What would you expect from an SEO firm?

I'm currently doing a bit of research into the actual services offered by either the full-service or specialist search marketing agencies out there.

Of course, most of us know how to get rankings for our sites. The question is - how do we provide this as a service for clients?

There is a substantial difference between 'Bedroom SEO' and 'boardroom SEO', and I would love to hear some people's take on this.

How far do you go with your clients in terms of the specific services you charge for when they hire you?

Off the top of my head, here a few examples of the services that I think should be offered *and* charged for when offering SEO as a service for clients.

Press Release Distribution
Article Distribution
Backlink building services [This is where I fall over]
Site Audits

I guess they are a few of the fairly basic services that you can offer.

My question is - where do you draw the line in terms of what you charge for?

Simply offering a full 'SEO Service' isn't an option IMO, as what is required for one site, isn't for another.

So how do you charge for this kind of thing?

OK - something like a site audit is going to be a fairly fixed fee because it's all the same regardless of the site.

The same goes for press release and article distribution I guess.

It's link building that's throwing me. How can you quantify it? How can you charge for this kind of thing.

I'm not in the business of submitting a site to 100 directories for $50 - we're talking about 'Big Brand SEO', which is why I'm struggling to get my head around how you actually provide link building as a service for clients. Paid links is one way to do it, but of course there are ongoing costs associated with it.

So - I wanna hear from the Pro SEO's who actually offer it as a service. Not just the bedroom SEO's who perform it on their own sites. (Although I'd love to hear input from you guys too).

I'm really stuck here - I want to get this sorted in my head, but as we all know - SEO is down to so many factors how on earth do you write up a service plan that's fairly 'standard', when there are so man y factors to consider when planning a marketing campaign (Which is what we're really talking about here - marketing)...

Anyway, sorry for the incredibly long post - I'm just struggling a bit.

Cheers

Ol

 

Good post.

I am interested to know what people expect for a certain price.
Looking on sites like rentacoder.com people will post a "I want my brand new site to be in the top 10 on google for xxxxx keyword" and accept a bid for $50, what would you get for $50?

 

For $50 we wouldn't bother at all.

We're talking substantially more for the kind of service I'm reffering to. Think $xx,xxx rather than $x,xxx or $xxx

 

Anyone on here knows it is unrealistic and probably a con when you see SEO companies saying 'top 10 positions on google for $xxx' because there are just too many variables and too much unpredictability to offer something like that.

What should be done first in my opinion is giving the client a brief of how the industry works, to help them understand thatthere are set SEO techniques but results are very dependant on a lot of factors, their industry being the biggest.

Price wise, you should lay out exactly what services you will perform for the money you charge. If it was me I would charge a monthly rate which includes x articles, x press releases, x hours spent link building, x hours spent doing on page SEO, keyword analysis, ppc campaigns etc.

Of course results cannot be guaranteed and will depend a lot on the industry, how well (if at all) website is developed already etc etc. 'Guaranteed SERPS' simply cannot be offered, of course telling the client that their SE results are likely to improve is ok, coz they are but it can no whay be the basis of your service. Getting the client to understand this is the most important initial challenge.

If they were not convinced by the above, you could always have a costing structure of basic +commission for traffic improvements, SE results etc which would not only ensure you are getting paid but hopefully would also reassure teh client that you are confident that teh work you are doing will make a difference to them.

I am by no means a professional, more of a 'bedroom SEO' as you put it but with the experience I have, that is how I would approach it.

hope that helps.

 

We do a two-pronged approach for our clients.

Essentially we take their monthly budget and split it into two parts (not necessarily equal, it depends on the market and competition).

The first part that we work on is implementing converion tracking from Google (if we're able to), and then start some campaigns to drive traffic to the website for the custmer. Over time, the budget for this is reduced by about 20% per month after the first 2-3 months. This gives them instant results.

Once the ad campaigns are setup and running, we then look at organic listings and do a complete site analysis. We'll make several changes to the site (pending the client's review), and then work on a massive link and content building campaign.

It really comes down to the budget and requirements of the client.

We had one a few months ago, for example, that wanted to spend $25,000 just to increase their organic listings. They didn't want ppc at all, so we focus entirely on SEO. We agreed to spread the $25k across the year, which gives us roughly $2000 per month to work on the site. For that kind of money, we can build anywhere from 50-250 fresh related links and add 50-100 articles to the site. The link building works with the fresh content and gives the client a huge boost. The search engines love it because they see a continual growth of backlinks and content on the site.

It works perfectly for us as long as the client understands that it takes time to get their positions

 

I am not an SEO Pro but I am the owner of several technology consulting firms. My advice to you is to be as honest and upfront as possible with prospects. Make sure that they understand that this is not an exact science and that results take time. As far as pricing goes first figure out your hourly rate. I would base this figure on what independent white collar professionals (they can be for any industry) in your area charge. Just call around and you'll soon know. Then come up with a realistic amount of time to complete each job and charge that amount. From what I can tell it would be difficult to build an a la carte menu of services because each company's site, and their current SEO ranking, could be vastly different from the next.

