When is SEO just too expensive?
Now this may sound funny, but I think it’s interesting to look at the cost of production of some of the largest most powerful websites out there. As an SEO I tend to judge huge sites radically based upon their ability to optimize code. We may think well let’s work some magic here and do a URL re-write or let’s optimize the way the templates are generated. But the most common thing that I tend to neglect is the overall cost!
Did you know that a simple code change, not a complicated URL re-write on a very powerful site could cost as much as $300k? So now that the company has paid for their consultant to come in and tell them what to do, they still have to fork out this much in resources. It’s quite a humbling thought.
This includes, engineering time. If the engineering teams are setup on certain groups or resources there is a certain cost associated with each hour of his or her time. That cost is then multiplied by the number of QA engineers associated with the testing of the code and then the user front end testing required to make sure that the user base is not going to freak out. This is before it’s even pushed to production and taking into account the simple cost of copying the code from staging, to production and then testing to make sure everything is live and happy.
I think back to some of my past articles, like its 2007 and most ecommerce sites are not SEO optimized. Yes the big companies have a large risk, we think its small but the cost is quite substantial. There still is no excuse for the smaller sites that can make these tweaks and it may cost them several thousand dollars in engineering time.
Ok this is a result of my brain going in crazy directions today with too much caffeine.
Did you know that a simple code change, not a complicated URL re-write on a very powerful site could cost as much as $300k? So now that the company has paid for their consultant to come in and tell them what to do, they still have to fork out this much in resources. It’s quite a humbling thought.
This includes, engineering time. If the engineering teams are setup on certain groups or resources there is a certain cost associated with each hour of his or her time. That cost is then multiplied by the number of QA engineers associated with the testing of the code and then the user front end testing required to make sure that the user base is not going to freak out. This is before it’s even pushed to production and taking into account the simple cost of copying the code from staging, to production and then testing to make sure everything is live and happy.
I think back to some of my past articles, like its 2007 and most ecommerce sites are not SEO optimized. Yes the big companies have a large risk, we think its small but the cost is quite substantial. There still is no excuse for the smaller sites that can make these tweaks and it may cost them several thousand dollars in engineering time.
Ok this is a result of my brain going in crazy directions today with too much caffeine.
Labels: seo
by Aaron Shear
3 Comments:
Wow I just realized that I sound like that chick who says when is a diet pill worth $153 a bottle?
The amount of money people pay amazes us DIY guys for sure. :)
Aaron... you're right on the money here. I worked with a company that couldn't make changes because of the cost. For any given change, including minor copy changes, it had to be run by product managers, usability, business analysts who write the documentation for the programmers, programmers, a person that writes the QA script, the QA person, project managers. The list was unbelievable. To say the least, URL re-writes weren't an option :)
SEOs need to think about multiple ways to solve a single problem. The less expensive solution seems to be based on a company's unique environment.
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