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: 4 to 6 hours @ $150 per hour, or $600 to $950

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: 2 to 4 hours @ $150 per hour, or $300 to $600

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:

1. The Essential Reading and Resource List - $900
2. The SEO Technical Report - $1200
3. The CMS (Content Management System) and Database SEO Guide - $1650
4. Interactive Guide to Using WordTracker with other keyword research tools - $3000
5. Essentials of SEO Copywriting - $1050
6. Submission and How to Run, Interpret, and Write SEO Results Reports - $1050
7. Training in Monthly and Semi-Annual ROI Reports - $1050

Price for step 3: $9900

1. The Essential Reading and Resource List - $900

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.

2. The SEO Technical Report - $1200

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.

3. The CMS (Content Management System) and Database SEO Guide - $1650

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.

4. Interactive Guide to Using Wordtracker and Other Keyword Research Tools - $3000

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 Wordtracker tool, 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 Wordtracker 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 that can augment Wordtracker, like PPC reports, Google Trends, and several Wordtracker competitors.

5. 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.

6. Submission and How to Run, Interpret, and Write SEO Results Reports - $1050

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 eight-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. Guidance for all these steps will be provided in a training document that enables your team to provide crisp, actionable reports to upper management, and to assess problems, successes, and opportunities.

7. Training in Monthly and Semi-Annual ROI Reports - $1050

Often clients want more in-depth and/or ongoing ROI reporting. To address these needs, DISC will provide training documents and templates for comprehensive semiannual reports and shorter monthly SEO ROI Reports. 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.

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: 10 to 16 hours @ $150 per hour, or $1500 to $2400

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 $11,250 to $12,800. If the first step is omitted, the price range is $10,650 to $11,850.