Your One Stop Guide To SEO (Part 1) Myth Busting

In the world of SEO, there’s a few questions that seem to always pop up but I’ve really never seen one good place to go to get answers to all these questions. Until now that is.  We’re putting together a small series that will literally be your one stop guide to SEO.  All the questions you probably have will be answered–and in detail, too.  After reading this series, I will be pretty surprised if you still have any common questions about SEO.
At the bottom of each blog post in this series, you’ll find a “Previous” and “Next” link that will, obviously, take you to the previous or next blog post in the series.  If you’re currently doing SEO with us, with another company, or are just starting to consider SEO for your business, I highly, highly recommend that you read this series.  It will only take about 20 minutes of your valuable time, but I guarantee it will be well worth it and will answer just about all your likely questions about SEO.
Before we get started, I really want to mention 1 thing about SEO– there’s a lot of people out there who claim to be SEO experts and really don’t know what they’re doing.  SEO 5 years ago was easy–literally anyone could do it–but as more and more people cheated and spammed the search engines, companies like Google, Yahoo, and Bing were forced to make their ranking algorithms more strict–meaning SEO is constantly changing and is getting harder and harder each time.  So before you ever get started with an SEO company or take advise from an SEO company, make sure you know they are capable of producing results.
Which leads us to our very first topic in this series: We’re going to do a little myth busting.  There’s so much poor information on the web about SEO–from for ums to blog posts by uninformed writers to just strange information that I’m unsure how it even developed.  Let’s take some time first to get on the same page with a few common myths before we dive into any substantial questions about SEO.
Myth 1: My web designer said he can do my SEO for me for an extra $XXX per month.
Our Take: Yes and no.  We’re an SEO company that does web design as well, not a web design company that does SEO.  Honestly, quality SEO is very different from web design, and 95% of web designers I have worked with don’t know enough about SEO to actually do the job right.  They may code your website right which is a big part of SEO, but honestly there’s a lot more to it than that.
Myth 2: Isn’t SEO just about putting keywords on the page and fixing the titles, meta information, and other aspects?  If that’s all it is why am I paying for that every month!?
Our Take: On page SEO is about 30-40% of SEO.  On page SEO does in fact consist of titles, meta information, and keywords, but it also means posting quality, fresh content.  Anyone who manages a website knows it takes time and effort to come up with quality, fresh content on a consistent basis.  The other 60-70% of SEO is off page, meaning we are building links to your site, making your site more popular on social media sites and bookmarking sites, and writing blog posts for you.  SEO is very labor intensive, so this is why we have to charge monthly fees for our monthly costs associated with your account.
Myth 3: SEO doesn’t work and isn’t cost effective for small businesses.
Our Take: Couldn’t be further from the truth.  Big SEO companies have packages starting at $10,000 a month.  We’re a small business SEO company–our packages start at a modest $297 per month, and quite honestly we’re doing at least half of the amount of work the big companies are doing.  The profit margins for most SEO companies are through the roof, but we work with our clients instead of just working for them, which means we never price gouge.  I’ve seen small businesses rank for a basic keyword like “local bakery” in their area and only spend 3 months at $297/month to rank.  They stay ranked for XX years and they usually recover the SEO costs within the first few months of being ranked.
There’s SO many other myths out there about SEO–we could do an entire series just on the myths (which we very likely may do some day) but these will give you a good starting ground on some popular myths.  In our next segment, we’re going to take a look at whether or not SEO will work for your specific company and more importantly why.