Hi there, I have to quote some guys tomorrow on a major deal. These guys want to be a major player in a fairly competitive market. I don't want to violate my NDA or anything so I'll use a similar industry. Lets say used cars. I want to start a site about used cars and want to be the Autotrader of used car selling. How much would you say it would cost to design/develop/promote a site on that level? I'm talking serious traffic with serious SEO. I have my own ballpark figures but would just like to get some advice from the experienced guys here. Thanks!
Design should be a piece of cake if you use open source CMS. If you're hand coding this site then design/code alone should probably be around $12,000. SEO will be worth several thousand more and managing a paid campaign for the site should be in the ball park of 10-13% of total adspend. For the SEO I would say about $2,500 for ranking in the top five results on google for 5 different keywords. Choose your keywords well and it won't be too difficult. DO NOT let the customer dictate the keywords.