1) I was thinking of creating subdomains for each major city they serve in, subdomain.site.com and optimize each subdomain to pull in for certain keywords. 2) Or create the entire site a cms blog, and have a separate site.com/page for each city they serve in and also create blog articles linking to their certain city. 3) Target only their main domain for a nationwide keyword phrase Or what would you do? How you you encounter a job like this? How much would you charge for a job like this per month, be honest! 100x$1,000/month ?
Do you have any idea the amount of work it will take to rank all the 100 cities? What keywords are you looking to rank for each city, "city name" or "keyword + city name"? I would recommend you create folders for each city and work on each folder/city as an individual site (domain.com/cityname/). It highly depends on exactly what you want to target, if you are planning to rank all 100 city names by yourself I would really suggest you reconsider or set up a team to help you. How much would we charge? It depends on the keywords, the domain, the age of the site, is the site indexed, is it urgent to rank all 100 keywords or do we have a "long" period of time, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc, there are many many factors to take into consideration.
keyword + city name prolly within a 50 mile or less radius. I have a small team, just would like to know what the best route would be to take on a job like this. The site will be redesigned most likely into a cms blog site
Just look at the top 25 competitors, see how long they've been online, how many back links do they have and from where, what content do they provide, how often do they update the content, etc.... That should give you an idea on the work needed and how much to charge. Do you have any experience? Have you done something similar before? Are you 110% positive you'll be able to rank them?
No offense, but honestly... if you're having to ask these questions then I'd say you're probably in way over your head. You are even having to ask in another post for examples of SEO proposals. So obviously you haven't done this before. If you have a client that needs work done and you don't have experience or the knowledge to determine the best course of action to get from their current state to where they want their site to be 3 months, 6 months, or a year from now then I would suggest subcontracting it to someone who already knows the best approach. If you try to do this your self without the experience, you can do yourself (and any future SEO business you might be considering) a lot more harm than good. What YOU can/should charge depends on what YOU know and the kind of results YOU can get. What other people here would charge for the same job is really irrelevant to what you can/should charge. I charge $125/hr with a minimum 20 hr engagement for JUST the initial site review before I will even consider doing work on their site. Not too many here can do that and still have customers contract them repeatedly because they feel like they always get more than their money's worth based on results. That doesn't mean you should charge $125/hr for your work.
Creating subdomains for each city would makes sense (take craigslist as example). Most people would charge you by hour.
depends how much content you have. if youre just going to put a standard landing page on each with only the city names changed i wouldn't do it on subdomains. in fact I wouldnt do it on subdomains anyway any more i dont think, as someone said they would need individual promotion. structure the site right, get the main domain to rank for the hardest terms, and all the areas will (mostly) fall into line along the way