I feel bad charging what I know I am worth.

Anything more than $25 an hour for SEO is robbery. No SEO can guarantee results I don't care what anybody says. Most SEO's also have learned how to SEO by trial, error, and just reading forums like this. No one goes to college for 4 years to learn to be an SEO.

$25 an hour for SEO is top pay imho and anything more you guys SHOULD feel guilty as you are just taking advantage of people. Most nurses and teachers don't get paid this much.

 

Hey, Labrocca, are you the one from Dnforum and the rest of the forums?

I think 25 bucks per hour would be OK maybe for a 17 y/o optimizing his buddie's site, but most of us wouldn't even take a look at your site for that amount. It is like the guy that charges $100 for changing a screw... $1 for changing it and $99 for the knowledge needed to know exactly the screw to change. SEO is kind of a science, loads of things to learn. not everyone can do it by just reading forums... it takes lots of trial and error.

 

yeah it's me fryman..I am here now too

And that's my problem with SEO's that charge $100 an hour...you are paying them to learn and they can't give you guaranteed results. 17 or 50 it doesn't matter...the best SEO is just another person who can change anchor text, do some submissions, change some page text and get you some links. Honestly it's not rocket science..or even a science at all. There is no answer to SEO only questions. Will this work? Will that work? When will results occur? You can't answer ANY of them. You can only try a few things here and there. Also ANY SEO can mess up and get you banned. It happens. You can be #1 for a week and then delisted, penalized, or banned.

Paying for SEO is really just a scam. It's what all those pre-bubbleburst "consultants" are now doing. Those guys were bullcrap too. Every jerk had a "Consultant" business card. It was stupid.

If SEO people are so good at what they do then why don't they have millions of dollars and top ranking on all the search engines? Show me ANY proof that a $100 an hour SEO is really any more valuable that the site owner spending a week doing some reading and then trying it out himself?

Would you pay for SEO Fryman???

 

He he... I get paid for SEO

I guess it is just like any other job. Sure, you can take the time to learn if you have it (i've spent 2 years learning all I can), but some people just can't do that. It is like learning to repair a car, you can do it, but some people would rather just take it to a mechanic.

I do agree that SEO prices are ridiculous in some cases, I have asked many times why can a SEO charge 5 or 6 grand to work on a site... I sure wouldn't charge that.

 

I agree with you to a certain extent. I don't charge for SEO... but I do charge for marketing. I like to be flexible in the way I can try and get traffic to the site.

$25/hour is peanuts for SEO stuff. An SEO does have to have a certain level of skill with a computer and a certain level of learning abilities as SEO is constantly changing.

 

When I think SEO I think in it's purest form.

1. SERP reports
2. Keyword analyzing
3. Competition analyzing
4. HTML code change suggestions
5. Meta changes
6. Layout suggestions for changes

Lot's of SEO's only do reports with no actual marketing or code changes themselves. Obviously if you are also doing FTP work, promotion, and marketing then you should get a few more bucks.

However $100 (someone said $150 even) an hour is pure rape. It's insulting. The skillset it takes to do the SEO I mentioned above is practically zero. I am not trying to insult anyone or make any enemies here but it's my opinion and how I feel on the situation.

If you can get $100 an hour more power to you but this topic is about conscience and feeling guilty about charging too much. I think if you are feeling guilty there is a reason. Some people can justify any action they take. That does not make their actions just.

 

Charging too cheap will often lose business as well. What happens when most people go shopping for products, you dont pick the most expensive and you dont pick the cheapest, you get the middle of the range.

 

People should be paid by the results they produce - period. If someone made me 2 million dollars from their skill, then 1 million dollars is a fair rate. To say that someone that has a degree deserves more, or that someone that learned their skill on their own deserves less is silly. Payment for any industry should be based on results, no matter what your education or background.

And yes, I think good teachers should be paid more - most are underpaid.

