How much to charge for an SEO retainer?

I have a potential client who would like to know my costs for a monthly retainer for SEO work. How much would you normally charge for this and how much work per month would this normally include?

I have previously only charged a fixed fee for SEO projects rather than a monthly maintainance package so I'm unsure how much to quote.

Thanks in advance,
Kev

 

It vasty depends on where in the world you're based and the quality of your work.

 

If you just need to maintain existing rankings just charge a nominal amount but if client his website to be targetted with more keywords or attaining higher rankings charge a good fees.

 

Also depends on the level of competition for the site. Ty to figure out how much time you think you will need to spend each month. Then multiply by your hourly charge and then give them a 10-20% discount for the security the retainer offers.

 

This is sage advice.

It's very hard to know how much to charge until you have a solid idea of how many man-hours it will take to meet (and then maintain) the objectives of the client. You could very well be selling yourself short if the project turns out to be more involved than you had originally anticipated (and quoted).

My job consists of helping to position the five websites that make up the service offering of the company I work for. Occasionally we are asked to help other local sites improve their ranking position. One site I recently helped to optimize was for the gospel group of a local church here in town. It only took a couple hours of work over a few weekends to get their site ranking nicely. That project was stunningly easy-primarily because the keywords we optimized for weren't very competitive.

 

It does seem pretty difficult to get this right, I think my best bet would be setting a fixed fee for a certain amount of hours a month and then charging an hourly rate for any extra work.