Phone and Email Training
in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Executive Summary
DISC offers two kinds of phone and email
training packages: (1) a comprehensive
package that is similar to the On-Site Training but without
DISC's visit to your location for the one- or two-day workshop; and (2)
brief but crucial answers to your specific questions about your current
and prospective SEM strategy and tactics. These two services are on
opposite ends of the price spectrum.
The first package aims to bring
your team up to professional-grade competence in SEO, and is a major
engagement with DISC.
The second package, which
ranges from a brief phone or email consultation to one or more 10-hour
blocks of time, gives you specific advice that comes from DISC's years
of managing and researching SEM. For example, one large client
allocated about $6000 for advice on and plans for link campaigns and
SEO'd public relations, and needed help with complicated, SEO-related
programming of their product sorting system. Another small client
needed to know what their web developer did wrong, and got answers in 2
hours.
Unlike other SEM training programs,
DISC passes all of our intellectual capital to our team, as though your
firm was a franchise of DISC. All of our 12
years of experience and research are distilled for your profitable
action. You team's learning curve is swift, and you avoid costly
mistakes. Of course DISC customizes the training to the precise
requirements of your business and web site(s), rather than merely
provide generic training documents. We assess your current employees'
skills, tailor training to them, and we hone the training to your
business and web site(s), so that the training program completes an SEM
job that you would otherwise pay an SEM firm to do. In many cases the
cost of training is less than the costs of paying an SEM firm to do the
job.
Details, Steps, and Prices
The brief phone and/or email
consultation is intended for competent web marketers who need
answers that come only from DISC's years of research and professional
experience with diverse clients. For example, you may want to know
whether it is worth paying for Yahoo's "Content Match" program that
guarantees inclusion in their putatively non-paid listings, or instead
whether you should use tactics that may gain your site entry into the
Yahoo index for free. Or your team may be considering employing a
keyword research tool, and you would like to hear from professionals
who use such tools (not from the vendors' obviously biased web sites)
which solutions would be best for you. Call or email DISC
for a quote. There is a
one hour minimum ($125), and new clients must pre-pay in full.
DISC's comprehensive training
package without on-site workshops replicates our On-Site
Training package, but replaces the in-person training with extensive
review of your work and Q & A sessions by phone and email.
The four steps in this
comprehensive package are described below. The first
step may be unnecessary if DISC did or will do SEO for you, unless you
plan to optimize more pages or sites.
Step 1: DISC assesses whether
your best ROI will come from cultivating in-house resources,
outsourcing SEO, or some combination of the two. This is the
same kind of analysis DISC performs when producing ROI Planning
and Web
Marketing Plans. For example, we may find that the nature of
your marketing niche or your competitions' lack of SEM savvy means that
a one-time, enduring implementation of SEO, perhaps with a little PPC
or other paid placement, will earn you optimum ROI. Alternatively, our
assessment might determine that your best ROI will come from
cultivating professional-grade SEM expertise in-house, in which case we
move on to the next step.
Price: 3 to 5
hours @ $175 per hour, or $525 to $875
Step 2: DISC evaluates your
team's strengths, weaknesses, and SEM knowledge, in order to
customize the remaining steps. For example, the marketing person you
want to train might have excellent language skills and product
knowledge, but needs an overview of the programming technicalities that
impinge on SEO, PPC, or trusted feeds. Or perhaps the programmer you
wish to train has the requisite language aptitudes but needs some
training in web and SEO copywriting. Based on such assessments, we
prepare the following two steps.
Price: 1 to 3
hours @ $175 per hour, or $175 to $525
Step 3: We deliver relevant
training materials. This includes a reading list (books, web
sites, and DISC's clippings from various web resources) and
interactive, step-by-step guides for performing the essential
procedures of SEO:
- The Essential Reading and Resource List
- $1050
- The
SEO Technical Report - $1250
- The
CMS (Content Management System) and Database SEO Guide - $2625
- Interactive Guide to Using Keyword Research Tools - $2975
- Essentials of SEO Copywriting - $1050
- Submission and How to Run, Interpret,
and Write Monthly and Annual SEO ROI Reports - $1975
Details:
- The Essential Reading and Resource
List - $1050
This list of books, studies,
statistics, and web sites is the best of the best. We also include
access to DISC's online library of top-quality research that we have
archived.
- The SEO Technical Report - $1250
This report is exceedingly valuable in
itself. In fact, it has uncovered significant problems for about 70% of
DISC's new clients. The STR covers many bases, such as evaluating your
server and web publishing systems relevant to SEO; determining whether
your site has a static and "clean" IP address; ascertaining the number
and type of incoming links to your site; assessing the extent of
penetration by Google, Yahoo, and MSN; testing how your site circulates
and amplifies Google's PageRank; and other standard pre-SEO checks.