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks for all the responses so far guys - Some good points raised. I'm pretty sure I've greened everyone too...

I'd love to agree, but we all know that there are firms out there that *can* do this. Usuually the firms are offshorea and as a result have lower margins. This is why I need to make sure that there is a way of offering a distinction between us and the rest of them.

I absoutley agree, however I doubt highly whether this is going to be charged. The chances are, that this info would be frovided at the pitch stage.

That's what I'd like to do, however like I say how can you quantify something like link building? Do you take the 'quality' of the links into account? The number?

There are never any guarantees with SEO - I agree. However saying that, it's pretty easy to say whether something is achievable or not. I wouldn't be in the business unless I felt I was capable of getting results - and I tell clients the same.

Unfortunately this is not an option.

So you mean rinning a test AdWords Campaign to see how the phrases convert?

So do you then charge on a per link basis or do you do it another way?

Absoutley - however as I previosly mentioned, we are being hired because we can deliver results. A 'guarantee' is never going to happen, but if I say 'We're going for [x] phrase' It's because I know that I can get the results.

Well this is where I disagree slightly. We're being hired for our knowledge and experience in the field. It might only take me 20 hours to tell them everything they need to know about how to rank well, but that's sure as hell going to be more expensive than the standard hourly rate.

Also there is a certian element of automation involved here. I'm not manyally going to check rankings for client sites every day - I'll automate it. Now does that mean that I only charge for the 0.05 seconds it takes me to click the 'Check the results' button? I think not.

Great suggestions so far guys - keep them coming.

 

There may well be offshore firms with lower margins, but does that really bean they can guarantee certain positions for certain keywords? I think the best way to make a distinction between you and the rest of them is honesty. By not offering unrealistic results you sound more plausable, especially like you said, if you back this up in your pitch by explaining a bit about SEO, how it works, and how 'getting a #1 in a month and staying there for ever for $xxx' is just not that simple. Good explanations and honesty will get clients on your side. Using this as part of your pitch is a good idea.

In terms of links, you should take into account the time taken to research 'good' links, the cost of the link (obviously). I don't think obtaining an excellent quality link is worth any more (in terms of what you charge) than a 'good' quality link, if the same amount of effort is put into finding and obtaining it. I would quantify it in terms of the time spent. So, for 10 hours link building a month you can expect somewhere in the region of x to 2x good to excellent quality links for a price of $1500 say (just an example).

In terms of the hourly rate, don't think of it as 20 hours @ hourly rate, think of it as - how long would it take them to gain all your knowledge, without your assistance? Can sure as hell bet it would be more than 20 hours!! You need to put a price on that if you were taking that approach. Same in terms of automation - may take you 5 seconds, but may take them an hour if they were doing it.

If you can use previous clients to quantify your rates - 'we got this client to #1 for this keyword, resulting in an increase in traffic of x and an increase in revenue of x' it sounds a lot more professional than just 'we can get you here for this much money!'

Hope that helps, it might read a bit muddled - i was just yping as thinking! Good luck and would be interested to see your final approach to this.

Andy.

btw... i didnt see any green

 

I wouldn't call it a test campaign. At first yes it's testing, but usually after the first month we've figured out which keywords convert best for the site in question and just push them through Adwords, YSM, and Overture. We do look at other ad sources, but those three make up probably 90% of the online ads we manage.

We usually charge on a per-link basis. But that's because we can offer certain guarantees that most people can't (i.e. all links will be PR2 or higher, relevant, etc). We basically have a set of guarantees that the client knows about before hand. We give them a list at the end of the month of all the links we have gathered for them and charge them accordingly. If one of the links doesn't meet the requirments, then we don't charge for it. Usually we'll get 150 links total, and only charge for about 130.

 

That's an interesting way of looking at it, and to be honest I've never consired running a PPC campaign to see what converts best for SEO. I imagine there will be descrepancies, but It's a great idea. Thanks

Nice - thanks.

Again, some great thoughts - I'll let you know how I plan to do it. Barry Lloyd from MakeMeTop has an interesting pricing structure that I'm thinking about loosly following. You can see details of it here.
http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/barry-lloyd.html

It looks like one of the more efficient ways of charging, the only issue I can see cropping up is that most of the clients I'm working with are fairly household names. Barry's method looks like he's basing the charges on the assumption that the site gets little-no SE traffic before he starts work - With the sites I'm working on, this certianly won't be the case.

There is a lot of scope for movement in terms of charging. It's great in one way that there are so many pricing models that you can use, but it's sure as hell no easy feat trying to work out which will work best for you.

Done

 

You will have to add a little extra on to your prices to cover the time spent researching how to charge clients

 

Ha! If only

Hopefully I'll have it all worked out by the end of the week.

