pour le e-commerce.
48, boulevard des Batignolles 75 017 Paris
+ 33 (0)1 44 09 48 44
+ 33 (0)1 47 63 00 21
+ 33 (0)6 66 65 71 53
Areas of focus for ATS include programmatic buying, real-time bidding, data trading, re-marketing, semantic targeting, audience buying, ad technology infrastructure, media optimisation, agency/advertiser exchange strategy and publisher-side trading.
La dernière newsletter de Yahoo! France reprend une étude menée par IAB UK et Gfk Research qui a comparé l’impact d’une campagne internet, celui d’une campagne TV et la combinaison des deux. Le cas la marque Maggi (cible femme 25-40 ans avec enfants). Si les deux premières campagnes ont bien fonctionné indépendamment, c’est surtout l’alliance des deux qui s’est révélée la plus performante pour la marque.
Twelve years ago the pizza chain took in $155,000 in a year from online sales. By the year 2000 that figure had jumped to $1.5 million a year. That sort of growth is impressive.
For six years now, I’ve been the founder, CEO, and president of a search engine optimization company, and I’ve maintained one additional role, that I soon hope to relinquish.
Salesperson.
My reluctance in hiring a salesperson is that finding the right person for the job can be quite a challenge. “Selling” search engine optimization (SEO) is a very consultative venture and one that I’m loath to turn over to someone mostly motivated by a commission check.
Selling SEO requires that you know the space well, and that you’re able to balance the need to bring revenue into the company while ensuring that you’re bringing in business which won’t lead to future headaches, because:
- Expectations weren’t set appropriately.
- The prospect lacks an understanding of the process.
- There aren’t enough resources on the client’s side (or not enough money to outsource) for generating content, addressing issues, and implementing recommendations.
- The work isn’t properly scoped out so that we can gain a solid estimation as to the work that will be involved (so that the work doesn’t end up being unprofitable).
It’s that last piece that I’m going to address, today.
Scoping Out and Pricing an SEO Effort
In order to survive as a well-run business, we must make sure that we operate profitably. Just as I might look at the probability of generating a positive ROI for prospects that come seeking SEO services, so too must I focus on ensuring that my company also runs profitably.
To that end, I made a decision, years ago, to hire a head of operations who also happened to have a background in process improvement. It also doesn’t hurt that she’s a CPA. Her name is Kim Patterson, and she also happens to be my wife’s cousin (so you headhunters can just keep on looking).
Kim came to the company with no background in SEO. Over the years, she has learned the process and has put in place measurements of effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability that I believe had been sorely lacking in our industry.
Another major component of bringing Kim on was to make sure that we were charging a fair rate (one which was within Industry standards, one which helped us to reach our profitability goals and one which would be reasonable, based upon what value we bring to our clients).
I asked Kim what formula she uses to price our SEO initiatives. Her response:
First, you need to determine your profit goals (15 percent; 20 percent; 30 percent; more?). You calculate your fixed overhead costs (costs that you pay no matter what your sales are), variable costs (what costs go up as sales go up – and what the relationship is to the sale dollar; not all relationships are the same for each sector of your biz) and direct costs (what actual direct labor, direct services, etc) for the actual job and make sure when it all is put together you end up with your targeted profit.
The real tricky part here is determining the direct costs. SEO projects can’t be precisely scoped out for everything that you might do for the next 12 months. Part of SEO is analysis and recommendations, based upon what we see in the SERPs, analytics, competitive analysis, and industry changes/opportunities, among other things.
Pricing SEO is one of the great challenges, because most prospects still have a basic understanding of search engine optimization and the time/work involved in the efforts. The best that anyone can do is get a sense for how much time may be required to spend adequate time to address specific goals.
Rand Fishkin provided a tremendous value when, in 2007, he wrote a quality post on pricing SEO. Granted, this was written over four years ago.
New figures released by Domino's Pizza reveal that, in Q3 2011, nearly half (46.6%) of UK delivered sales were ordered online, up from 39.7% in the same period last year.
Rattachée au Premier ministre, la Direction interministérielle des systèmes d'information a pour but d'accompagner la transformation IT de l'Etat. Un grand entretien réalisé par Luc Fayard.
