One of the hardest parts about being an SEO professional is pricing your services. You don’t want to charge prospects so much they run away, but then again you don’t want to eat into your profits and sell yourself short either. Before learning how to price your services, first determine your worth. Christine OKelly, the Self Made Chick has very interesting articles and one of them can teach you how to determine your value or worth.
First, I will give you an example of a good pricing structure and then explain it in detail:
- Keyword Research of Niche Category Terms - $75 - I will research a maximum of 5 different keywords for your website. For additional keywords the price will be $50 for every 5 keywords/phrases over the first 5.
- On Page Optimization - $150 - This includes the first 3 pages, each additional page is $100/page.
- Link Building - $200 - This includes between 50 and 100 links from related sites with high PageRank. (For this I recommend outsourcing link building as it is the hardest and most time consuming part of SEO. One good resource for outsourcing link building is Directory Submission They are a directory submission company and getting 100 directory submissions can cost you as low as $20.)
- Error Checking & Repair - $35 Inspection - $35/hour for error repairs. (Quote the client on how many hours it will take you to fix the errors and promise to stop before going over your quote. Never go below 1 hour because your time is worth it.)
- Site Submission - $35 - Submit site to all major search engines and be indexed within a few business days. (I highly recommend setting up a Google Webmasters Account if you haven’t yet: Google Webmaster Tools In order to generate XML sitemaps for use with this site go to: XML Sitemaps Generate a sitemap for every client whom you want to index in Google and all the other search engines and submit it through your webmaster tools account. Google will index the site sometimes within the same day.)
- Analytics Reporting - $10/month or week or day - (Use a Google Analytics account and set up analytics reporting to email the client a report automatically every period(m/w/d) This way they see what you are doing. Let them know it takes a while before results show so they don’t pay to get a bunch of reports of no traffic.)
- Copy Writing - $120/page - I recommend outsourcing this also: SEOCopyWriters These guys are really good and very fair priced. Call them before you email them and let them know specifics on your copy writing needs. Also let them know Jeremiah Smith from SimpleTiger referred you
With this pricing structure you have total control over what your client receives and how much it costs them. You can both agree on a price with details before signing a contract and then neither of you will have any unexpected costs. If I were to consult or analyze any prospective client’s site, I would initially inform them that most likely they could use all of the services outlined above. Then if the price is simply too high, you can cut away services until it meets their budget.
Some clients may only want link building for instance. You and your client will both know that it costs $200 or so for a link building campaign, and if that’s all they want then thats all you have to do. This saves all the sweat and work of going back and forth and trying to work out details on every single contract you make with each individual client. You spend less time writing contracts and more time completing them.
What about my monthly income?
Much like changing oil in a car keeps it new and strong, tweaking website syntax, keywords, and links help maintain high rankings. The more competitive the industry (like insurance, law, real estate) the more important this continual maintenance is to the high rankings of a site.
One of my clients requires work almost every day in order to stay in the top of the rankings, this is slowly getting easier as the domain name ages and as I learn new tricks to automate each process.
So charging someone for this contract on a monthly basis is pretty easy:
“After we get all of this up and going I will need to do continual keyword research, on page optimization, and website submissions on a frequent basis. I charge a monthly fee for each of these services, but you will receive a discount off of each service since I will be more familiar with your site and needs. The longer the contract with me, the better your discount”
Give them a discount for a longer contract with you so that they will be more inclined to purchase the longer contract. This is absolutely no trick at all because the longer they have their site optimized, the better the results are going to be in the long run. If they have had their site optimized for over 2 years with you, they should really be rolling in the business. It also makes things easier on you because you can more easily set up goals for the client and for your self, and trust that you will have an income to provide those services for the length of the contract.
Try to make changes to your pricing structure before you advertise it and determine if you need to factor in any other services like design elements, server clean up, landing page creation, PPC management etc.
If there is anything else you think I forgot to add please post a comment and let me know. If you have any questions I would be more than happy to answer them.
For more info check out Andy Beal’s post on “Top 10 Business Mistakes Search Marketing Firms Make”
If you are looking at getting your business off the ground quick, or would just like a professional PPC manager for consulting, please call my friend Greg Goodson with Sawtooth Media.
