Case studySEO not working? Read about a PLN 200k-a-month contract – Gelp Case Study

SEO not working? Read about the contract for 200K a month….

Circulating opinions on the Internet proclaim that SEO doesn’t work, doesn’t produce the expected results, and in general is extracting money from business owners for activities that are not necessarily beneficial and have a purpose. It is further considered that SEO takes a very long time and involves spending very large budgets, despite the meager effect.

Well, as in every story, there is a grain of truth. Many SEO companies are carrying out activities that were effective in 2008, when all you had to do was massively underlink your site to get into the top positions. In doing so, they propose budgets in which it is difficult to achieve good results – a few hundred zlotys per month is very often too low an amount to break through on important phrases. Which does not mean that it is impossible to get any results on this budget as well.

However, it is hard to do so for a very simple reason – everyone around you is already spending more. In addition – all those who occupy the top positions have been investing for many months or even years. So this advantage cannot be overlooked. To get to the same level a large financial or time investment is required. This is because we can take care of content creation and link acquisition on our own. Often, however, this is not enough, because there is also on-site optimization or internal linking.

Thus, one can come to a conclusion that has been repeated for a long time – SEO costs money, and not a lot of it. And good SEO often costs a lot.

So, is it worth investing if SEO theoretically doesn’t work?

As always, it can be said that it depends. It depends on the industry, the competition and the financial outlay. It is always prudent to perform an SEO Audit, which will tell you where you are, what you should improve, what the costs would be and what your competitors are doing. This is a good starting point for further discussions.

In many cases – looking from experience – sites have a lot of basic errors, due to which they display in very distant positions and do not generate traffic. Usually it’s a lack of content, unoptimized headers, titles and meta descriptions, as well as long loading times, lack of inbound links or lack of internal linking. Often, just the implementation of an audit results in significant changes in terms of keywords displayed or traffic generated. These actions can translate directly into generating inquiries, online store purchases or phone calls.

So what about that 200,000 a month contract… SEO doesn’t work?

The above paragraphs reflected very much the path we had to go through in one of our projects. Initially, the decision-makers were very doubtful about the legitimacy of doing SEO, noting the low effectiveness, lack of results and general bad reputation of the industry. However, we were able to present an interesting enough perspective that we signed a contract and began audit activities.

It showed that there was a great deal of room for improvement on the site:

• excessive loading times
• lack of engaging content
• unoptimized titles and meta descriptions
• 404 errors
• lack of properly embedded map
• too large size of images
• lack of internal linking
• So there was a lot of work at the beginning, but knowing that the total number of searches for phrases related to the industry is even several thousand per month made us eager to implement the next steps.

So we implemented technical changes to the site, added content, created blog sections, took care of internal linking, plugged in the map properly, and started off-site external link acquisition activities. These activities were outlined for a period of three months, after which we were to meet and discuss next steps.

The meeting took place recently. We discussed further activities related to the site. We mainly paid attention to focusing on usability for users (User Experience) and optimizing the site for conversions. While discussing the changes to the site and the shape of the new subpages, we heard one sentence, “Thanks to the website and SEO activities, we signed a contract for 200K per month, so we want to further develop the project.”

The result is that we will be creating a new site, based on a custom graphic design, and further develop the project.

So does SEO not work…?