SEO ROI’s clients are leaders. Clients come to me because they demand results and they know that I deliver a positive return on investment. Being a leader is about:

• Recognizing value,
• Budgeting for growth and
• Investing that budget in ROI-driven activities.

Those traits reflect themselves in the following three ways.

1. Educated on the value of SEO. It’s not something they can outsource to their nephew to do, and nor is it the magic marketing bullet. It’s simply a cost-effective form of online marketing that provides a very high return on investment in leads and sales generated, besides positive branding effects. They take an interest in their analytics and see the power of search marketing for themselves, as the data shows so many visitors coming to their site from the search engines and the revenue this generated.
2. Savvy enough to understand that premium SEO services require an appropriate budget. I personally spend 10 - 15 [update:] 20 hours a week, minimum, reading blogs, forums and other industry publications to keep my skills current. And that’s not even taking into account the hours spent on writing articles, blogposts, emails etc. That investment in time that has yielded an uncommon depth of knowledge that enables me to provide my clients with the best return-on-investment for their money. Between compensating me proportionately to my expertise and the fact that they need to budget for pay-per-click marketing, analytics and directory submission to the select few directories that still provide value (Yahoo, Business.com, BOTW.org and a handful of others) my clients understand that they need to set aside a reasonable budget for their SEO.
3. Aware that SEO is an investment, not an expense. A website sitting on a server not being visited by anyone - that’s an expense. Generating leads and sales online - that’s an investment. The former costs you money. The latter makes you money. Leaders succeed in business by limiting costs as much as possible and making as much money as possible. Simple.

My clients tend to be medium-sized businesses, more often than not. Medium-sized businesses realize that SEO provides a very high return on investment and function accordingly.

While some small business owners do have the characteristics mentioned above, many lack at least one of those traits. The most common occurrence is the business owner who thinks they can get SEO services dirt cheap or on a profit-sharing basis when there are no revenues to share at the outset. Or the understanding of SEO is minimal and it’s just a chore that needs to be handed off.

At the other end of the spectrum, large corporations tend to prefer dealing with other large businesses and search for an SEO company accordingly. In doing so, they will often come across firms with a significant appearance but less than impressive technical knowledge and expertise.

I’ve been asked by firms doing work with Fortune 500 clients how I would handle the meta tags if they subcontracted work to me. This indicates that:

• They don’t know what to ask about to figure out if I really know about SEO; meta tags aren’t used as a ranking factor any more in today’s SEO and only occasionally are shown as the snippet on a search results page (SERP). In other words, they’re not the experts they claim to be.
• The Fortune 500 company will pay more money than the service really costs because of the middleman’s markup. Such is life in corporate marketing.

Some clients who I’m proud to say do get it include

• The Business Card Creator Software,
• Ice.com Jewelry / Diamond.com and
• Montreal’s Hotel de Paris / Auberge de Jeunesse Montreal.

So there you have it - leaders come to SEO ROI because leaders demand results. Are you a leader? If so, then go ask for a proposal (pricing for monthly services begins at $3000/month). Or find out a little more about what makes SEO ROI different and better.

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