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The Real Cost of Ranking Number One in a Google Search

Ranking-Number-One

The Knowledge Gap

“A market for lemons” was a paper published by George Akerlof and he won a Nobel Prize for this paper in 2001. He explained in his paper that there is a reasonable gab of knowledge between the buyer and the seller. This is taken advantage of by the seller to give information to the buyer at an unfair price.

This was clearly demonstrated in the vehicle industry. It was almost impossible to judge the durability of a car before making purchase, thanks to Carfax. As a result, consumers paid much more for lesser services. The sales man made more money from the consumer as a result of this gap in knowledge. What is the relationship between this and SEO? There is a great relationship.

The Cost and Benefits of Ranking #1

The prices of effective SEO is determined by the competition. Nevertheless, many people then to see traffic from SEO as free. SEO is a race against every other company that has come ahead of you in the search engine rankings.

The following has been discovered:
• SEO has always been a winner as the top 3 results gets 55% of the clicks.

• After observing progress with respect to SEO, efforts are normally channeled towards securing the advantage of the firm, this leads to what could be referred to as a competitive moat.

• Leaders in the market have premium access to data that acts as a guide to direct their investments.

Huckster Salesmen Abound

Ever since SEO became popular, several companies are looking for ways to get a piece of the action through using SEO. Many have become SEO experts overnight. Some say it is in the CODE, others say it is in excellent customer relationship, all in a bid to get a piece of the action. As a result, there are several SEO packages which end up with no effect at all on the search engine rankings. This results in the following:

• Many clients are tied to a long term contract with companies even though there is nothing gained from these projects.

• Most of the techniques are of no effect, if of any effect at all, it is short lived and very risky and could lead to long term penalties.

• As often said, first rank in 30 days guaranteed, what they do is to rank the site for keywords nobody searches for or on a search engine no body uses.

No Barrier To Entry

Anyone who has been online for 6 months and has been conversant with SEO terms can claim to be an SEO expert and offer services to unsuspecting clients. Here is what some of these persons do.

1. They pay huge sums of money to get listed and have high ratings on websites that offers unbiased rating systems for these companies.
2. Then they move on to join trade companies and decorate the home page of their company website with badges from these unions.
3. Some of these companies have the Google Adwords Certification badges on their websites, some consumers thinks this has to do with SEO, as a matter of fact, it is not true. It has nothing to do with SEO
4. Google Adwords clearly states the following, “Google Adwords doesn’t allow ads that make inaccurate claims…superlative and unverified offers”. This may apply to other fields, but with respect to SEO, it is inapplicable.

Numerous Business Models for Truly Talented SEOs

When an SEO masters his skill, there is a lot of business opportunities available for them. Here are some of them:

• Affiliate Marketing.
• Contextual Ads.
• Creating their own info-products.
• Increasing revenues through partnering with webmasters.
• They will be hired by large corporations.
• Selling physical sites through selling of physical goods.
• Direct Ad sales.
• Buying and selling of domain names and websites.

Salesmanship vs Expertise

Some SEO focus on sales and assure the client that it can be done against all odds, others who are more conscious of quality uses the word “Maybe”, well, the more certain the person is selling SEO, the less reliable the person might be. The following should be noted.

There is no need sharing success stories as this will cause there to be more competition in the niche causing more scrutiny from search engineers. This can cause the fall of a site that has since reached and remained at the top.

SEO Brand

People involved in SEO have realized the importance of marketing themselves since everyone is doing this, it becomes more time consuming to rise above the noise. Since there is no time for this, many “though leaders” in SEO simply make use of their brands in collecting leads and give them to an intern to work on at the office.

Scale Clients-Based SEO Business Models

In SEO, the success of one marks the demise of another. When there is a change in the Algorithm, some people win, some others loose. For those who scale their SEO services, they often run the same risk per clients since they use the same models and templates for all their clients.

In the event of a change, there comes the need for more research, testing and implementing of new strategies. With frequent changes in the algorithm, SEO business models cannot be fully optimized as there will be need for SEO firms to always change strategies along with upgrades.

So what is the way out, it is a combination of Knowledge, Patience, investment, continuous training and testing. There will also be the need to hire an in house SEO personnel.

About The Author
Although millions of people visit Brandon's blog each month, his path to success was not easy. Go here to read his incredible story, "From Disabled and $500k in Debt to a Pro Blogger with 5 Million Monthly Visitors." If you want to send Brandon a quick message, then visit his contact page here.