How Much Should I Charge My Client For SEO and Marketing Services?

I am an internet marketer who just decided to provide services to local businesses.

Would you be so kind to take a minute or 2 and help me know how much I should charge - or how would you would bill a real estate agent client in a town of 10,000 to 20,000 people for the following services?:

-keyword research
-video lead capture page
-a free report
-email followup (with new emails every month)
-a blogsite with articles (and new articles every month)
-seo on existing website
-video webmercial creation each month
-25 directory listings
-google map listings
-monthly seo services for blog, existing website, and google places
-track all results and deliver reports
-personally brand the agent while expanding her online presence each month and essentially dominating google in her niche

How much would you charge upfront for all the setup and then what would you bill monthly for these services?

I REALLY appreciate beyond words any insight you can give. Even if it's just a ball park figure I can work within... I am at a loss for what to charge her for all that.

 

i think.. u should charege 200 $.. and then 50 $/month.. hope this helps..

 

I was thinking more along the lines of $3500/mo. is that too much? She is going to make a killing once I begin the campaign.

 

Yes, its too much, but if your client have that much budget then go for it. IMO above seo packages price will be $500, because we are already doing this for other clients.

 

A freelancer will typically take the hourly wage they could make elsewhere and multiply it by 2. That's your freelance rate to help you cover downtime hours and advertising. You could do 2.5 or 3 if you are really ambitious.

So take that number and multiply it by the number of hours you think this will take, and then discount it to what you think your client can afford if necessary. If that involves a big discount, work something in the back-end, like 2% of all sales that exceed the number of sales she's made in her best month or something like that.

niralimarwadi - you've severely underbid this. This isn't a basic SEO package. This is a full service deal - content, videos, everything. $500 is insanely low. You would be working for $5 an hour for sure on this. This has to be over 50 hours of work unless you are doing the absolute bare minimum on every piece of the job.

(FYI, I know companies that would easily charge 10k for a package like this)

 

Do not "rob" from your first client just because they will make a killing or have money. The rate you charge should be the same regardless of how much they may or may not make.

Dont overhcarge and risk your first client finding out you took advantage of them and get bad PR. Better to be fair and get good PR by word of mouth and get more business.

 

Cosmo, can you let us know your estimated hours on this project? I strongly doubt $3,500 a month is "robbing" based on the amount of work I think this will take.

BTW, to all the people saying $200/$500 - she isn't selling hamburgers here. One sale/month will easily pay for this. And #2 the real estate market is competitive as hell. This guy is going to have to work his butt off to get her to dominate that niche.

 

i really have a hard time knowing how many hours this would take. a lot!

 

Well, the first step is to guestimate that. That's the problem with these jobs, you really have to guess the hours. And it's such a pain doing that because you could short yourself or them, and either way you lose because in one case you work for a crappy hourly wage and in the other case the client might balk at your price and you could lose the whole contract.

I've never found a way around this except to charge at an hourly rate - but clients generally hate that.

As I said above, you are going to want to double the hourly wage you could make elsewhere in most cases to account for any overhead/advertising/administrative hours you have to put in throughout the month. Freelancers have some overhead to cover.

However, if you are basically being employed nearly full-time by her, most of those costs don't exist - so that's where you discount it to somewhere between that number and the hourly wage you could make working elsewhere.

I hope this helps

 

$3,500 a month is more than the average Canadian real estate agent makes a month. I would be very surprised if they would agree to pay that - especially for such a small local area. In the end, you need to determine a fair price you would be willing to do the work for. I would be surprised if they would pay $1,000 a month. Perhaps you should break down your service into smaller packages and let them choose how much they can afford. Even great SEO can take 3-6 months to produce good results and few people are going to sit back and spend $10K - $20K before they see results unless you can provide proof of results for similar work in the same niche.

 

Why don't you charge them on hourly basis.

 

It does help @marketingideas, thanks.

I guess what I need to do is figure out what she can afford but I'm only guessing - I dont know what kind of debt or expenses she personally has that would get in the way. I get the feeling though, that she would prefer to have my services for free! I just dont want to get caught without the necessary funds to do the job right.

I am a consultant and the overhead is mine to bear.

I have appreciated all the comments so far in this thread - so, thanks. Some comments were a bit off on the price IMHO but I got something out of all of the comments.

Such as:

"Dont overhcarge.... Better to be fair and get good PR by word of mouth and get more business. "

Even though I probably am being fair, I really don't want to risk losing the contract because she is not willing to pay my quoted price.