 

SEO is so simple you could train a monkey to do it

but the fact remains some people consitantly come out on top, and as long as those top postions are worth thousands of dollars a month, people will be charging for them

Some of them do, and some like me and many other people on this board don't make millions but make a pretty good living

Because some people don't want to learn shit about seo, they are lawyers, doctors, run warehouses, sell real estate etc. They don't want to build links or learn about anchor text. They want to do what they do.

 

In a past life I spent 9 months selling double glazing so I picked up a few tricks there, I guess the most basic selling method is to make sure you waterproof your clients first, meaning that whatever price you charge they should have a rough idea of what it may cost before you give your prices and therefore you will not alarm/scare/shock them.

i.e. I would say that I used to work for company x before moving to the current company a while ago but they charged $1k per window and $1.5k for a door, just slipping that into the conversation you could see them count up the windows in their house as their head tilted backwards and their eyes moved left to right

An hour later when I was ready to give my price they had been waterproofed and I could only impress them with my price and quality. After discussing some common horror stories I then spent time on quality/guarantees etc, after a sale is made it is very important to go back over everything explaining it again as "buyers remorse" kicks in when you leave and they start to worry about how much they are spending and do they really need it so spending an extra 15 minutes reassuring them "after" the sale is good practice even though you may feel the money is in the bag.

Albeit the above example is for a direct sale the techniques are applicable to a variety of situations and may of of use to someone.

 

labrocca - You're thinking too small.

You are thinking from the perspective of some cat who has a website with some adsense or some dropshipped products to resell. Guys with MAYBE $100,000 advertising budgets.

Small change.

Companies like Dell, GM, Dex have advertising budgets in the millions. What % do you suppose should be dedicated to their online markets..? With search fast becoming a medium of connecting products and buyers search optimization of ecommerce and brand populating sites is fast becoming a focus for strong market leaders.

When Dell gets beat out by "Joe's 'puter site" for the term Desktop Computer the Dell CEO has got to get pretty upset. And when "Joe's Chevy Forum" beats out GMs family of Chevrolet sites for any number of make/medel searches - heads roll.

Mind share. People with powerful brands understand mindshare. The capacity to come to peoples mind when someone mentions a product you sell - they've been spending BILLIONS of dollars on every advertising medium ever developed catalogs, flyers, billboards, radio, television, email, search engine results -

Some companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on paid advertising - and make many hundreds of thousands of dollars a month back in online sales and website generated sales leads. Why Wouldn't a corporate organization pay to have people with the experiance to do their best...?

Advertizing firms can't "guarantee" market acceptance of a campaign. They present it to test audiances and tweak the campaign according to findings.

Is search engine marketing really so different..?

Online sales is quickly becoming a valid income channel for many major corporations, and while their online income can comprise 20%+ of their income, online marketing only amounts to 3-4%.

Millions of people see the Super Bowl - so advertizers have convinced companies to spend millions of dollars in advertizing for 30 seconds to a 1 minute. There are millions of Americans who don't drink alcohol, so and advertisiment for an alchoholic beverage comes on and millions of Americans laugh at the cute animal or snicker at the goofy guy, or oggle the scantily clad babes and go on with their life. Never to spend a dime on that product.

This sort of 'shotgun advertising' is the past. Number crunchers have already figured out that the ROI on a $1 Million advertising campaign can't be effectively measured, but ROI on SEO can be measure exactly. From searched term to completed sale visitor/conversion tracking software can quantify any $$ spent on optimization.

Spend $100K on an print ad capaign that will hit 50,000 viewers of which maybe 2,000 will respond, and maybe 500 will convert to a sale - oh, and I can't really measure that since there no way to figure out who got their flyer...who read it...or which store they boiught from..or if they even did.

Why would I be afraid to spend $100,000 on a search marketing campaign - optimizing my website to appear when seekers search for products that I carry - when I can measure the responce, track the visits and confirm the conversions..? and when I'm likely to get $500,000 back in sales since the person searching online has a much higher tendancy to buy than the guy who finds a flyer in with his daily mail..?

Anything more than $25hr for SEO is too much...? what!!?? Wake up to the real world. The internet is more than 'Joe's Chevy Forum', theres big business out there, and there is a wide open market place where guys with years of advertising experiance can't begin to compete, while there are guys that hang out in DP Forum that are self trained in the school of hard knocks that could provide realtime consulting and experiance that could make BIG difference.

