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Giving away free seo? for review & backlink

by brettuk
11 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi,

Would it be a good idea to give away some 'Free' SEO work, maybe just the onpage stuff to local websites in order to obtain a review & a backlink from their site.

So in the footer it would say... 'SEO by COMPANYNAME' then a link back?

Thoughts?


Thanks.
#backlink #free #giving #review #seo
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    The amount of work it would take is not worth a low quality link like that.
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    • Profile picture of the author brettuk
      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      The amount of work it would take is not worth a low quality link like that.
      Very true, but obtaining decent links to rank my site for generic terms like 'affordable seo services' 'seo services' etc will take a while without having that footer strategy put in place on client sites.

      I actually don't have any clients to start with.
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      Full-time SEO Analyst and Blogger at semtuts.com - a search engine magazine that dedicates their time, effort and knowledge into creating useful SEM posts for their users.

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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by brettuk View Post

        Very true, but obtaining decent links to rank my site for generic terms like 'affordable seo services' 'seo services' etc will take a while without having that footer strategy put in place on client sites.

        I actually don't have any clients to start with.
        You are not going to rank for those kind of terms with a handful of footer links.

        No way in hell I would offer to rank sites for free for a couple of lousy links.

        Let's just look at the financials of this idea.

        Let's say you are on the cheaper end of SEO providers and you would charge clients $500/month to rank their sites for some key local terms. You are looking at probably 2-3 months of work if you know what you are doing that you are offering to do for free. It might even be 4-6 months of work for just a few keywords. Depends on the competition. We will keep this conservative though.

        3 months at $500/month = $1,500.

        You want to do that for 5 clients for a few links?

        $7,500 for a few footer links.

        Yeah, no thanks.
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        • Profile picture of the author brettuk
          Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

          You are not going to rank for those kind of terms with a handful of footer links.

          No way in hell I would offer to rank sites for free for a couple of lousy links.

          Let's just look at the financials of this idea.

          Let's say you are on the cheaper end of SEO providers and you would charge clients $500/month to rank their sites for some key local terms. You are looking at probably 2-3 months of work if you know what you are doing that you are offering to do for free. It might even be 4-6 months of work for just a few keywords. Depends on the competition. We will keep this conservative though.

          3 months at $500/month = $1,500.

          You want to do that for 5 clients for a few links?

          $7,500 for a few footer links.

          Yeah, no thanks.
          2-3 months work for free? Not at all.

          I mean the basic fundamentals of SEO which I can implement onto local websites, considering it's 'free' they will be more than happy to do that. This will only be a couple of hours work, in return for a honest review which I can put on the website aswell as a link to get me started.

          I'm no where near charging $500 a month, I would be happy to even scrape $150 a month at the moment!
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          Full-time SEO Analyst and Blogger at semtuts.com - a search engine magazine that dedicates their time, effort and knowledge into creating useful SEM posts for their users.

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          • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
            Originally Posted by brettuk View Post

            2-3 months work for free? Not at all.

            I mean the basic fundamentals of SEO which I can implement onto local websites, considering it's 'free' they will be more than happy to do that. This will only be a couple of hours work, in return for a honest review which I can put on the website aswell as a link to get me started.

            I'm no where near charging $500 a month, I would be happy to even scrape $150 a month at the moment!
            Two things.

            First, they are not going to see any results for a "couple of hours of work". Tweaking a few onsite things is likely not going to bring in any additional traffic or very little traffic. So whether it is free or not, you really are not giving them much value there.

            And again, these footer links are not going to help your site crack even the top 50 for the kind of terms you were talking about.

            Second, you really cannot do good SEO work for $150/month.

            Hell, just to put a client into BOTW is around $100.

            What kind of keywords are you currently ranking websites for that you are only spending $150 for links, content, and time?

            Even a lot of easy single keywords are going to max that out really quick and not leave any room to make a profit.

            I'm not trying to bash you. As someone who as done SEO for over 10 years, I'm just trying to bring up some points that I think you are not considering.
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            • Profile picture of the author brettuk
              Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

              Two things.

              First, they are not going to see any results for a "couple of hours of work". Tweaking a few onsite things is likely not going to bring in any additional traffic or very little traffic. So whether it is free or not, you really are not giving them much value there.

              And again, these footer links are not going to help your site crack even the top 50 for the kind of terms you were talking about.

              Second, you really cannot do good SEO work for $150/month.

              Hell, just to put a client into BOTW is around $100.

              What kind of keywords are you currently ranking websites for that you are only spending $150 for links, content, and time?

              Even a lot of easy single keywords are going to max that out really quick and not leave any room to make a profit.

              I'm not trying to bash you. As someone who as done SEO for over 10 years, I'm just trying to bring up some points that I think you are not considering.
              That's very true, I am only an apprentice SEO so honestly, I appreciate everything you are saying.

              The agency I am working for is charging just over £100 a month for SEO, not to sure what it is in dollars probably something around $160. I have ranked clients on the first page every time for their target keyword in the local area - at that price.

              As an example, we had a window cleaner in the local area which was looking to pay £100 a month to get ranked on the first page for his area and the other areas around him. I did some onpage optimisation, checked his back link profile and noticed some opportunities. He ranked first for over 10+ different 'window cleaning' variations for his area in just 3 weeks. In reality, the work I did was only 6 hours worth? and he ranked first.

              Sometimes I feel as if you can rank a site by doing only a couple hours work, depending on their link profile, but that's for the low competition keywords. Yeah ofcourse it can take weeks, or even months for Google to pick up the changes - but I have only got around 6-8 hours work logged against that project. I haven't really ever experienced trying to rank a site for 'seo services' etc.
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              Full-time SEO Analyst and Blogger at semtuts.com - a search engine magazine that dedicates their time, effort and knowledge into creating useful SEM posts for their users.

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  • Profile picture of the author ssweety
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    • Profile picture of the author DABK
      If you can convince a business owner to let you mess up with his/her site for free, you ought to be able to do it for money.

      I suggest you say, Hey, the fee is $x. However, if you let me place a link to my site in the footer of your site, the fee is 20% less, or something like that.

      And then you can have some money to buy a few domains, put up sites, link back to your main site from the middle of the homepage no less.
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  • Profile picture of the author patco
    Those links won't help you! You need QUALITY backlinks to your MONEY site! At least you should be sure that those websites won't get blacklisted or won't be spammed as once placed, you probably can't remove this link!
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  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    As Mike F said that kind of links are really low quality. I know a local company that very likely got bitten by the footer links that they had liberally placed on sites that they built. Not only ineffective, but if you go too far with such a link scheme they're even potentially harmful.

    You may get a glowing reference from one of your "clients", or it may lead to nothing. Often the kind of people who take cheap or free offers are not those who are making the big bucks, but they still have a lot of demands.

    I've done a few €200+ a pop on-page optimizations and link-building gigs, but that's usually not a good sell unless you know the client already. You've got to negotiate all sort of stuff, get access to the sites, try to understand what they do on a general level, keep the client posted, describe what you're doing on layman's terms, etc. If you're just doing some well-defined part of SEO I think good subcontracting gigs tend to be more tolerable because someone else is defining the scope, minding the big picture, and handling the client contacts.

    I would not do any of this for free, or for backlinks. Probably not even for the money I've asked previously.
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    Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
    Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

    What's your excuse?
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  • Profile picture of the author Slade556
    Why don't you offer your services on Elance or odesk? They're a good place to start to build a client base, and focus on getting high quality backlinks yourself, instead of working for free for a link that won't even help you out.
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