Google Penguin Leading to Rising “SEO” Inflation
With the Google Penguin update forcing SEO providers to once again get back to basics, two important components have rightly come back to the fore:
- Strategy
- Quality
For a long time, mindless over optimisation and intensive link building were prominent in SEO. Now, with the new update, it has forced everyone to rethink. SEO now, in my opinion, has less to do with SEO and more to do with acting as brand ambassadors i.e. ensuring that visitor experience is of the utmost importance. If a website's navigation is well thought out and content is written with user (and not bot) in mind, then Google will reward with rank.
The question is: how does this affect the price of SEO? Well, it has a direct impact in my opinion. For a long time, the majority of SEO was effectively put out as a labour intensive process which anyone with minimal experience could undertake and churn out using automated software.
This is no longer the case, now it requires real creative and strategic input which is achieved through real experienced personnel. Where does this leave the industry that was built on automated processes and cheap labour? Well, either they re-educate themselves or the work is taken back to more qualified agencies. In any case, if more qualified personnel need to spend more time on each project, costs will have to rise accordingly. This reluctant rise in costs will slowly creep in over the next 18 months, as website owners start to realise that the company or individual they have hired are not producing results. The alternative will be to hire a competent agency or individual.
This should also help to somehow provide some sort of balancing out of SEO prices as they are currently all over the place.