@mjewel do you recommend I make up 3 or 4 packages I could sell to her? like a silver, gold, platinum type packages with graduated price structure? Actually, I think I just had a good idea there. And question: How do you know that the average Canadian real estate agent only makes that much? Not to be contrary, but I was under the impression she makes like 10 grand month on her 4 sales a month average. She told me she walks away with around 3000 grand take home money per-sale on average and makes about 3-4 sales a month.

If she is serious about her marketing, she would be willing to throw down a chunk because it is an investment no? Maybe I should offer my services for half off until she sees the reason she hired me at which point I can bring it up to actual price.

Maybe I just need to send her a proposal with my price and the work I am doing associated with it and see what she says. Its not written in stone, it's just a proposal. Do you happen to know how people tend to respond to proposals and are there things I should be aware of? Like do people say, "I dont want this but I want this and this, and how much will that be?" yada yada?

This is definitely a learning curve for me. I wish I could read minds.

 

mjewel, you are making a fallacy with your calculations. That is what real estate agents make AFTER advertising, not before it.

There are a lot of professionals (real estate, mortgage, financial, etc) that make over a million a year, but $900k goes to advertising so they end up with $100k. But without investing that extra $900k they would have made $35k.

Your figures are post advertising, not pre-advertising, and as long as OP convinces her she will make from what he does than she spends she will do it, even if her profit after the $3,500 comes off is only $1,500. That's still $1,500 she would not have had.

You cannot take what a person makes post advertising and say that they cannot afford to spend more than that to advertise. The numbers aren't connected at all. Also, I suspect your figures are a touch on the low side, but even if they aren't, there are a ton of real estate agents making many times $42,000/year (3,500 x 12).

 

not necessarily. It may be a big firm. Just remember that if you go in high, you have to be offering all the bells and whistles, because when they say 'no', you have to be able to chop the price realistically, by shedding options, rather than just admitting that you overpriced in the first place, and are desperate for the business. '24 hour support instead of 2 hour support', that kind of thing. Cheaper server, you get the idea.

 

cosmo, I don't advise letting her pick and choose like a grocery store. You are the expert - and if you turn that over to the client how can you possibly guarantee your results? She doesn't know what she does/doesn't need.

What I've done before is offer a gold/silver/bronze type layout to my proposal all three priced accordingly and with the options I can give for that price.

(Plus, don't forget that she's a trained negotiator. Real estate agents are masters at getting the lowest prices they can get. I've dealt with many mortgage brokers before, and they are ruthless negotiators.)

 

First of all, there are NO agents grossing a million a year in a city with a population of 10K to 20K - not even if they were the only agent in town (which is never the case, otherwise they would have no need to advertise). Even with a 20K population, you would be looking at about 6K homes max and only a small fraction (few hundred a year) of those would be for sale in any year. My comments about $3,500 a month aren't related to what the job was worth (I wouldn't do it for $10K a month) but rather my opinion of what a small local agent would pay. I live in an area with a population of several hundred thousand, personally know the agent who ranks #1 for the majority of localized keywords, and the amount of business these rankings bring in is a small fraction of his business (most comes from word of mouth, referrals, and other forms of advertising - and he wouldn't pay it even though he spends six figures in advertising annually. It's not a question of whether he could afford it, it just isn't cost effective and homes here are much more expensive than Canada. A localized adwords campaign would put you in a top position for such a small area for less than $3,500 a month. If this agent is willing to pay it, then the OP should go for it and hope it works out - it was just my opinion that a small local agent is likely to balk at $3,500 a month and instead of losing a potential client, offer different packages at incremental price levels.

 

just make it between $300 to $500 that is good, once u get some result then u can raise your amt

 

mjewel, my one million example was strictly an example that service professionals can make far different amounts than their advertising. And if you are focusing on the numbers you missed my point completely.

The point was that what a person makes yearly after tax has nothing to do with how much they can spend on advertising.

 

I like marketingideas thought process here. You need to first determine the amount of hours your putting into it. Work from there.

 

Precisely, marketingideas has the ideas. When I started doing business virtually, I established myself as a freelancer. I took care of my first client, met up with all his expectations and delivered to all the commitments. Or should I say, I exceeded to his expectations and that was the start of a good friendly relationship with him. Up to this moment that I own several sites and is earning really good bucks, he never ceased to send his regards. Our line of communication is still open and he had referred me many times to some of his virtual friends. And so, as we are gearing to the value of how much we can earn, I think it's still best to build connection with clients.