I got my first nibble from someone who wants me to do a quickie preliminary analysis of their site (I offered to do this for free) and come back with a quote. My thinking is that I should offer a one time quote, if they're interested in just having some site optimization suggestions, keyword suggestions and maybe some basic reports run one time only (I don't want to scare him off by insisting he commit to something monthly) and another quote that would involve an ongoing monthly commitment and would include my building backlinks, directory submissions, article submissions etc. I don't want to undersell myself, but I've also never charged for this. What do you think my quote(s) should be?
Depends, on you really, how many backlinks,directory your going gain or summit to. (If i was you, do it on timei.e.1 hour - summited to 20 directories with pr 1-4 and gained 6 backlinks.) Record what you did in that time and set a fee, this fee is upto you. If it is the first time for charging for seo i recommend to do a few months on a trial basis if the client likes your work and sees an improvement in traffic i think he will be glad to pay for your work.
Honestly, you need to charge what your worth and what you can provide. Regarding using article submissions and directory submissions that shows low talent in link building, sorry but it's an honest opinion.
Thanks for your honesty. We all have to start somewhere. Article submissions and directory submissions are part of the equation, but of course there are link exchanges, relevant forum postings with anchor text in sigs, blog comments etc. What other methods do you use in your link building efforts?
Well more than article and link directories, you can sometimes comment blogs with real comments like you actually read the blog. Usually a place for your website is provided in the comment form which will link your name to the website. But when commenting, make sure of a few things. it is relevant it is a good comment the page the comment is on has a good pagerank (more than n/a) the page does not use "nofollow" attributes in the meta tags or external links (view source and search for nofollow) That's the quickest way I built my PR. Just remember you won't see PR results for 6 months after your link campaign. And why the heck didn't you charge for the analysis? I charge 50 bucks for a simple text format critical SEO report.
Haha, I just realized that you said blog comments. I must have skipped over that. That's a pretty good list of free methods. I've heard that sometimes you don't have to exchange links if you provide a proper bribe...actually, I did that once, but then I didn't get any click-through traffic from her site. Don't forget you can create a web site of your own to display your customers' websites as examples (with testimonials hopefully). If you promote your page, theirs will be promoted automatically through your external links to their site.
OK, a free SEO analysis should detail how much work is involved for you to get the clients site to rank. Here's some question I would be asking myself if providing a quote: How many competing pages are there? What's your clients current position? How many backlinks do the top ranking sites have? What's the backlink profile quality of the top ranking sites? How many backlinks need to be "cleaned" from your clients backlink profile? How much onpage SEO needs to be completed? Knowing all of the above, how long will it take you to achieve your clients desired results? Article and Web directory submissions are fine, but are not the silver bullet to get top ranks in competitive niches. You'll need to research the top ranking sites and determine where their links are coming from. If you can get some links on those pages, that should help your client as well. You will find many SEO Pro's charge monthly fees to maintain paid links for their clients. These paid links are not the typical paid links you find for sale in webmaster forums either. Good quality links are not cheap and tend to be on pages with high PR and few, if any, outbound links. Relevancy is important to minimize the possibility of being penalized in the future. Onpage and Offpage SEO takes time. Especially if you have not provided SEO services before, take extra time and caution. Do your onpage SEO first. Make minor changes and monitor the results. If any change results in a negative result, revert back. While you are doing Onpage SEO, you can begin organizing your Offpage SEO strategy. Layout where you want to get links from, contacts for those sites, etc. This way you are ready once you are satisfied with your onpage SEO. Your quote all boils down to the amount of time that needs to be invested and the number of paid links you will need to purchase and maintain. Good luck, and I hope you get this client!
You can never commit any thing in seo process, no one can give you 100 % gurrunted seo services, not even Google gives u gurruntee for how much time you will be doing better. You need to do work, your work will automatically comes out in SeRP's, Still i suggest you never make any commitment in SEO...
A pretty good post. In answer to your question you can charge what is known as 'one off' basically as you describe it, a one time consultation and analysis....make no commitment as to results.
charge by the hour, depending on what he/she wants you to do. if you charge by the hour, you'll never feel like you're doing more work than you're getting paid for...just make sure to write exactly what you are doing in your proposal ah yes...and don't commit to any specific results...SEO is a funny game
I think you need to prepare with your seo plans, like, silver, gold, platinum and diomand... that;s works the best when your sending any one an quote.
That just tells me you're (not you in particular, just using the word in a general sense) attempting to attract tire kickers and price gougers, not anyone who's running a serious business. Which is why in this industry you charge based on the value instead of a package plan. (Note, I use a combination of an hourly rate, flat fees and value-based pricing - it works pretty well for me so far.)
Exactly, and it also tells me the "SEO" probably isn't anything advanced but typically cheap labor offering some form of 500, 1,000 and 1,500 directory submissions and maybe some social bookmarking thrown in with the push of the Social Bookmarking Demon button for good measure. IMHO you can't really offer true SEO and lump everyone in to fixed price packages, each site and webmasters requirements are unique.
Depend on the keyword you are targeting because on that basis you need back links and all other services.
No, I would never commit to anything in terms of my results. What I said was I didn't want to scare off any potential clients by asking them to commit to some kind of ongoing monthly services, so I wanted to offer a one time analysis for one fee and then the option of committing to a monthly link building thing as well.
for free link building (direcory submission, blog commenting, parastic hosting pages etc) i would charge by the hour. for paid links i would charge cost of links plus 50% But thats just me
Its simple, just bill the client on how much time you think this will entail per month. The first month is usually when its the busiest as you need to do all the keyword research, develop content, integrate this into the site etc so I would charge maybe a little extra for all th ehard work and then a flat monthly fee i.e. for 8 hours of work per month, obviously don't tell the client how many hours you're going to spend on it but just give the client a monthly fee, that way both parties are clear on teh cost and the deliverables. IMO it seems the best way. Good luck