This week, I’m thankful for my team, I’m thankful for our clients, thankful for our friends in the business like Mike Belasco, and thankful that our new service launch has gotten such a warm reception.

Doug Karr, of the MarketingTechBlog, got a preview of the new, low-cost service offerings supported by the Software as a Service tool that we’re using to help clients monitor the performance of their sites. In his review, he called it an “incredible SEO dashboard,” and went on to say:

There are three important elements of search engine tracking… the volume of searches per keyword, your current rank and volumes (and relative share), and your historical rank (whether you’re gaining or losing ground). As far as I know, there’s no other product on the market that looks at search as a ‘market’ and translates your rank to market share. RefreshWeb has done this with a simple but powerful reporting interface.

“Simple but powerful” was the whole idea, and our CTO, Tom Bartling, has spent every spare hour for the past year or so making it work. RefreshWeb wants to give a shout out to Tom, who’s not just a brilliant programmer, but a patient and helpful guy, smart, funny, creative, and always willing to explain and teach. These are an incredible combination, and we are SO glad he’s on our team. In fact, if you find yourself with an end-of-the-year budget you need to spend quickly, you should send it to Tom, care of RefreshWeb. It would make him happy, make you feel good, and make me a hero…one of those rare win/win/win opportunities!

Back to business: our goal is to provide exactly the services that clients need, at a price point that makes sense for any size business. And, if these new packages take off, there’s some job creation in store. This new dashboard makes it possible to provide SEO support starting at just $250/month. That’s a small fraction of the full service, SEO agency model we have always used in the past, but in this continuing recession, helping all kinds of business increase sales by moving up in the rankings is a worthwhile goal. So, we’ve developed a lot of flexible solutions for clients, from people doing SEO in-house to folks interesting in seeing if SEO works. Besides, we know there are a lot of companies that fallen for some fast talk and not seen results–but they have read enough to know that there IS a right way to do SEO.

If you’re come to the blog via the home page, you probably noticed all the design changes, namely boxes defining some prospects’ needs, pointing to new pages addressing how we can address this particular problem.

This was all possible because last Thursday, we launched our SEO dashboard at InnoTech in Austin, in combination with more flexible, less expensive service offerings. This is a big milestone, because it’s the first fruit of our strategy to evolve into a product company. As a bridge from here to there, we’re only selling the dashboard in combination with services we provide. From the business perspective, we now have a $250/mo. entry level price point instead of a typical monthly price of $2000, so our expectation is that this will stimulate a lot more demand. Plus, now we can help a lot more people weather the recession.

As a company, our intent is to become known for personalized education about search, tools for clients to better oversee and manage SEO (either internally or for an overview of the results from their consultants or SEO agencies), and as a trusted partner for developing site optimization strategy. The SEO dashboard is the first tool we’ve created, in response to where we believe the market is headed, which is wanting to develop search marketing as an internal capability. With the right kind of help, we think clients can develop this as a truly sustainable competitive advantage.