What is SEO worth..? I guess that depends on the experiance of the service provider, and the ambition of the client.

 

Nice post, dude

 

Very good post, and definitely worth a green rep

 

Great post AzAkers, and I am tempted to agree with you right down the line. If it weren't for a meeting I had the other day with an SEO firm.

The meeting was with a reputable SEO firm (in NZ), they asked what SEO had been done and what tactics we had employed, quoted a starting price of $5000 for an initial appraisal, but did say during the meeting that 'there probably isn't much we can do for you', they also pointed out (quite often) that they were very clever and knew what they were doing.

I went to these guys as a second opinion as I do my own SEO. I was quite prepared to pay, more than they asked, for good advice - I charge for what I know, and I expect to pay for good advice.

At the end of the meeting all I had was a hand full of good intentions and no guarantees.

I have no doubt that the company in question does give it's clients (some blue chip companies) excellent advice and get them good results.

I just wonder if it's a case of you buy the product in the branding you want?

 

You have to consider several other issues at hand...

Just because it's easy in your mind doesn't mean that other people feel the same. I've done consulting, mentoring, and teaching for almost ten years...many people don't grasp new things very quickly, especially if it involves learning the lingo and working with numbers. I've been testing several methods for training people to do seo and 50% of the people I work with have a lot of trouble learning it.

For many businesses it boils down to this...

They don't have the time and/or energy to learn to do it themselves. Even if they did, the might not have the time to just do the work because they are busy running other parts of the business. They realize it can save them money to pay an experienced person to do this (avoiding mistakes they might make while learning). Many Internet business owners are not necessarily tech or web savvy. They are willing to pay good money to grow their business by working with folks experienced and on top of the pulse of what's happening online.


You can try to compare average salaries across industries...but it really doesn't mean anything. It's not apples to apples.

To get a fair idea of what SEO is worth you have to look at all types of marketing costs and their average ROI. People will pay a lot for SEO because it's proven itself effective and even with high fees it still often has better ROI than other forms of marketing. Now if you want to still argue about "anything more than $25 per hour is ridiculous" then let's talk about cost of living...because I can honestly say that I wouldn't be able to survive if I only charged that amount. Where I live I have to charge minimum $75 an hour just to get by as a freelancer. Thank god I don't have kids, because otherwise I'd have to charge double that.

Don't get me started on talking about the self employment taxes I pay, the time I spend just marketing my own business (and those costs), the fact that I have to pay for my own health insurance, dental insurance, etc, AND business insurance. That's just part of the iceberg of business related expenses an seo company would have.


It's never as easy as saying "if you can be number one on Google, then why aren't you making millions?."


PS: I hadn't read all the posts in this thread yet, so I just now got AzAkers...great stuff. It's exactly what I was thinking but was too lazy to post. lol

 

This was a fantastic post azakers and I agree with it 100%.

I would also add that if someone can run a successful business selling their services at a cheaper rate than their competitors then that's just business! I don't know why people can complain about business charging too much or too little for a service. If someone is willing to pay X to do a certain job, what does this have to do with anyone else?

 

I am really bad at asking for money, I've lost count of the number of small jobs I've done and refused to charge for

 

The bottom line is that as the title states "I feel bad charging what I know I am worth. ", the service must be worth it. So in that case there is no reason to feel bad.

 

Great post, reps comming your way

 

This is like asking the pope if the donation box should be removed. You guys are mostly making money on SEO so of course you are gonna say that $100-$500 an HOUR is fair. Also I think of SEO in it's purest form. If you want to entangle more into it like marketing then of course that ups the wage.

You guys can charge what you want...but no one here seems to be a Jerry Mcguire. I earned 2 bad rep points from my opinions here. That's fine too. It's obvious that my words are very threatening. Heaven forbid someone reads my post and agrees.

IMHO SEO's are bogus and I feel inspired to start a site devoted to debunking their "secrets" and exposing SEO's for what they really are.