Hello everyone, I've been thinking about this... SEO experts who are free lancing or working for a company. According to what, or on which basis do they get paid?? I mean, is it target based? Like if you reached result #10 you'll get paid? or based on the PR or the traffic of the site? or times based e.g. (working per hour), if this is the one, then what's the rate per hour? Can someone please just tell us more about this? Thanks!
I don't freelance, but I work full time for a company. I'm very underpaid so I won't even say what I make, but a job is a job.
I`m working as freelancer for few projects and i`m currently getting paid for finishing task that employer asks me to do. For example : 1000 profiles backlinks etc etc. In the end, i sell the employer what converts the best for SEO but i`m not paid as ranking at this point, because i do linkbuilding directly on website and not other domains and then redirect with 301 error as most companies. I also offer some other services and attract webmasters directly.
Depends on your business model, the contract and the type of customer. Some of the contracts that I've done in the past involved getting paid for: - Getting a certain page rank (PR1, PR2, PR3, ....). The higher the PR, the more money. (Exponential growth) - Reaching a certain amount of traffic (more traffic, more money) - Scoring on Google/other Search Engines at a specific position (E.g., #1, #2..) for a specific keyword. Make sure that your contract indicates exactly WHICH search engine (including local variants, it's not the same thing to score on Google.com and on google.de or google.es, check out Why your #1 in Google is worthless in the rest of the world). - Creating a certain number of back-links (usually also required with a specific PR). - Writing and posting a certain number of articles. - Fixed rate for on-page SEO - Hourly rate for on-page and off-page SEO So choose what is best for you, though you might have to change it depending on the customer... P.D. This is what the SEO expert charges the end customer, either as a freelancer or as a company. If the SEO expert works for a company, he usually just receives his salary.
Thanks everyone... That was really helpful! Can you please tell me about the average of these rates? Also, From all the basis that you mentioned, Which one of them is the most reasonable and fair your point of view?
Most Australian companies contract you for a minimum term 6 mths or 12 mths, they then charge you an average rate per month to get you onto the first page, the cost is dependant upon if the site needs to be reworked and how difficult the keyword is. the harder the keyword the higher the monthly cost, IZ have heard some companies charging up to $6000 per month and others saying they will do seo for $99 per month, clearly the $99 per month will not get very much attention. finally one last business model is tyo create niche sites and promote them to the front page of google and then rent these out to companies (you can rent the website out much cheaper than when you provide seo services ) this last one is the best as it means you own the domain and if they decide not to continue on then you re rent it to another business. where as most other business models mean that you need to remove your high pr links linking to the site before you can resell your services to another company
Personally I charged a flat rate, I only get paid if I get google page 1, and I get a bonus for reaching the top 2 spots 50% and 100% respectively. I think most work on a monthly basis with an open ended contract, but people are turned off by that because it is not usually performance based.
there are so many people doing so many things in this profession. some freelancers working on their own gets paid per job so when they finish a protect, they get paid on that. people who work for companies get paid salaries or wages that are pretty much set. some large seo companies will have account managers that are responsible for building business or acquiring new clients and these types of positions are often incentive based. it just depends on what they do or whom they do it for
We either get two ways : 1 - Services for others 2 - Service we do for ourselves I would highly recommend the service we do for ourselves since that will help us make the most money in the shortest amount of time.
This seems to be the best advice. Thanks +Rep I am also interested of selling my services to local companies.
when i used to managed a large travel agency's websites network we used to get tens of offers every week. we did our SEO ourselves, but it was still interesting to see what they had to offer. most of them asked for a starting amount, sort of account opening fee (varying from 50$ to 4000$). this is reasonable, as they have to put in quite some work at the beginning. then you had the option of paying by target (traffic, keyword position, pr) or paying a monthly retainer, promising you of their link building or article submissions. now that i'm starting my own similar business, i plan on adopting these 2 possibilities.
A very interested thread indeed. In Peru, South America, you get paid by hour. SEO is almost unknown here, so doing it for performance simply doesn't work.
That is actually not so much the payment method but rather the payment terms. In most of my contracts (unless it's an old, very trusted customer) I ask for some up-front payment (not only for expenses, but also because I need to live until I get the results - PR for example is updated typically every 3 months, and I need to eat in the meantime, I'm not a 100-people company). The rest is then paid by target achievement or spent hours, as indicated above. For example, if I'm asked to bring a PR0 site to PR4, I would charge x when at PR1, y when at PR2, etc. For traffic increment, I could charge for monthly traffic achieved, or for the increment of traffic, etc. You get the idea... Some payment up front to start the work, then payment only with results. Most of the customers prefer that to hourly charges. Yeah, we all complain about that...