 

I find it strange that an seo company would create a new site and make that site popular with the sole aim of driving traffic to the client website.

As a webmaster rather than an seo consultant I would not employ somebody to do this sot of service. I would much prefer somebody worked on getting my site to a high position as this will be much better in the long term and I would end up with a better site and more loyal client base because of it.

 

but organic rankings take time - months, years even depending on how tempremental the SE's are, driving some traffic non-organically, ie through ppc is a way to increase traffic in the short term, while you wait for the SEO modifications to take effect

 

My original concern before I read the whole article and discussion, was how you can you actually measure the work you do?

I read on and saw that they were using another site that they own to drive the traffic.

Really, that's the only way I can think of actually being able quantify the work you perform, because you need to be able to:
a) Distinguish the efforts of the SEO campaign you run from what traffic the site was already getting;
b) Maintain control of the work in case the client ever decides to stop paying.

I'm not sure about using another domain to do it though.

It would be great i there was another way of tracking the work, but there just isn't.

You have to use a seperate domain to send the visitors from, because othewise you're back to the original point of having to quantify the work you perform.

It's a tricky one, and I'm not sure how to do it.

I like the idea of evaluating the key phrases you go for initially through a ppc campaign, but that's not the service I'm trying to price.

 

Interesting that there is a discussion about this method of billing for SEO services which I started some years ago. The whole method of being able to quantify (and justify) to clients what they are paying for is still a tricky subject.

How on earth can any potential client tell the difference between one company saying that they can get you great results (when they can't) and another, who says the same thing, who can?

Back in (I think) 2002 when I wrote that article, it was based on my wish to differentiate ourselves from the hordes of other SEO/SEM wannabees that were springing onto the market. I wanted to present a paid-on-performance SEM plan rather than the usual x for doing it and y for a monthly fee.

As a marketing pitch it worked very, very well. Clients like(d) the idea of only paying for provable results. However, things have moved on from those days and the use of stand-alone sites which charged on the basis on a "call to action" on the client site isn't particularly one that I would recommend today.

With the ability to use comprehensive tracking systems, it is now possible to do things within the client's own site - and we, ourselves, have developed a server-side solution that allows the monitoring of all new visits due to SEO for new keywords/phrases while excluding terms which the client was already receiving a certain threshold of referrals for on their own site.

This overcomes the thorny problem of "what have you done new that works - as opposed to what we had before.." - the major reason we used an external site previously.

Anyway, to a certain extent - this is academic as our own business model has changed yet again - and I no longer take on new end-user clients but have changed to providing tools and support to SEM agencies - inlcuding (slight plug) our own ROI tracking sytems for both PPC, organic listings and other referrals (amongst many other tools).

Having said that, we still have clients from the inception of our original program still prefering it to any other form of SEO/SEM campaign. As a result, they still are happy to pay every month, some with sizeable sums, years after the orginal campaigns were started.

Bottom line with all SEO campaigns is if you can satisfy the client that you are responsible for delivering them decent convertible traffic that generates revenue for them - both parties can smile - all the way to the bank!

 

Thanks for stopping by Barry.

It looks like we'll be going with a kind of hybrid pricing model for the SEO service, based on baseline figures for SE traffic that the site currently recieves.

It's not a flawless system, but it seems like the only way to distinguish the work we perform from the rankings the site currently recieves.

I didn't realise that article was so old - Just goes to show that SEO pricing is still a tricky issue.

Cheers,

 

Hi there

First there is a mish mosh between seo and sem one is search engine optimization and is done to attain high search rankings in the organic results.

SEM is search marketing - Marketing websites through search engines via ppc, seo, paid for inclusion, paid to call and other methods of marketing involving search engines and directories.

Internet Marketing other forms of driving traffic and promoting a brand online. Ad buys, Press Release, Terrestial Ads Contextual Ads, Banner, Etc.

As was noted earlier articles and press release writing is not SEO from the traditional aspects of it....IMHO ( You can build a business doing article marketing)

Fees are what the market will bear. Most businesses need marketing in order to build to an advertising budget of $2,000.00 a month as another poster noted his clients budget.....that is the exception more than the rule in most cases.

Client expectations need to be set firstly.

Next nobody can guarantee anything with a 3rd party company

Black White Gray hat matters not ...nobody can guarantee performance within a 3rd party business without some form of payment..... to claim that in the organic side is pure bullshit... plain and simple.

Also another thing I did not see covered and I am surprised MakeMeTop did not point it out as I am sure they would know this little fact as well and that is search engine traffic typically will represent 'less' than 20% of the traffic to your website.

In my eyes it is better to work on an intergrated plan to drive 'targeted' buying traffic to the web business than to focus on one ascpect of marketing online..

I like to say

live by google...die by google

My 1.5 cents adjusted for GDP, Inflation, and just because