Hi all, I have a good 2 year background in SEO, and have worked on a number of 'freelance' projects over the last year. However, these have typically been for friends and colleagues websites and were done on the basis of mates rates, favours owed etc. I've just been offered my first proper freelance job. I know what SEO the site needs in terms of onsite SEO, but had no real idea of what to charge. After digging around on the web I decided to charge £24 an hour for the onsite SEO. However, they will want link building and I have no idea what to charge… Do I charge the same hourly rate, with as many quality links as possible per hour? Or A cost per link? In that case, just what is a link worth? Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
It depends on entirely what your investment in getting the links are. If you plan to link build through article submission and directory building you can outsource these tasks for very little money using submitedge and directorymaximizer. Total cost to you could be as low as $60 However this kind of link building alone may not get the rank you want and so more money may need to be invested in other more expensive methods. Like buying links which can get way more expensive! The trick is to know exactly how many links you will likely have to buy. This knowledge comes with time (but then, you have had 2 years experience). And then you could go for much cheaper ways of getting links such as comment spam, pligg spam, referrer spam, RSS exploits and link laundering. What I'm saying is what you charge first and foremost needs to be enough to cover whatever you're likely to spend, after that you just charge whatever you think is reasonable and steadily increase your price until your sales plateau. I know that link building on getafreelancer.com is quite competitive and is normally won for around $250 for 150+ links. It's very competitive on sites like that and I'm not sure there's a lot of money to be made out of freelancing. I suggest you spread through word of mouth or even better put that 2 years experience to good use and get into affiliate marketing. Then make a bunch off your high rankings
Hi DaveJo. If your experience consists solely of working on friends sites etc, I think you are going to struggle to get anyone to pay you an hourly rate like that. 40 hours a week and you're talking £50k a year - experienced SEO's in central London aren't getting that.
Hi DaveJo, I have a few customers, with over 50 sites, which need link building for their sites. How many back links could you build? Give me a figure please, and if its impressive, they might be interested and will give you their price.