This article may contain personal views belonging to Tahir Dinç. What you are about to read goes with our SEO and SEO agency pages.

Türk SEM was here yesterday, it is here today and it will be here tomorrow. When SEO was not a known or established profession in Turkey, we were already doing SEO work in Şişli and genuinely serving a lot of companies.

Here is what I noticed: when we put the work into the right project, that project grew faster and the agency grew soundly with it. Around 2006 we decided to be more selective about the projects we develop. That was an advantage on a lot of fronts.

A difficult client drains the team’s energy and lowers the quality of what comes out of the hours worked. Once I understood that, we decided to be far more particular. We were probably running the most unusual selectivity rate for SEO clients anywhere.

We have had meetings with plenty of companies whose site had already been through a bad SEO process and been penalized under a previous agency. Now, say we sign for six months and take that job on: a heavy stress lands on the team. The reason; however good the software we write, and however far we take the content beyond even its competitors worldwide, that block does not lift.

The Philosophy of Quality on the Web

We do not look at a company the way a conventional SEO specialist does. We look at it first as a user who would get something out of that site. We look at the brand and at the products. You will not turn up in the results just because you wrote very good content; people have to like your products and they have to be searching for them. We examine your position in your sector and where your products and services sit in people’s minds.

Which is to say: for us, an SEO engagement starts with the whole and complete past performance of that company.

The Right Target

In our meetings with a client we listen, we analyze and we ask what they want. Large goals are fine under normal conditions, but; a near goal is a realistic one. Some of the people who come to us have 20 products on their site, for instance, and say they want to come up when somebody types “shoes”.

We tell them, gently, that this goal is a long way off, that good SEO will not get them there any time soon, and that the product count is not enough. We say we will focus first on a niche phrase like “red running shoes”, and that depending on how those products and the site perform we can work outward from there, step by step. The prospect then says, “some agencies say we could get there within 1 year.” It is hard to understand how the large SEO agencies make a promise like that. An agency makes strong promises to 10 clients, succeeds with 20% of them (one way or another) and fails with 80%. The 20% then become the standing clients that produce the standing income.

At Türk SEM we have 4 brands under us and we guard the reputation of every one of them carefully. Our Türk SEM brand is precious to us too, of course. We think investing in trust is the right thing to do for goals both near and far. Company people come to us and we go through it in detail. Sometimes the job is so serious that you wonder where to begin, where to go on and where it ends. It needs a lot of time, and we say so gently, and we explain our main rule, the one third rule. Under that rule:

  • One third of the budget: our people (the cost of the SEO specialist assigned to you)
  • One third of the budget: PR, Google Ads and other costs
  • One third of the budget: our operating cost and our operating profit

The figure that comes out for a given company can be high. Now say we cut the price by 50% and put that to the client. In that case we will have to provide fewer people and a smaller PR and Google Ads budget. And when that happens we will not have laid down enough time to reach the goals or to run the process properly. Which is why, in cases like that, we cannot accept either.

We Are Already Succeeding

Here is what we learned from the experience we have built since 1999: a quality site makes itself felt immediately. The insight we have carried since our DMOZ editorship says that Googlebot is now smarter than people, and that details like CX and UX tell you the future of a project. Two software engineers here are continually building the software that makes our clients’ websites worth more than their competitors’.

Our agency does not only do SEO; where it is called for, it puts forward strategy on television advertising or YouTube collaborations. We are chasing “pure success”, and that is how we reach the audience we are after.

If You Want to Work With an SEO Specialist

If they make you even the smallest promise, never work with that firm. By which I mean, a sentence like “in six months we will be at this position for that keyword” is never acceptable. And sadly, a great many other SEO agencies make exactly those promises. You have to be careful. What is on the table is important enough to shape the fate of your company.

Noisy emails selling SEO work land in our inbox too. I would advise you to be very careful with those as well. A good and honest SEO agency is already succeeding, and it does not sell SEO by email.

High quality is never cheap. It cannot be cheap: good software, good content and above all reaching your audience flawlessly take effort, and the process has to be run properly. If you are going to work with an SEO agency, work with the one that explains the process to you transparently, not the one with the lowest quote.