Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
Archive for May, 2008
How much should I be paying for SEO services?
Pricing for SEO services vary a great deal, making it difficult to know what you are getting for your money. However, you can gert a better idea of the value by requesting a long term roadmap that will show you exactly the type and amount of work that will be done over the course of several months.
Furthermore, the experience levels of the SEO’s that will be working for you will come into play. Basic SEO is relatively easy to grasp and implement. That type of SEO is cheap, and will supply you with meager results. However, for results that will provide a more substantial boost to your business requires more complex SEO in order to rank for the high-traffic (and therefore highly competitive) keyword phrases.
This requires the work of well-trained experts that have a constant thumb on the pulse of the SEO world, as well as have the technology necessary to constantly analyze the search engines and watch for changes in algorithms. All of these things cost money, and will therefore drive up the costs of SEO.
A few things to ask of an SEO company are:
- How experienced is the SEO(s) that will be working on my site?
- Can you show me case studies of other companies you’ve done work for that were in a similar situation as I am know?
- What kind of results can I expect, and when can I expect to see the results?
You’ll also want to try and avoid paying upfront, opting instead for a monthly subscription. This will not only spread out the costs, but it will also allow you to terminate a relationship with a company that is failing to meet expectations, preventing you from losing any more money than you need to. many agencies require large upfront fees ensuring that they get paid regardless of the value they provide for you. A subscription based model forces a company to provide you with results month to month or risk losing your business.
Verbal Abuse Slows Down Productivity
Kevin Kennemer, SPHR
Anyone can have a bad day and lash out at a coworker. Civilized people will later apologize for their poor behavior. On the other hand, there are certifiably rude people in corporate America who have made incivility, rudeness and verbal abuse a way of life in business. The companies who employ these violent neanderthals in business suits should beware of their negative consequences.
In a recent behavioral study reported by Harvard Business Review, it was determined that workers on the receiving end of verbal abuse became impaired in their ability to perform tasks. According to researchers, “their studies indicate that after exposure to rudeness, people think hard about the incident—whether just ruminating or trying to formulate a response—and those thought processes take cognitive resources away from other tasks.”
“The mere thought of being on the receiving end of verbal abuse hurts people’s ability to perform complex tasks requiring creativity, flexibility, and memory recall,” according to Christine Porath of the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Amir Erez of the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida.
The study also found the environmental impact of rudeness to be very profound and overreaching to even those outside the receiving end of the abuse. Researchers stated, “Verbal abuse affects more than just those who experience it directly; it apparently can harm innocent bystanders.”
If you want your company culture to deteriorate with increasing doses of fear, risk aversion, inability to make decisions, and lack of communication, employ or promote rude people. In other words, trying to create a great workplace while employing rude people is a recipe for failure.
It is common for business leaders to allow executives, rainmakers, and movers and shakers to behave in a rude manner, including verbal and psychological abuse. Leaders falsely believe the rude rainmaker’s contributions overcompensate for the toxic venom they spew in the office. Some mistaken leaders believe a toxic tyrant’s abuse causes employees to work harder.
Do you want to build an energized, profitable and high-performance organization? Require your leaders to take a stand against rude behavior. At times doing the right thing is difficult—it calls for strength of character—but it brings great rewards. The CEO must weed out abusive employees no matter their position in the organization. By doing so, the organization can return to an environment conducive to creativity, flexibility, productivity and profitability.
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Kevin Kennemer is president of The People Group, LLC a consulting firm committed to enhancing employee lives, increasing business performance and improving society through positive people practices. With twenty years of people practice experience, Kennemer was formerly the chief human resource officer of an international energy company that rose from obscurity to #5 on Forbes list of largest privately held companies. Kennemer is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources.
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