I remember the first time I learned about “a la carte”. It was the first day of middle school. I walked into the lunchroom and saw this sign for a la carte items. And my little 7th grade brain had no idea what that meant. What I did know was that I could buy ice cream with my lunch meal and there was not one thing my parents could do about it.
Today all kinds of things can come in a la carte models. Of course there’s the restaurant model. There’s home services where you can pick what you want done out of a list of options. There’s personal care a la carte models. Business practices where you just need accounting or IT support. And it works for digital marketing and SEO services as well.
Some agencies and SEO providers offer a la carte services for just link building campaigns or just blog writing. Other agencies like Boostability offer full packages that looks at an SEO campaign at a whole and optimize the whole site rather than just a couple tasks.
So which method is best for your particular needs? Let’s look at the perks and cons of both.
A la Carte SEO Model
This model is also sometimes called project-based SEO. It depends on the agency, but the concept is the same. Essentially, you buy a product at a time. There’s a lot of options, and honestly, many customers might not understand what all the tasks are that they can choose from.
There’s some benefit to this model. With an a la carte SEO model, you get exactly what you need. You aren’t paying for potential extras that might not actually help your website because of your industry, your location, or other reasons. Perhaps you don’t have the bandwidth to create new blog content regularly. Or you’re not sure how to do link outreach. If someone has that specialty and that’s all they do, it could work perfectly for your business needs. If you only have one need, then a la carte is likely the way to go.
A la carte model pricing depends on the work required. You could end up paying a higher price for just the one product because it’s a premium or more time consuming product. Or the agency could also charge different pricing depending on the amount of work actually done. Be sure that if you want to go this route to make sure that you understand how pricing will work up front.
Full Service SEO
Full service SEO takes a holistic approach to improving a website. It does all the work of improving keywords, optimizing the code, creating insanely good content, improving a link portfolio, and so much more. Full service SEO is more for those who want to improve their online presence, but don’t know quite how to do that. Or they want to make sure that their SEO campaign gets done right by professionals who know how to navigate the Google algorithm and best practices.
Full Service SEO, like Boostability provides to our small business customers, and to our partners who would like to re-sell it, offers everything you could need in an SEO campaign. But the scale and breadth of the campaign can depend on the price. Lower budgets still bring results, but they can take longer or be for keywords that might not be as competitive. Bigger budgets offer wide-ranging options. But either way, the SEO campaign will improve your online rank and presence, building your authority and hopefully increasing your traffic and eventually revenue. Full service SEO pricing often depends on the ultimate goal of your campaign.
Which model for me?
No matter which model you choose, improving the SEO of your website is very VERY important. More than 90% of searchers never go to the second page of Google when looking up something. SEO gets you found by those people looking for your product or service or that answer that only you can provide on your website. So no matter how you do it, you should be optimizing your website for search engines.
A la carte provides some flexibility in what you need for your website. It could also provide the availability of you to implement the optimizations yourself on your site. It allows you to fill in the pieces of your marketing plan on your terms. Full Service allows the experts to do what they do best and optimize your site depending on a variety of factors. They know the Google best practices and what elements of an SEO campaign can best help your site. Full service takes the guess work out of an SEO campaign.
If you want help with your full service SEO campaign, or want to offer it to your small business customers, call us here at Boostability!
