see how the changes affect search engine rankings, if at all… repeat the process. To borrow a phrase from direct marketing, our approach is to “always be testing.”
Educational and marketing content separation. Search engines are biased in favor of pages that are more informative in tone, effectively penalizing pages with persuasive marketing language, superlatives, and calls to action. So we essentially turn your website into two sites: First, we create brief landing pages for your pay per click advertising, with persuasive copy, direct calls to action and copywriting that is consistent with your search engine ad copy. Then, your existing website pages are made more factual (and longer) and given a less promotional tone.
Inbound link building. Google originally set itself apart from other search engines by delivering search results that were more relevant and of higher quality. A big part of their approach involves assigning value to web pages based upon the number and quality of inbound links from other web pages on the Internet. While the practice of inbound link building can be abused, we work much like a conventional public relations firm, attempting to obtain inbound links from high credibility third party websites that are related to your products and services.

How much does it cost? Our standard search marketing campaign management fee is $1,750 per month. This fee is based upon a single website domain with up to three major product and service categories and up to 12 different products and services. The fee is increased by $250 per month for each additional category and $50 per month for each additional product or service. Campaign setup is included in the monthly fee.

In short, if you have three or fewer major product and service categories and 12 or fewer different products and services, you can have a professionally managed, world-class Internet marketing campaign for less than the typically monthly payroll cost for an office receptionist. Naturally, your actual advertising expenditures are extra.

How long does it take? This is an ongoing service and requires a client minimum commitment of one year. The elapsed timeframes for setup and initial research are the same as described for our search campaign setup package.