Several of these tests are crucial for ascertaining whether to optimize
for shorter, competitive phrases vs. longer, less competitive phrases.
It will also help us determine whether and to what extent you should do
a link campaign, which amplifies SEO.
- The CMS (Content Management System)
and Database SEO Guide - $2625
This service is also crucial, as CMS
SEO is often the single most important tactic in the SEO arsenal. The
goal is to make your web site publishing system do as much SEO as
possible automatically. Once done, CMS SEO should last in perpetuity.
After your team fills out our questionnaire, DISC prepares a report
that details how to make your CMS and database optimized for search
engines. The guide gives precise instructions on how to configure your
CMS to produce ideal code, layout, database structure, URL structure,
and much more, so that your site is "naturally" open to search engine
penetration and Google's PageRank circulation – and, thus,
top ranking and subsequent new business from the search engines. The
guide also explains how to avoid SEO blockages in JavaScript, DHTML,
Flash, Ajax, breadcrumb trails, and sorting systems. The guide explains
the rules, which are usually not very time consuming for your web
development team to implement because they merely alter attributes of
your CMS that already exist in most cases.
- Interactive Guide to Using Keyword Research Tools - $2975
SEO begins with rigorous research
using linguistic/statistical software to determine which relevant key
phrases people are actually searching for in the top search engines and
how much competition exists for those phrases. (Be aware that keyword
research requires strong statistical and language skills as well as
seasoned business sense and lots of experience.) Using the keyword research tools, an SEO practitioner tests hundreds of relevant key phrases to
refine the “keyword universe” to a prioritized list
of phrases with the most traffic-generating potential. The next step is
to build a sub-list for each page to be optimized. Management then
provides feedback on those sub-lists. Finally, the SEO implementer
optimizes the web pages' copywriting and HTML code by artfully but
precisely weaving in selected key phrases, using a rigorously
researched pattern of frequency, density, and distribution.
This PowerPoint document explains in detail all the steps in
professional keyword research that DISC has refined over 11 years. It
enables a PC-competent person with no SEM background to complete an
excellent job of keyword research. The document covers details such as
in-process file and folder naming, and helps you make sense of
keyword data and use that information in a very powerful manner,
based on DISC’s many years of experience manifest in this
guide. We also include an annotated list of secondary keyword research
tools.
- Essentials of SEO Copywriting - $1050
This guide covers the writing tactics
for weaving in researched key phrases, and includes target frequency,
density, and distribution (fdd) of key phrases in copywriting text
content and other key parts of pages. DISC's seasoned SEO writers have
learned many neat ways to lace in repetitions without degrading good
copywriting, and you will enjoy using these tactics. The fdd is
important of course, but you will also learn how to produce a
diversified verbal portfolio around this fdd throughout your web site.
- Submission and How to Run, Interpret,
and Write Monthly and Annual SEO ROI Reports - $1975
For submissions, DISC will
train your
team to check and (if needed) revise your major directory listings, and
check to ensure that the major spiders index your site within three
weeks of SEO completion. As for reporting, submission is followed by
two or three industry-standard WebPosition® reports on your
search engine ranking. These reports are run several weeks after
submission to allow the search engines to fully index your site. The
next step is an ten-page SEO Results Report, which provides an overview
of improvement in search engine referrals shown in your server
statistics package and explains how to assess results and
ROI. These reports are crucial for preventing little problems
from causing
major SEO damage, and they make ROI analysis and reporting efficient
and actionable. DISC will work with your team to adapt standard reports
to your exact needs. This training document enables your team to
provide crisp, actionable reports to upper management, and to assess
problems, successes, and opportunities.
Price for step 3: $10,925
Step 4: We email you a
detailed plan for applying the procedures in Step 3 to your specific
web site(s), and guide you throughout your implementation,
providing reviews and feedback. We also allocate a few hours to
answering your questions as they emerge. This step also includes time
for DISC's interpretation of your results.
Price: 8 to 14
hours @ $175 per hour, or $1400 to $2450
This comprehensive training
package will build your company's intellectual capital
while ensuring optimum SEO. Having done the work in-house and learned
SEO principles, your team will be able to maintain and expand your SEO.
Your team will also have a short list of the best resources for keeping
up with industry developments in SEM and for answering questions as
they arise.
Prices are quoted individually
but range from $13,025 to $14,775. If the first step is
omitted, the price range is $12,500 to $13,900.
|
|
