SEO Business

A buddy of mine is interested in starting a local design business for companies that are not "web-enabled". He and I have been discussing the possibility of working on a package with design and marketing in mind (he'd do the design, I would do the marketing).

I've been tinkering here and there with SEO and have been able to get pages and sites ranked fairly well and am making a decent bit of pocket change as well. However, I'm fairly clueless as to running an SEO business as far as pricing is concerned.

I want to know what most of you have been charging others, or what have you paid to have SEO work done? Most sites I browse that deal with SEO services typically require you to call and get a price quote. I can see the reasons in this, but on the other hand it doesn't really give a fair market value on what the service is worth. The most difficult aspect of all of this is that you can't guarantee results, and that's something a lot of people may shy away from.

Also, how many are using the Co-op for business related services for clients? I'm personally using it primarily as my bread and butter to see how well it works out for various key terms. From my testing, I've seen it work extremely well on its own without any other link building campaigns (directory links or recip links). So, I'm fairly confident that I could run a few ads with my weight to help jump start the link building campaign.

Looking forward to hearing from you guys.

 

The reason that people don't quote is that every single job is different. There are so many variables within SEO that it just isn't possible to give an out of the box quote. How can you give a price? E.G. fixed price cost of £xxx one person has a site of 5 pages, the other has a database driven site of 10,000 pages, what now? Method 2 price per page. in the above example the price for 10,000 pages is laughable as it is never going to happen.

The other reason that you will not get a price is that different people provide a different level of service. I provide a 100% service that includes usability conversions layout design as well as marketing and link building. How can I possibly give a price for this? Some clients are able to make all the changes themselves, in which case the cost is MUCH lower. Other clients don't have a clue so I have to arrange to carry out all the site changes. Some sites are dynamic and not search engine friendly, they have to be re-scripted.

Competition: Some sites operate in an arena that is hardly competitive, and a few changes to the content and navigation system, plus submission to a couple of directories will get it ranking and converting. Other sites might operate in the sex/mortgage markets which are going to take constant link building to get and maintain their rankings.

I hope now that you can see how difficult it is to put a price on a job. It is like asking a builder to give you a fixed price on building your house without him having even seen your plans. A shack in the middle of town is going to cost a lot less than a 50 bedroom mansion in the mountains.

 

Thanks for the comments, OWG.

I understand the issues regarding it. I guess I'm just looking for some rough estimates on pricing to get some ballpark figures to work with. I'd rather not quote too high out of jobs. I guess it's likely best to start at a low figure at first and generate an established clientel before moving on and increasing the price quotes for additional services (depending on the size of the job, amount of pages, keywords, etc.).

As for my second question, you seemed to have skipped that. Are you using the co-op for business clients?

 

Infiniterb,

If you use coop for clients then you will be requirg to maintain those weight for entire lifetime of the site. I had a site that was used 5000+ weight for 3 months and rocked SERPs. But now after removing the weight, after 1.5 months its no where in top 20.

Hence this will be same for your clients site too.

PS: I'm not in SEO business, but i was thinking to start one in future.