How much is SEO worth?

Ok, well the reason I ask this is because based on my experience competing with high-volumed search keywords, SEO takes a lot of time and effort.

I was wondering what quality SEO work is worth to most companies looking to rank in the top positions.

I offered a potential client top keyword positions for like $1k (I think) for a 6 month campaign. On top of this would be additional costs needed for links, content, etc.

Is that fair or not? I don't understand how these "SEO experts" (according to GetAFreelancer) are able to offer #1 positions for like $100. Are these blackhats or noobies?

 

Most of the time those guys are frauds. The price you charge a client for rankings should always depend on the level of competition that keyword has. If someone wanted to rank for the keyword "gift baskets" do you really think that you could get it done for $1,000? This unlikely, it would cost that amount just to get the quality backlinks it would take to rank them, not to mention your time and effort for finding those links and doing all the other stuff you may be doing for the client to make sure they get to the top.

It is up to you to get your clients to understand that they are paying for a quailty service, if they have a small budget then most likely they are going to get small results, a bigger budget produces larger results, that's just the way I do it and it works great.

 

Exactly. It depends on the business sector, country, region, and business model.

 

I don't have a specific keywords to rank on at but I still want to optimize my site.

What kind of keywords do Youtube rank on?

 

Pretty much Clowns - unless they put that bid to get the attention and then haggle out more realistic prices in PM or whatever... either way, $100 ain't getting anyone far ....ssooooo... grain of salt I would say

 

Depends how badly you want to be #1 in your field. For a term like (Mustard Jars) not much at all. For a term like ( Cell Phone ) better sell your car

 

SEO on a site is worth the increase in sales on that site due to the SEO.
It's usually not a good idea to guarantee top keyword positions, because really no one can guarantee anything when it comes to google.

I would recommend some sort of profit-share arrangement, so if you increase their sales by X you get a % of those increased sales.

 

Well said, one can't really make promises when it comes to SEO. At the end of the day, it is up to the search engine to do the ranking, and competition can be tough, so right, facing someone who is confident about reaching X SEO results for your web project is like talking to a magician..

 

I work as a web designer and SEO and I would charge at least $1000 per month to run someones AdWords campaign and organic SEO not including costs for directory listings like Yahoo! etc.

SEO is a lot of effort, but it the key to making money. Just think of it as advertising. How much would you pay for it?

I agree that there are a lot of guys there who have no idea what they are doing.

I normally analyze the business before making any promises. If the domain name has been registered for longer then a year, normally within 2 weeks it is possible to get it into top 10 for some keywords in Google

 

You cant promise, but you can make a prognosis based on analysis.

SEO is easier then you think, but it is time consuming.

Try optimizing your site for your name first and see if you get there in Google. If you start seeing the pattern as to why your name appears number one then you might just crack the code.

Make a search for me

Alexei Kouleshov

 

I'd say Real Names are not a good pointer for describing SEO techniques.
Your last name, for instance, tends to be rare on the web, while names like Clive or Ray are pretty common.

So who's got more home work to do
Besides, pushing a real name on top of a search engine results isn'tt usually the actual goal put in front of a SEO assistant.. More often you have to fight common words like service or product names which can be far more time consuming. And predictions can be compared to weather forecasts here. You can be first on the list today, and drop to page #2 just overnight..

 

I guess optimizing for name is a bad example, but that was how I started. I just proposed an SEO battle to optimize for the keyword SEO Battle in 3 forums and on my blog. The search term has 1,480,000 cometing sites.

There will be some serious competition.

Does this sound like a serious SEO challenge?

 

the number of results in the search term is only a very small piece of the ranking difficulty......

 

hey frankly...

being from the SEo field i wld only say tht u hav been charged very high.... this is the nominal charge for PPC n not SEO .....

n also ur keyword depends upon ur business, the poluarity of tht keyword within ur taeget inche users n also the competition or no of sites tht r selling d same thing n targeting d same audience....

 

hi oseymour could you explain your point of view of what are the other pieces of ranking difficulty, why and how to assess them?

 

I think they rank on a lot of them, by the way did you heard how to rank on google well just from video??

 

Well... - If I may be so bold brother O - there are many many ways of establishing baselines for competitiveness. Ultimately a manual inspection of the top 20 sites gives the final plan..

.. but in the early research you can do something like this, which illustrates a tighter set of parameters fo TRUE competition on a given term

Term -- ‘Blue Widgets’

Core search; 1 200 000 results
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-21,GGLG:en&q=blue+widgets


Quotation narrowing; 50 300
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=%22blue+widgets%22


Allintitle – 606
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=allintitle%3Ablue+widgets

allinurl – 86
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=allinurl%3Ablue+widgets



Term 2 – ‘Red Widgets’

Core search – 1 390 000
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=red+widgets

quotation modifier – 20 600
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=%22red+widgets%22

allintitle – 141
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=allintitle%3Ared+widgets

allinurl – 38
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=allinurl%3Ared+widgets

As you can start to see some terms react differently when tightening up the process …. And as mentioned, some manual inspection is eventually required on the top results….

...but there are more ways to play.. as I mentioned...

 

1000$ for a 6 month contract is way too low.
Maybe for a keyword like "red birds africa" or somthing

 

gypsy you gave a good example but I didnt see you clarify what you thought was the most competitive... red widgets or blue widgets.

at first look red widgets looks more comp. with 1.39 mil. results. and blue has 1.2 million core results.

But at second look when you look at each other search you start to realize its the opposite. this is why you need to look at not only the core results but like gypsy said... narrow it down with quotations, allintitle, allinurl, allinanchor (didnt see that one but tbo might be the most important one to determine competitiveness)

allinanchor:blue widgets - 31,800
allinanchor:red widgets - 7, 910

Blue widgets is def more competitive once you dig deeper